Subtle with big ambition, by improving the necessities. That is what summarizes Firefox 94.
Mozilla has released Firefox 94 for desktop users across all relevant platforms, as well as on Android. The update does not seem to be such a big deal at first glance. However, version 94 of the browser is an important release to users, as the browser has lost a significant portion of its market, mainly due to increasingly powerful Google Chrome.
For starters, Firefox 94 introduces enhancements that include Colorways, site isolation that is enabled by default, as well as multiple performance and security improvements across all platforms.
The Colorways feature allows users to choose on the six color themes preset for the browser.
According to Mozilla on its blog post, this feature "allows our users to express their most authentic selves and to bring them joy while browsing the web."
It's worth noting that Mozilla uses the term "Colorways" rather than theme to show that it is "branching out from our language of 'browser' to speak the language of everyday life and everyday users."
"This is about more than just installing a new 'theme,' which really doesn’t have much meaning to most people," explained Mozilla.
Next up, is privacy improvements. And the notable in this Firefox 94, is the introduction of what it calls the 'site isolation' feature.
What it does, is separating the contents of websites users visit from each other.
This allows the browser to be able to defend against side-channel attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown.
The idea is to prevent complex attacks by taking advantage of the way modern processors handle execution.
When the site isolation feature is on, Firefox will load every single website users visit in its own separate process.
This way, Firefox can prevent content from a benign site from being loaded with a potentially malicious site.
"Without Site Isolation, Firefox might load a malicious site in the same process as a site that is handling sensitive information. In the worst case scenario, a malicious site might execute a Spectre-like attack to gain access to memory of the other site," explained Anny Gakhokidze in another blog post.
“Suppose you have two websites open – www.my-bank.com and www.attacker.com. [...] with current web browser architecture it’s possible that web content from both sites ends up being loaded into the same operating system process. To make things worse, using a Spectre-like attack would allow attacker.com to query and access data from the my-bank.com website.”
Through Firefox 94, Mozilla also includes fixes for a number of high-severity vulnerabilities, including a group of bugs that may result in remote code execution.
"Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption and we presume that with enough effort some of these could have been exploited to run arbitrary code," Mozilla said in its advisory.
Other features include, and not limited to: automatically handled updates (in the background, so no more update prompts to disturb the user) on Windows, support for Apple's low power mode for YouTube and Twitch, improved WebGL performance for Linux users, Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension with Mozilla VPN integration to use different server locations for different containers, and more.
As for users on Android, they get a customizable Firefox for Android Homepage that includes recent tabs, bookmarks, searches, and articles recommended by Pocket.
Firefox on Android also has a more polished redesign, which simplifies browsing experience with clutter-free menus, simpler navigations, a redesigned tab designed and more.
The browser on Android also introduced a feature called Inactive Tabs.
Through the feature, Firefox automatically moves tabs that have not been viewed for two weeks into a dedicated section on the tabs tray.