Mozilla Firefox is one of the last true competitors left in the browser market, with many other developers long using Google’s Chromium rendering engine. Thus, it's great to see that Mozilla is hard at work to improve its browser, even if in some versions nothing but the underlying code receives some cleanup and bug fixes. That seems to be the case for Firefox 96, which has just been released this week.
For those of us stuck with video conferencing, Firefox 96 is good news: The company says it has significantly improved noise-reduction and auto-gain control, along with bringing slight enhancements to echo-cancellation. And for screen shares, Mozilla has fixed issues with downgrades in resolution. If you’ve previously had to rely on other browsers for video-conferencing due to colleagues not being able to understand you well, you might soon be able to give Firefox another try.
There are some more quality-of-life improvements. Mozilla has reduced the main thread load for its browser, meaning that it should use up fewer resources, which could give you ever-so-slightly longer battery life. The video quality has also been enhanced on some sites which were previously prone to quality degradation. Firefox will additionally enforce the "Cookie Policy: Same-Site=lax" by default. This should prevent many so-called Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks, helping you stay more secure online.
Firefox for Android should benefit from all of these changes, and it looks like there are also small user-facing tweaks in the form of yet another minor overhaul of the new tab page. As per Mozilla's release notes, the browser will make the Jump back in section full of recent searches and history highlights a bit more prominent. Firefox has also gotten better at displaying images for recent bookmarks displayed on the new tab page.
Welcome to a new version of Firefox for Android (version 96). In this release, you will find the following updates:
- The Jump back in section will display recent searches and history highlights on the home page.
- Firefox will now display better images for recent bookmarks on the home page.
Meanwhile, we’re still stuck waiting for broader add-on support, which is still one of the biggest gripes when you’ve previously relied on the mobile Firefox browser — at least you can still keep using the nightly release to alleviate this omission.
You can download Firefox 96 over at APK Mirror or get it right from the Play Store, where it's starting to roll out as we speak.