14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox continues to be one super-popular browser these days, especially on the desktop, but with growing consumer appeal on mobile as well.
But with the browser market currently dominated by Chromium-powered choices, Mozilla Firefox has remained one of the few choices that aren’t using the engine that Google and Microsoft are now fully committed to.
So for Mozilla and its users alike, it’s critical for Firefox to get frequent updates that further polish the experience with the app and add new capabilities.
Earlier this week, Mozilla published Firefox 81.0.1, a new version of the browser that is supposed to introduce a series of fixes on the desktop. And you can tell this is a bug-fixing update just by reading the version number, as it’s the very first revision to Firefox 81.
One of the most important fixes in this update concerns a high memory usage problem that was first reported in Firefox 78 and which was reported no less than two months ago.
The user who reported the whole thing to Mozilla on Bugzilla explained that the issue made Firefox completely unusable.
“Firefox explodes, performance is chronic and unstable and unusable. Reports of this cross all operating systems, all GPU and high-end and low-end hardware. Firefox doesn't offer a path to downgrade to 77. Using 77 is to be constantly harassed everyday. I want Mozilla to give us a build that doesn't harass us, ideally with security patches, and for future incidents a better system for rolling back and a ability to disable its naive strong arm Update harassment policy as it stands,” they say.
Mozilla says this new Firefox update also resolves a Picture-in-Picture problem that caused controls to become visible on audio-only page elements.
This problem was originally reported 9 days ago and it was discovered in Firefox 82 beta 2 and Firefox 83 Alpha 1, but Mozilla discovered that the latest stable build of the browser was impacted as well on Windows, Ubuntu, and macOS.
Users who are running Firefox on a macOS computer are getting a bugfix aimed at the incorrect scaling of Flash content on HiDPI systems.
This glitch only hit Firefox 81 running on macOS, and it wasn’t confirmed in the Nightly builds of the browser.
“This only appears to happen with the generally available release version of Firefox 81.0. It does not happen on Firefox 82 or nightly. I'm mostly concerned that this was a late breaking change that might get merged into another branch in the future,” one user said, explaining that the whole thing happens on a 2019 MacBook Pro 16-inch running macOS 10.15.6 with Firefox 81.
You can find the full Firefox 81.0.1 changelog embedded in the box after the jump.
Needless to say, you are strongly recommended to download and install this new release regardless of the desktop operating system that is running on your computer, especially because it comes with so many important fixes.
As per Mozilla’s new Firefox release schedule, the browser is getting updates every four weeks, and by the looks of things, this is an approach that allows for some glitches to escape unfixed simply due to the faster release cadence.
The good news is that Mozilla typically reacts pretty fast, and minor updates like this one usually land quickly after new issues are detected. On the other hand, the issue detailed above and discovered in Firefox 78 is living proof that in some cases it could take much longer than expected to get a fix, and this is where Mozilla should improve its update policy in the long term.