Mozilla has released Firefox 73 today, February 11th, 2020, to the Stable desktop channel for Windows, macOS, and Linux with bug fixes, new features, and security fixes.
Included with this release are new features such as a default zoom setting, high contrast theme improvements, and NextDNS as a new DoH provider.
Windows, Mac, and Linux desktop users can upgrade to Firefox 73.0 by going to Options -> Help -> About Firefox and the browser will automatically check for the new update and install it when available.
With the release of Firefox 73, the other development branches of Firefox have also moved up a version. This brings Firefox Beta to version 74 and the Nightly builds to version 76.
You can download Firefox 73 from the following links:
- Firefox 73 for Windows 64-bit
- Firefox 73 for Windows 32-bit
- Firefox 73 for macOS
- Firefox 73 for Linux 64-bit
- Firefox 73 for Linux 32-bit
If the above links have not been updated for Firefox 73 as of yet, you can download it from their FTP release directory.
Below are the major changes in Firefox 73, but for those who wish to read the full changelog, you can do so here.
NextDNS as a DNS over HTTPS provider
With the release of Firefox 73, Mozilla has added NextDNS as an additional provider that can be used with their DNS over HTTPS (DoH) feature.
When using DoH, all DNS requests will be encrypted so that they cannot be monitored and tracked by governments and Internet providers.
When first released, Mozilla only supported Cloudflare's DoH servers by default and people were concerned that this put too much control over Firefox user's data with one company.
To enable DNS over HTTPS and configure it to use NextDNS, you can go to Options -> General -> Network Settings. Then scroll down and put a checkmark in 'Enable DNS over HTTPs' and select NextDNS as the provider.
Global default zoom setting
In previous versions of Firefox, when you changed the zoom level on a site it was configured just for that site and would reset back to the default 100% when visiting other sites.
With Firefox 73, Mozilla has introduced a default zoom level that will be used for all sites that you visit.
The 'Default zoom' setting can be accessed under 'Language and appearance' in the General section of the Firefox options.
When configuring the default zoom level, you can configure it to 30% through 300%. You can also specify that it should only zoom the text and images and other elements will not be zoomed.
High Contrast theme improvements
When Firefox detects that the operating system is using a high contrast theme, it will automatically switch to this theme for the browser. This includes the Firefox interface itself (all menus, windows, and dialog boxes) and the content of the web sites that you visit.
In previous versions of Firefox, when high contrast mode was enabled, Firefox would not display a background image of a web page.
With Firefox 73, background images are now displayed but the text will be backplated with the theme's background color to make it easier to read the text.
"Many users with low vision rely on Windows' High Contrast Mode to make websites more readable. Traditionally, to increase the readability of text, Firefox has disabled background images when High Contrast Mode is enabled. With today’s release of Firefox 73, we introduce a “readability backplate” solution which places a block of background color between the text and background image. Now, websites in High Contrast Mode are more readable without disabling background images," Mozilla states in their Firefox 73 release notes.
With this release, Firefox also added a High Contrast Mode for GTK.
Other bug fixes and developer changes
In addition to new features, Firefox 73 also adds a variety of improvements and bug fixes, which are listed below:
- The tab overflow menu, which used to only appear when you had more tabs than fit in the tab strip, can now be made permanent with the about:config flag browser.tabs.tabmanager.enabled In this configuration, it's called the Tab Manager.
- In Dev Tools, the "Omniscient Browser Toolbox" has been enabled by default. This should allow you to inspect and debug any resource of Firefox, no matter in which thread or process this resource is.
- Several Accounts Menu items have been renamed to increase clarity.
- about:crashes now has a "submit all crashes" button.
- Media control key event on OSX has been enabled on Nightly.
- The Contextual Identity indicator has been moved up the tab so it' still visible with the addressbar's new expanded area.
- Find no longer fails when you enter text with diacritics or accented characters.
- Gecko now has support for CSS3 text module text-underline-position.
- Firefox no longer sets the User-Agent header for DoH requests.
- The OS compositor has been enabled by default on Windows.
- Picture-in-Picture window will now resize when the video changes dimensions.
- Picture-in-Picture now has an audio toggle.
- WebExtension install/uninstall has been implemented for GeckoView.
- Improved audio quality when playing back audio at a faster or slower speed.
- Firefox will now only prompt you to save logins if a field in a login form was modified.
- WAMP-formatted WebSocket messages (JSON, MsgPack and CBOR) are now nicely decoded for inspection in the Network panel.
- Improved auto-detection of legacy text encodings on old web pages that don’t explicitly declare the text encoding.
Security vulnerabilities fixed
With the release of Firefox 73, Mozilla has also fixed numerous security vulnerabilities in the browser.
These vulnerabilities will be outlined on Mozilla's Security Advisories for Firefox page when they are available.
Mozilla notes that users of the 0patch security software may receive crashes in Firefox 73 and that firefox.exe should be excluded in the 0patch software.
"Users with 0patch security software may encounter crashes at startup after updating to Firefox 73. This will be fixed in a future Firefox release. As a workaround, an exclusion for firefox.exe can be added within the 0patch settings."
Comments
cmilhaus - 1 month ago
I updated my Firefox to Version 73 and now it will not launch at all regardless of what I try to do to get it to launch. Very disappointing!!