[German]The Mozilla developers have released version 108.0.3 of the Firefox browser on January 5, 2022. It is a maintenance update that is supposed to fix two bugs and also brings a small change under macOS. In addition, at this point a note: Starting with Fixefox 110 (until Firefox 120), Mozilla will freeze the user agent of the browser to avoid confusion with Internet Explorer 11.
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Firefox 108.0.2
According to the release notes, the maintenance update changes the location of the "Device Sharing Tabs" menu item for WebRTC, which is now only located in the "Tools" menu on macOS. The update to version 108.0.2 also fixes the following two bugs.
- Fixes a crash for some users on Mac OS X 10.12-10.14 during video playback (bug 1806391).
- Fixes a crash that can occur when managing browsing history (bug 1806408).
Firefox should update itself automatically, but can be checked for new versions via the Help menu and About Firefox. In addition, the browser can be downloaded from this website for various platforms (the variant is to be selected via the displayed list boxes).
Firefox 110 User agent will be frozen
At this point, another topic that I had not previously addressed in the blog. Microsoft will end support for Internet Explorer 11 in February 2023 and deactivate the browser in many versions of Windows 10 (see Windows 10: Microsoft disables Internet Explorer 11 on Feb. 14, 2023). Nevertheless, IE 11 still plays some role on some websites and the site developers query the visiting browser via user agent sniffing.
Starting with Firefox 110, such websites would incorrectly recognize the Mozilla browser as Internet Explorer 11, as Sören Hentzschel noted at the end of December 2022 in the post Wegen des Internet Explorers 11: Mozilla ändert User-Agent von Firefox. The background is that Internet Explorer 11 delivers the following user agent string under Windows 10, for example (see this page):
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
Some websites only check the user agent string for "rv:11.0" to recognize Internet Explorer 11. Confusion would then have occurred with Firefox 110, which would have provided the following user-agent string in the previous nomenclature:
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Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:110.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/110.0
where the "Windows NT 6.1" depends on the operating system version and may vary. But a browser switch in a web page that only looks for the string "rv:11" in the user agent string would have falsely detected Internet Explorer (according to heise, Bestbuy and Le bon Coin would be affected). This leads to problems, as Sören Hentzschel explains in his article. Therefore, the Mozilla developers freeze the version number starting with Firefox 110 and report the user agent string for Firefox 109 in the following form:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/110.0
The rsv: part reports the Firefox 109 version, while the current version is correctly reported as Firefox/110.0 in the last part. This customization will remain in future versions of the Firefox browser and will only be removed starting with Firefox 120. This browser version is expected for November 21, 2023. Until then, ket's hope that the developers have taken Mozilla's hints about browser detection into account.
