Firefox 116, 115.1 ESR, 102.14 ESR released

[German]On August 1, 2023, Mozilla developers released the new Firefox 116, as well as the Firefox 115.1 and Firefox 102.14 ESR maintenance updates. The updates closed some vulnerabilities that were rated as High. Here is a brief overview of the updates in question, including the fixes and the new features.

Firefox 116

Firefox 116 is a new development branch, which has the following new features according to the release notes.

• With Sidebar Switcher, users can easily access the Bookmarks, History, and Synced Tabs sections, quickly switch between them, move the sidebar to another side of the browser window, or close the sidebar. Now keyboard users can also take advantage of this, with or without assistive technology, without having to remember keyboard shortcuts to access these areas.
• When an update is available in English locales, users now have access to version notes in the update notification in the form of a "Learn More" link.
• It is now possible to copy any file from your operating system and paste it into Firefox.
• By user request, the volume slider is now available in picture-in-picture.
• Added the possibility to edit existing text annotations.

HTTP/2 upload performance has been significantly improved as of Firefox 115.0, especially on networks with a higher bandwidth-delay product (i.e., networks characterized by both high bandwidth and high latency). But there is also a change:

The keyboard shortcut to reopen closed tabs (Command + Shift + t) now opens the last closed tab or window in the order in which the items were closed. If there are no tabs or windows to reopen, this command restores the previous session. This change is in anticipation of upcoming changes to recently closed tabs.

Several vulnerabilities rated High have been closed in Firefox 116 (see here). Notes for Enterprise users are available here. Firefox should update automatically, but can be downloaded from this web page for various platforms (choose the variant from the list boxes that appear).

Firefox 115.1 ESR

This is a maintenance update for Firefox. According to the release notes, Firefox 115.1 ESR0.2 fixed the vulnerabilities described here as of August 1, 2023.

According to the colleagues from deskmodder, there was also a maintenance update of Firefox 102.14.