Like all browsers, Firefox launches new versions periodically with which, little by little, it evolves and improves. A few hours ago, Mozilla just released the new version of its web browser, Firefox 85 , which comes with interesting news, both in operation and, above all, in security and privacy.
What’s new in Firefox 85
Although this had to have happened years ago, it is finally a reality. Since December 2020, Adobe has stopped supporting Flash , the web plug-in that did so much good in the past and was doing so much harm today. Since then, the developers of the major web browsers have started to remove this plugin once and for all. After Chrome and Edge, now it has been Firefox who, with the new version 85, definitely renounces this add-on.
Another quite important novelty for those who are concerned about their privacy is that the browser now has a protection system against supercookies . These cookies are tracking files that are generated when visiting certain websites and that are used to constantly track us wherever we go. What the new Firefox 85 does is isolate the cache and the connections for each of the websites we visit, thus preventing a trace file from being accessible to other websites. By isolating them, no website will be able to know where we are going after visiting it.
Other changes that we find in this new version are:
- Firefox now remembers the last folder where we have saved a bookmark.
- Better controls for the home page and new tabs.
- Support for importing passwords from other managers, such as KeePass or Bitwarden.
- New option to disable Tab-to-Search.
- Support to print ranges of pages, instead of all contiguous, when printing a web.
- Ability to delete all Firefox password manager logins at once instead of having to do it one by one.
Mozilla has also taken advantage of the Firefox 85 release to fix a good number of vulnerabilities. Specifically 13 security flaws that have been discovered both by Mozilla’s own developers and by external researchers. Two of the most serious are found in CVE-2021-23964 and CVE-2021-23965, two failures in memory management that allowed remote code to be executed in any vulnerable version of the browser.
Download or update
The new Firefox 85 is now available to all users. Users who do not yet have this web browser installed can download the new version for free from the Mozilla website . This will allow us to always be directly up to date.
Those users who have this browser installed on their computer will be able to update it directly from their own updater. If we enter the Help> About Firefox menu we can see a window with the version that we have installed. This window will check if there are new versions of it and, if so, it will proceed to download and install the new version. After restarting we will have the browser to last.
The ESR (Extended Support) branch of Firefox has also been updated to version 78.7. And the same goes for the “Beta” and “Nightly” versions, who have taken a step forward in the development phase.