Mozilla has made Firefox 74 available today and has published the release notes explaining what’s new inside the update. One of the new features is that third-party programs aren’t allowed to install add-ons in your browser. If for some reason a program has installed an unwanted add-on, you can now remove it yourself from the browser’s add-on manager without issue.
Aside from better add-on management, this update includes the ability to reverse alpha sort login details in Lockwise, it allows you to import bookmarks and history from the new Microsoft Edge browser on Windows and Mac, and Firefox now provides better privacy for your web voice and video calls by adding support for mDNS ICE which cloaks your IP address with a random ID in certain WebRTC scenarios.
On the security side of things, Firefox 74 removes support for TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1. These were first switched off in September 2019 while Firefox 74 was still in the Nightly phase. Going forward, website admins should ensure that TLS 1.2 or TLS 1.3 are used instead. According to Qualys SSL Labs, 97.1% of websites support TLS 1.2 while 26.5% support TLS 1.3.
While Firefox 74 is more of a usability release, next month’s Firefox 75 update will be a little more flashy. According to the beta release notes, Firefox 75 is due to ship with a revamped address bar that expands with links to your top sites when you click it. According to Mozilla, the new bar “provides a focused, clean search experience that’s optimised for smaller screens.”
If you’re a heavy mobile user and like testing cutting edge apps, be sure to check out Firefox Preview 4.0 which was published earlier today. It comes with lots of new features including login management and initial add-on support.
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