Firefox 96 Brings Noise Improvements, History Highlights, and More: Details

Mozilla has released the latest version of its Web browser, Firefox 96, with multiple new features and fixes. The Firefox 96 version is available for desktop and Android now. In order to upgrade audio and video calls, Mozilla has worked on noise suppression and auto-gain-control in the latest update. The company has also added improvements to echo-cancellation. On Android, users will get a new history highlights feature with Firefox 96. It will show recently visited websites. Separately, Firefox users on Mac and Windows are complaining that they are facing issues while loading any website. As per user reports on Twitter and Reddit, a growing number of Firefox users are witnessing problems with sites failing to load and no status information is provided to users.

Mozilla’s first Firefox update of the year for desktop comes with noted improvements in noise-suppression, auto-gain-control and echo-cancellation. Firefox version 96 for desktop also focuses on reducing the workload on the main thread. It is likely to help the browser to work faster on older and slower systems. Further, with the new update, Firefox will default all cookies to having a SameSite=lax attribute. Mozilla says this will help to guard against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks.

The update has fixes for security vulnerabilities in older versions of Firefox. With the latest update, on macOS, command-clicking links in Gmail will open in a new tab. It has fixed issues with multiple video playbacks and video quality degradation issues on certain sites. It also fixes the issue where WebRTC downgrades screen sharing resolution. To avoid the problem with brightness changes, missing subtitles and more Mozilla has temporarily disabled detached video in fullscreen on macOS.

For Android, the new Firefox 96 release has added history highlights that show recently visited websites. Also, it brings improvements to the images displayed for recent bookmarks on the home page. The update brings improvements to the “Fill link from clipboard” and fixes the interface problem of private tabs.

With the latest update, Mozilla says selecting ‘search group’ in ‘Jump back in’ switches to an active tab. Duplicate history items are now merged and the history delete button is labelled for screen readers. The update fixes the crash while browsing bookmarks. Also, users can dismiss the keyboard when scrolling Home behind the search dialog.

Separately, some Mozilla Firefox users are reporting an issue on the company’s support forums, Twitter as well as Reddit that prevents websites from loading at the moment. An infinite loop bug in Firefox’s HTTP3 implementation is reportedly causing the issue. While there isn’t a permanent fix from Mozilla for the bug right now, there is a temporary workaround to disable HTTP3 loading entirely in Firefox. As detailed by 9to5Mac, this can be done by following these steps:

1. Opening Firefox
2. Enter about:config in the URL bar to open a settings screen
3. Search for the setting ‘network.http.http3.enabled’
4. Set this setting to ‘false’ to disable HTTP3
5. Close and restart Firefox