Mozilla on Tuesday released Firefox 75 on schedule, unlike rivals Google and Microsoft, which postponed browser releases by weeks and scratched one version entirely because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The upgrade’s most visible changes were to Firefox’s address bar, which has been tricked out with several enhancements designed to make for more productive searches.
The company’s developers also patched a half dozen vulnerabilities, three labeled “High,” Firefox’s second-most-serious label. As has regularly been the case, Mozilla addressed multiple memory safety flaws that criminals might have been able to exploit had they known of them.
Firefox 75 can be downloaded for Windows, macOS and Linux from Mozilla’s site. Because Firefox updates in the background, most users can just relaunch the browser to get the latest version. To manually update on Windows, pull up the menu under the three horizontal bars at the upper right, then click the help icon (the question mark within a circle). Choose “About Firefox.” (On macOS, “About Firefox” can be found under the “Firefox” menu.) The resulting page shows that the browser is either up to date or describes the refresh process.
This was the second version of Firefox to be released four weeks after its predecessor — Mozilla last upgraded the browser on March 10. In September 2019, the company announced it would accelerate the browser’s release pace by shortening the interval between upgrades from six weeks to five as an interim step, finally to four weeks.
Mozilla: We don’t do delays
It was notable that Firefox 75 appeared on time, as it had been scheduled months earlier. Three weeks ago, first Google, then Microsoft, announced that they had temporarily suspended Chrome and Edge releases, respectively.
Google put off Chrome 81’s March 17 launch, while Microsoft followed suit two days later. Although neither explicitly named the coronavirus and its resulting disruptions as the cause, their “adjusted work schedules” and “current global circumstances” descriptions blamed the pandemic.
A week later, Google said it would release Chrome 81 on April 7 (it did), scrub Chrome 82 from the launch list and debut Chrome 83 three weeks earlier than originally scheduled (on May 19). Microsoft again said its Edge — like Chrome, built on technologies provided by the open-source Chromium project — would mimic Google’s browser’s return.
Mozilla held to its calendar. “We believe we can maintain our 2020 Firefox release schedule as we navigate this global crisis together,” Joe Hildebrand, vice president for Firefox web technology, and Selena Deckelmann, vice president of Firefox desktop, wrote in a joint post to a company blog. And the two took shots at the competition, noting that their teams were familiar with working remotely.
“These strengths are what allow us to continue to make progress where some of our competitors have had to slow down or stop work.”
But Hildebrand and Deckelmann didn’t promise that Mozilla would never deviate from the every-four-week tempo. “We will continue to monitor both internal and external feedback and remain open to making future adjustments,” they said.
Augmenting the address bar
With its 50% faster release cadence – every four weeks rather than every six – users have to expect fewer new features and smaller amounts of new functionality in each upgrade. That’s the case with Firefox 75, which adds to the address bar and that’s about all.
Among the improvements to the bar, one stood out: A click in the address bar now drops down a list of the first eight sites from the new tab page. The click-and-list function works at all times, saving the need to first open a new tab before zipping to a favorite site (as long as the site is one of the first eight).
To change the contents of the list or the order of the sites within it, users must add to or subtract from the thumbnails on the new tab page, or reshuffle those already there.
MozillaA click in Firefox 75’s address bar displays the first eight sites from the new tab page. It’s a slick shortcut.
Other changes to the address bar’s user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) included boldfaced keywords based on the search string being entered – “to narrow your search even further,” Mozilla asserted – and a variable-sized field and font, both which expand when typing a search string and contract to standard size when finished.
Mozilla highlighted several developer- and enterprise-specific changes as well, ranging from the loading attribute on elements to support for client certificates from the macOS certificate store. More information can be found in Firefox 75’s release notes.
The next Mozilla upgrade, Firefox 76, should appear May 5.
