The Mozilla Firefox 74 web browser is now available to download for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux.

Expected to be officially released tomorrow, March 10th, 2020, the Firefox 74 web browser can now be downloaded for 32-bit and 64-bit systems from Mozilla’s FTP servers. The source code is also available for download for OS integrators.

Firefox 74 isn’t a major release since Mozilla decided to push a new version every four weeks. However, it implements a new security feature to keep users safer while surfing the Internet.

This is called RLBox and allows Mozilla to quickly and efficiently convert existing Firefox components to run inside a WebAssembly sandbox. RLBox is first available with Firefox 74 to Linux and macOS users.

RLBox has been developed by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, the University of Texas, Austin, and Stanford University.

Furthermore, Firefox 74 rolls out the DNS over HTTPS feature by default for users in the United States, with Cloudflare being the default DNS resolver.

Users will be able to choose between Cloudflare and NextDNS, which has been implemented as an alternative DNS resolver in Firefox 73, from the DNS over HTTPS option in the Network settings under Preferences.

Firefox 74 also disables the TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 cryptographic protocols by default. This means that websites that do not support the TLS 1.2 protocol will display an error page.

Another change included in the Firefox 74 release the ability to create an exception in the Facebook Container by adding custom sites.

Moreover, Firefox now offers better privacy for users when doing voice and video calls on the Web by automatically cloaking the computer’s IP address with a random ID.

Login management was also improved with the ability to reverse the name sorting in the Lockwise password manager. It’s also now possible to remove add-ons installed by external apps through the Add-ons Manager.

The Picture-in-Picture toggle is now moveable when uploading a video with multiple images on Instagram to allow users to flip through to the next photo in the batch.

For web developers, this release adds support for debugging Nested Web Workers in the built-in Debugger, as well as support for the new JavaScript optional chaining operator (?.), as well as the CSS text-underline-position.

If you can’t wait until tomorrow’s worldwide rollout, you can download Firefox 74 right now using the link above. However, I recommend waiting for this release to arrive in the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution before upgrading.

Update: Mozilla officially released Firefox 74 for all supported platforms. I’ve updated the article with more details about the new features and improvements included in this release.

Last updated 6 months ago