Image: Mozilla
Mozilla today released Firefox 85 to the stable channel, a new version of its beloved browser that removes support for the Adobe Flash Player plug-in, but also increases privacy by adding more extensive protection against ‘super-cookies’.
The removal of the Flash plug-in comes after Mozilla announced that it wants to abandon Flash in July 2017 as part of a coordinated plan to abolish Flash and end-of-life, along with Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook.
The EOL date was set for December 31, 2020, a date after which Adobe agreed not to provide any more updates for the software.
Firefox is now joining Chrome and Edge, both of which removed support for Flash earlier this month with the release of Chrome 88 and Edge 88.
Network partition and cookie protection
But even though Firefox 85 is the first version to be shipped without the very malicious Flash plug-in, the bigger feature of this version is ‘network partitioning’.
The network partitioning feature, first reported by ZDNet last month, works by splitting Firefox browser memory on a website, a technical solution that prevents websites from locating users as they navigate the Internet.
In a blog post today, Mozilla said that this new feature effectively blocked the use of cookies in Firefox in the future.
“Super cookies can be used in place of regular cookies to store user IDs, but they are much harder to remove and block,” Mozilla said today.
“Over the years, trackers have been found to store user identification as super-cookies in increasingly obscure parts of the browser, including in Flash storage, ETags and HSTS flags.
“The changes we’re making in Firefox 85 significantly reduce the effectiveness of cache-based cookies by eliminating a tracker’s ability to use them on websites,” said the browser manufacturer.
Mozilla said that although they expected a major impact on the performance of websites after splitting the Firefox cache, internal statistics show that the impact was minimal.
“Our statistics show a very modest impact on page load time: between a 0.09% and 0.75% increase at the 80th percentile and below, and a maximum increase of 1.32% at the 85th percentile, said Mozilla.
The browser manufacturer considered this performance impact acceptable to improve the overall privacy of users.
Other changes
But other features are being shipped with Firefox 85 today. The first is a change in how bookmarks are stored in Firefox.
As of this release, Firefox now remembers where users stored their last bookmark and stores all other bookmarks in one place.
Furthermore, Firefox has also added a bookmark folder to the bookmarks bar. This latest feature caused problems last week when some Firefox users saw it in their browsers, but without an easy way to turn it off. With Firefox 85, deleting the folder from the bookmarks bar is possible via a right-click menu option.
In addition, Firefox 85 also comes with a button to delete all saved references, which can be a very useful feature if users need to clean a Firefox installation and make it available to other users.
Other changes are outlined in the Firefox 85 change log here, while security updates are listed here.