Firefox 81 arrives with a new feature to control video from headset and keyboard
Two day before, on September 22nd, 2020, Microsoft released Firefox 81 to the stable desktop channel with new features, bug fixes, changes and six security fixes.
The web browser has added a feature to control videos via headset and keyboard and a new credit card auto-fill. This new update is available with all such functions for Windows, macOS, Linux and android users. The users can upgrade to Firefox 81 by going to:
Options -> Help -> About Firefox
Upon this, the browser will automatically check for the new update and install it if available.
With this release, other Firefox development braches also moved up a version bringing Firefox Beta version 82, and the Nightly builds to version 83. You can download it from Mozilla’s FTP release directory.
Major changes and improvements in Firefox 80
Auto-fill credit cards – Firefox users from US and Canada can now auto-fill credit card info with the Mozilla based on the information saved on the browser when shopping online.
The users, who have privacy concern, have a lot to deal with this situation. They can secure their passwords with OS system login password. In Windows, this option will be available as “Require Windows authentication to autofill, view, or edit stored credit cards.”
New Alpenglow theme – This theme provides a colorful appearance for the buttons, menus and windows. Firefox users can enjoy this feature with the release Firefox 81. To enable this feature, you have to go to Firefox Menu > Add-ons > Themes and then clicking on Enable under Alpenglow.
Control video directly from the headset and keyboard – Firefox 81 allows its users to control videos via headset or the keyboard, even when they are not using the Firefox at the time or are in another tab. This feature will be useful for them in doing other tasks and listening to video or a music on the background.
Other bugs fixes, improvements, and developer changes
New:
- You can set Firefox from now as the default system PDF viewer
- You will no longer see the reported incorrect information by accessibly tools for items in multi-tiered tree controls items at different levels, when reading in a screen reader
Fixed:
- Bugs fix to the language packs where the default language was reset to English after Firefox updates
- Several accessibility fixes are received by Browser native HTML5 audio/ video controls
Changed:
- It becomes easier to find important sites now as the bookmarks toolbar will now be automatically revealed when any bookmarks are imported to the browser
- Support file types are expended and added with .xml, .svg, and .webp -so the downloaded files can be opened just with right click
- Soon you see Picture-in-picture more easily on all the videos you watch with new iconograhpy
Developer:
You can now easily find the TypeScript files which are labeled with corresponding icons in the debugger panel
HTTP JSON responses using XSSI prevention characters are properly parsed and JSON data presented in a form of an expandable tree
It is now possible to pause on script first statement. It is useful when developers want to debug side effects caused by script execution or timers
The color vision deficiency simulation in the accessibility panel of Developers Tools is added with achromatopsia and all protanomaly, deuteranomaly and tritanomaly are removed, meaning it will be more accurate.
Security fixes
Total six vulnerabilities are fixed with Firefox 81 release. Two of with are the potential ones allowing remote access execution. All these six vulnerabilities are:
- CVE-2020-15678: When recurring through layers while scrolling, an iterator may have become invalid, resulting in a potential use-after-free scenario (Moderate)
- CVE-2020-15676: XSS when pasting attacker-controlled data into a content editable element (Moderate)
- CVE-2020-15677: Download origin spoofing via redirect (Moderate)
- CVE-2020-15673: Memory safety bugs fixed in Firefox 81 and Firefox ESR 78.3 (High)
- CVE-2020-15674: Memory safety bugs fixed in Firefox 81 (High)
- CVE-2020-15675: Use-After-Free in WebGL (High)
