Image: Mozilla
Mozilla today released Firefox 85 for the stable channel, a new version of its beloved browser that removes support for the Adobe Flash Player plugin, but also increases privacy protections by adding more comprehensive defenses against “supercookies”.
The removal of the Flash plugin occurs after Mozilla announced its intention to abandon Flash in July 2017 as part of a coordinated industry-wide discontinuation and end-of-life plan for Flash, along with Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook.
The EOL date was set for December 31, 2020, a date after which Adobe agreed to stop providing updates to the software.
Firefox now joins Chrome and Edge, both removing support for Flash earlier this month with the release of Chrome 88 and Edge 88.
Network partitioning and supercookie protection
But even though Firefox 85 is the first version that comes without the much-maligned Flash plug-in, the biggest feature in this release is “network partitioning”.
First reported by ZDNet last month, the network partitioning feature works by dividing the Firefox browser cache by website, a technical solution that prevents websites from tracking users as they move across the web.
In a blog post today, Mozilla said that this new feature has effectively blocked the use of supercookies within Firefox in the future.
“Supercookies can be used in place of regular cookies to store user identifiers, but they are much more difficult to delete and block,” said Mozilla today.
“Over the years, trackers have been found storing user identifiers as supercookies in increasingly obscure parts of the browser, including Flash storage, ETags and HSTS flags.
“The changes we’re making to Firefox 85 greatly reduce the effectiveness of cache-based supercookies, eliminating the crawler’s ability to use them on websites,” said the browser manufacturer.
Mozilla said that while it expected a big impact on the site’s performance after splitting Firefox’s cache, the internal metrics show that the impact was minimal.
“Our metrics show a very modest impact on page load times: between a 0.09% and 0.75% increase in the 80th percentile and below, and a maximum 1.32% increase in the 85th percentile,” said Mozilla.
The browser manufacturer considered this performance impact to be acceptable to improve overall user privacy.
Other changes
But other features were shipped with Firefox 85 today. The first is a change in the way bookmarks are saved in Firefox.
Starting with this release, Firefox now remembers where users saved their last favorite and saves all other favorites in the same location.
In addition, Firefox also added a bookmark folder to the bookmarks toolbar. This last feature caused some problems last week, when some Firefox users saw it in their browsers, but without an easy way to disable it. With Firefox 85, you can remove this folder from the bookmarks toolbar via a right-click menu option.
In addition, Firefox 85 also comes with a button to remove all saved credentials, which can be a very useful feature if users need to clean up a Firefox installation and make it available to other users.
Other changes are detailed in the Firefox 85 changelog here, while security updates are listed here.