Mozilla releases Firefox 96 with improved Cross Site Request Forgery safeguards

Mozilla has released Firefox 96. It doesn't bring much in the way of new features but it does improve protections against Cross Site Request Forgery which could protect users from attackers.

The Firefox logo on a black and yellow background

Mozilla has announced the launch of Firefox 96, it comes with just a handful of new features and several changes but there’s nothing particularly groundbreaking. Perhaps the most interesting item is the improved security against Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks which allow attackers to perform actions in web apps that the user doesn’t intend to happen.

The new features in this update are as follows:

We’ve made significant improvements in noise-suppression and auto-gain-control as well as slight improvements in echo-cancellation to provide you with a better overall experience.

We’ve also significantly reduced main-thread load.

Firefox will now enforce the Cookie Policy: Same-Site=lax by default which provides a solid first line of defense against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks.

As for fixes, Firefox 96 brings the following:

On macOS, command-clicking links in Gmail now opens them in a new tab as expected.

Our newest release fixes an issue where video intermittently drops SSRC.

It also fixes an issue where WebRTC downgrades screen sharing resolution to provide you with a clearer browsing experience.

Plus, we’ve fixed video quality degradation issues on certain sites.

Detached video in fullscreen on macOS has been temporarily disabled to avoid some issues with corruption, brightness changes, missing subtitles and high cpu usage.

If you’re running a supported version of Linux Mint, Firefox 96 is also bringing a big change thanks to a partnership between the Linux Mint project and Mozilla. The settings that Linux Mint had changed in Firefox, such as making the default search engine Yahoo! to raise more income, will be done away with. From Firefox 96 onwards, the browser will have the same default settings as on any other system when running it on Linux Mint. You can read more about that development on the Linux Mint blog.

If you run Firefox already, it should be updated soon automatically. If you don’t have Firefox installed just yet, you can head over to the Firefox website and download the browser now.