Firefox 83 with ‘https-only’ mode appears

Mozilla has released Firefox 83. The developers of the browser have added an option for https-only. As soon as a user visits a website that is not available via https, the user will receive a warning.

The https-only option is not activated by default. From version 83 of Firefox, which appeared on Tuesday, users can set this in the Privacy & Security menu. The mode can be switched on for all windows or only for private windows. The browser will then only open sites that support https directly.

If a user wants to visit a site that is not yet available via https, Firefox displays a warning that a secure connection cannot be established. The user can ignore that warning and visit the site anyway, Firefox will then temporarily disable https-only mode for that site. The mode can also be switched off manually via the lock in the url bar, for example if sites do not look correct because they still work partly via http, which may be the case with images, for example.

Another change with version 83 of Firefox is that the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine has improved performance and uses 8 percent less memory. Pinch-to-zoom for web pages is also enabled for touchscreens of Windows devices and the trackpad of Macs. Furthermore, users can now use the arrow keys to fast forward and rewind for videos that rotate picture-in-picture.

It is now clear that the next version of Firefox, version 84, is the last to still run npapi plug-ins. With version 85, the browser no longer loads npapi plug-ins. Npapi is outdated and insecure plug-in technology, which can be traced back to Netscape Navigator 2.0 from 1995. Mozilla already discontinued support with Firefox 52 in 2017, but Adobe Flash was also an npapi plug-in and support remained available for that.