Firefox 78, 78esr and 68.10.0esr available

[German]Mozilla's developers have released version 78.0.0, also in the esr variant, of the Firefox browser as of June 30, 2020. This is a new main version of the browser with long-term support (esr). In addition there is the Firefox 68.10.0esr.

Blog-readers had already commented on the update of the browser – and thank you very much for that. There was also a tweet from ghacks.net. on the topic.

Here is what is new and changed in Firefox 78.0. New Firefox ESR major version, lots of changes! #firefox #enterprise #mozillahttps://t.co/dqLbuhBZHH pic.twitter.com/F6i3FBHjHX

— ghacksnews (@ghacks) June 30, 2020

Firefox 78 and esr version

There are two variants: the 'normal' Firefox 78 and the esr edition. The abbreviation esr stands for Extended Support Release, a variant that provides a longer support of about 1 year for the version in question, while the normal variant is updated to new versions after some time.

The release notes of Firefox 87 point out several new features. The Protections Dashboard contains consolidated reports on protection activity, data breaches and password management.

• Track directly from the dashboard how many security breaches you have resolved.
• See if one of your stored passwords could have been exposed by a data breach

To view the dashboard, type about:protections in the address bar or select "Protections Dashboard" from the main menu.

It is known that people try to fix problems by reinstalling Firefox. However, often a simple update may solve the problem more easily. Therefore an update button has been added to the uninstaller.

With this release, the screensaver will no longer interrupt WebRTC calls in Firefox, making conference and video calls in Firefox better. WThe developers have introduced WebRender for Windows users with Intel GPUs, bringing the improved graphics performance to an even wider audience.

Firefox 78 is the last major release with support for macOS versions 10.9, 10.10 and 10.11. If you use one of these versions, you'll be supported through Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release) 78.x for the coming year.

Firefox 78esr

The Firefox Enterprise Release Notes give some information about what has changed in Firefox 78esr. Here are some highlights from this page:

• Kiosk mode
• Client certificates
• Service Worker and Push APIs are now enabled
• The Block Autoplay feature is enabled
• Picture-in-picture support
• View and manage web certificates in about:certificate

I didn't found hints for security fixes. Update: There are 7 security issues fixed. A bug in the quality composition of the search results has been fixed and the texts of the search results based on the recommendations of the Mozilla partners have been improved. The Extended Support Release of Firefox 78 is available on this website. The browser is also available via FTP.

Changes in Firefox 78/esr

The developers have made some changes to the browser. The minimum system requirements for Linux have been changed. The minimum system requirements for Linux have been updated. Firefox now requires GNU libc 2.17, libstdc++ 4.8.1 and GTK+ 3.14 or newer versions.

Firefox 78 is the last major release with support for MacOS versions 10.9, 10.10 and 10.11. If you are using one of these versions, you will be supported by Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release) 78.x for the coming year. The Mozilla developers also indicate the following changes on their web site.

• As part of an ongoing effort to discard outdated cryptography, the developers have disabled all remaining DHE-based TLS ciphers by default in Firefox 78.
  • To reduce web compatibility issues caused by disabling DHE-based TLS cipher suites, Firefox 78 enables two additional AES-GCM SHA2-based cipher suites
• The developers have disabled TLS 1.0 und TLS 1.1 to improve website connections. Sites that do not support TLS version 1.2 now display an error page.
• The context menu (accessible by right-clicking on a tab) allows you to undo closing multiple tabs with a single click, and places Close Tabs on the right side and Close Other Tabs in a submenu.

This version includes a number of accessibility improvements.

• When you use the JAWS screen reader and press the down arrow in an HTML input control that contains a data list, the cursor no longer incorrectly moves to the next item after the input control.
• Screen readers no longer delay or freeze as much when the microphone/camera/screen sharing display is focused.
• Large tables with thousands of rows now load much faster for screen reader users.
• Text input controls with custom styling now display the focus outline correctly when appropriate.
• Screen readers no longer sometimes erroneously and unexpectedly switch to document browsing mode when the user enters the main developer tools window.
• The developers have reduced a number of animations such as floating tabs, expanding the search bar and others to reduce movement for users with migraines and epilepsy.

For enterprise environments, developers provide the following information:

• Enable support for client certificates stored on MacOS and Windows by setting the security.osclientcerts.autoload experimental setting to true
• New policies allow you to configure application handlers, disable picture-in-picture and require a master password, which will be renamed to "primary password" in future versions.

For more details, please refer to the Firefox for Enterprise 78 release notes. Martin Brinkmann has provided also some details on ghacks.net within this article. And there is Firefox 68.10.0esr available.