Mozilla has released Firefox 80 to the Stable desktop channel for Windows, macOS, and Linux. There is a new features, bug fixes, changes, enterprise improvements, and several security fixes.
The highlight of this release is that it enables Mozilla’s new add-ons blocklist. It is designed to enhance the browser’s performance and scalability by lowering the time needed to parse the list when automatically disabling problematic Firefox extensions.
Firefox 80 also enables users to set it as their system’s default system PDF viewer. In addition it fixes several crashes that make the web browser more stable for screen reader users.
Firefox’s new add-ons blocklist
Mozilla has been blocking extensions causing stability or security issues with the help of a list of unsafe add-ons since at least 2008. Starting with Firefox 80, the web browser will use a new and more scalable version of this blocklist. In other words, this should lower the time Firefox needs to parse it.
When we become aware of add-ons that go against user expectations or risk user privacy and security, we take steps to block them from running in Firefox using a mechanism called the add-ons blocklist. One of the constraints of the previous blocklist was that it required parsing of a large number of regular expressions. In late 2019, we began looking into a more efficient way for Firefox to determine if an add-on is blocked.
said Stuart Colville, Engineering Manager for Firefox Add-ons.
Download Firefox 80
You can download Firefox 80 from the following links:
