Firefox 81 Released With Credit Card Autofill and New Theme

Mozilla has released Firefox 81 today, September 22nd, 2020, to the Stable desktop channel for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android with new features, bug fixes, changes, and six security fixes.

The new features that stand out in this release are the ability to control videos via your headset and keyboard and a new credit card autofill feature.

Windows, Mac, and Linux desktop users can upgrade to Firefox 81 by going to Options -> Help -> About Firefox, and the browser will automatically check for the new update and install it when available.

With the release of Firefox 81, all other Firefox development branches have also moved up a version bringing Firefox Beta to version 82, and the Nightly builds to version 83.

You can download Firefox 81 from the following links:

• Firefox 81 for Windows 64-bit
• Firefox 81 for Windows 32-bit
• Firefox 81 for macOS
• Firefox 81 for Linux 64-bit
• Firefox 81 for Linux 32-bit
• Firefox 81 for Android

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If the links above haven’t yet been updated to download Firefox 80, you can manually download it from Mozilla’s FTP release directory.

Below you can find the major changes and improvements in Firefox 80 — if you want to read the full release notes, you can do so here.

Firefox can now autofill credit cards

For Firefox users in the US and Canada, Mozilla can now autofill credit card information saved in the browser when shopping online.

When released, users can secure the passwords with your operating system login password. This option for Windows will be named “Require Windows authentication to autofill, view, or edit stored credit cards.”

The new autofill feature is currently rolling out to users in the United States and Canada and may not be available to all users at this time.

New Alpenglow theme

Mozilla has added a new theme to Firefox 81 called AlpenGlow that provides a colorful appearance for the buttons, menus, and windows. 

You can enable this theme by going into the Firefox Menu > Addons > Themes and then clicking on Enable under Alpenglow.

Control videos directly from your handset and keyboard

Firefox 81 now allows you to control videos via your headset controls or the keyboard, even if you are not using Firefox at the time or are in another tab.

This feature will be particularly useful when listening to a video or music in the background while performing other tasks.

Other bug fixes, improvements, and developer changes

New:

• Firefox can now be set as the default system PDF viewer.
• The name reported by accessibility tools for items in multi-tiered tree controls no longer incorrectly includes information from items at deeper levels, providing users with the correct level of content when using a screen reader.

Fixed:

• We’ve fixed a bug for users of language packs where the default language was reset to English after Firefox updates.
• Browser native HTML5 audio/video controls received several important accessibility fixes:
  • Audio/video controls remain accessible to screen readers even when they are temporarily hidden visually.
  • Audio/video elapsed and total time are now accessible to screen readers where they weren’t previously.
  • Various unlabelled controls are now labelled making them identifiable to screen readers.
  • Screen readers no longer intrusively report progress information unless the user requests it.

Changed:

• You will soon find Picture-in-Picture more easily on all the videos you watch with new iconography.
• The bookmarks toolbar is now automatically revealed once bookmarks are imported into Firefox, making it easier to find your most important websites.
• We have expanded our supported file types – .xml, .svg, and .webp – so files you’ve downloaded can be opened right in Firefox.

Developer:

• TypeScript files are now properly identified in the Debugger panel and labeled with corresponding icons making it easier for you to find these files in the list.
• HTTP JSON responses using XSSI prevention characters are properly parsed and JSON data presented in form of an expandable tree. This allows easy inspection of such HTTP responses through traditional (expandable) tree UI.
• It’s possible to pause on script first statement, which is useful e.g. in cases where developers want to debug side effects caused by script execution or timers.
• The color vision deficiency simulation in the accessibility panel of Developer Tools is now more accurate. We removed protanomaly, deuteranomaly and tritanomaly and aded achromatopsia.

Security fixes

With the release of Firefox 81, Mozilla fixed six vulnerabilities, with two potentially allowing remote code execution.

• CVE-2020-15673: Memory safety bugs fixed in Firefox 81 and Firefox ESR 78.3 (High)
• CVE-2020-15674: Memory safety bugs fixed in Firefox 81 (High)
• CVE-2020-15675: Use-After-Free in WebGL (High)
• CVE-2020-15676: XSS when pasting attacker-controlled data into a contenteditable element (Moderate)
• CVE-2020-15677: Download origin spoofing via redirect (Moderate)
• CVE-2020-15678: When recursing through layers while scrolling, an iterator may have become invalid, resulting in a potential use-after-free scenario (Moderate)

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