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Mozilla has released Firefox 83 on Mac, bringing new features and improvements, including a new HTTPS-Only Mode, pinch to zoom, and more.

firefox-83.jpg

HTTPS-Only Mode is Mozilla's latest security feature that ensures users establish fully secure connections to every website they visit. If a website doesn't support the HTTPS encrypted protocol, Firefox asks for user permission before connecting.

Enabling HTTPS-Only Mode is done through the Preferences menu (the three lines icon in the top-right corner of the browser). Select Privacy & Security and scroll down to the section HTTPS-Only Mode. Then choose Enable HTTPS-Only Mode in all windows.

A new pinch zooming feature also comes to Firefox on Mac. Users can now pinch to zoom using a trackpad to zoom in and out of webpages.

Elsewhere, Picture-in-Picture now supports keyboard shortcuts for fast forwarding and rewinding videos. The arrow keys can now be used to move forward and back 15 seconds, along with volume controls. For a list of supported commands see Support Mozilla.

Mozilla has also improved functionality and design for a number of Firefox search features, and improved page load performance by up to 15%, page responsiveness by up to 12%, and reduced memory usage by up to 8%.

Part of the JavaScript engine that helps to compile and display websites has also been replaced, improving security and maintainability of the engine at the same time.

Firefox 83 is available to download from the Mozilla website and works on Apple Silicon CPUs via emulation under Apple's Rosetta 2 that ships with macOS Big Sur. Mozilla says it is working toward Firefox being natively-compiled for these CPUs in a future release.

Article Link: Firefox 83 for Mac Brings HTTPS-Only Mode, Pinch to Zoom, and Performance Improvements
 
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I'm not really sure what took so long. I didn't even realize you couldn't do pinch to zoom before. Although you could apparently enable it in about:config. Just goes to show how often I zoom in or out on web pages.
But on a touchscreen-less Mac? What's the point?

EDIT: Yeah, I stand corrected - just checked the trackpad zooming with Safari.
 
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What's the point of https only mode if you're not in a public wifi connection, and you're not logging into a banking or similar website?
 
Firefox 83? What?! I remember when me and my friend used Firefox portable 2 in my high school computer classes. We even used proxies to get past the filters! It’s weird to remember how much I used Firefox back then. Come to think of it, I haven’t used it since high school. So, about 12 years ago.
 
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I'm not really sure what took so long. I didn't even realize you couldn't do pinch to zoom before. Although you could apparently enable it in about:config. Just goes to show how often I zoom in or out on web pages.
If you enable it before this update, it will be pinch-to-enlarge-text not to zoom. It's like if you hit "cmd+".
 
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They didn't update the icon yet. What a disappointment!

For the rest, indeed nice features. Firefox remains the most stable, secure, and fast browser, in my experience. Extremely satisfied.

Great! Now all Mozilla has to do is update the icon for Big Sur, then my OCD will satisfied.

If you care about the look in the dock, you can replace it with the icon from the iOS app.
 
Wish Safari picks up the way pages tab are represented and new page add tab from Chrome and Firefox.
 
If you enable it before this update, it will be pinch-to-enlarge-text not to zoom. It's like if you hit "cmd+".

That's what I was expecting it to be. I just tried it and don't care for it. I was just expecting something to act like Command + and -. Especially since that is what Zoom refers to in the menu bar.
 
What's the point of https only mode if you're not in a public wifi connection, and you're not logging into a banking or similar website?

No matter what network you're on, your request is going to go through dozens of devices, any of which could be compromised. HTTPS ensures that whatever data they intercept is encrypted, which doesn't make it perfectly safe, but does mean it would take an attacker a lot of extra time to get at the data. Which is the reason to change your passwords every few months - the idea is the attacker got the encrypted data a few months ago and has spent all the time since trying to decrypt it, so you change your password just intime for it to be old and worthless to the attacker.

You encrypt everything, not just your banking login, because:
1 - A lot of people reuse credentials, or variants on credentials. So even though your MacRumors account isn't super important, there's a good chance that some MacRumors users use the same password here that they use at their bank. Thus why you encrypt your MacRumors login.
2 - It increases the amount of crap that an attacker has to decrypt. They don't know it's worthless until they decrypt it. You just made it harder for them to focus on the actually sensitive stuff.
 
Good to know that Firefox is still alive. I've been using Chrome for like ages.
In my experience, Chrome is crap. I never used it much on Mac (Safari is generally better), and on Windows I use Firefox.

Chrome wastes a lot of time sending god knows what to Google's servers. Besides the security implications, it just slows the entire browser down as it won't display a page until it hits fonts.google.com or whatever other stupid Google service it wants to hit for no reason.
 
I'm not really sure what took so long. I didn't even realize you couldn't do pinch to zoom before. Although you could apparently enable it in about:config. Just goes to show how often I zoom in or out on web pages.
I press the Command and + key to zoom in, the Command and - key to zoom out, and Command and 0 key to reset to default
 
Oh, Firefox… Safari’s had pinch-to-zoom since 2012. Great to see they’ve finally updated with support for it, 8 years later.
For the record, it’s my second browser (after Safari), and I applaud them for their security focus. It’s just baffling that they can’t make a more “Mac-like” app...
 
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Oh, Firefox… Safari’s had pinch-to-zoom since 2012. Great to see they’ve finally updated with support for it, 8 years later.
For the record, it’s my second browser (after Safari), and I applaud them for their security focus. It’s just baffling that they can’t make a more “Mac-like” app...
Back in the day there was Camino, a project to use Mozilla’s Gecko engine in a Cocoa app. Long defunct, sadly.

These days I use Firefox instead of Safari for three reasons:

1. Container Tabs
2. Cookie Auto-Delete
3. uBlock Origin
 
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