Firefox 132: Mozilla paves way for 4K Netflix playback
Mozilla plans to release Firefox 132 Stable today. The new version of Firefox ships with a number of major changes, including support for Microsoft PlayReady, tracking protection improvements, and more.
Both Firefox ESR versions -- Firefox ESR 115 for older operating systems and Firefox 128.x -- are also updated.
The details:
- Support for Microsoft PlayReady enables "up to" 4K playback support.
- Wide Color Gamut WebGL enabled to display "a broader range of colors".
- Enhanced Tracking Protection strict mode blocks third-party cookies.
- Security fixes.
Firefox 132.0 download and update
Updates are designed to install automatically. This does not happen right away though and a restart of the browser is still required to complete the process.
Once the update is released, you may install it immediately by selecting Menu > Help > About Firefox.
You can also download the latest version of Firefox by following these links:
- Firefox Stable download
- Firefox Beta download
- Nightly download
- Firefox ESR download
- Firefox for Android on Google Play
Firefox 132: major changes
Microsoft PlayReady
Mozilla Firefox for Windows is getting Microsoft PlayReady support for "select sites". This enables 1080p baseline playback and 4K Ultra HD support "with key streaming partners".
Mozilla does not say which sites or streaming partners are supported. The feature is rolling out over time to select sites.
Support for Microsoft PlayReady should also improve performance and reduce battery drain while watching shows and movies on the supported sites.
We asked Mozilla for clarification and will add the information, when we get it.
Tip: if you do not want the DRM, you can set media.
Enhanced Tracking Protection Strict blocks third-party cookies
Mozilla has enabled third-party cookie blocking in the strict mode of Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection. This is true for regular browsing windows and private windows. Firefox supports three tracking protection modes: standard, strict, and custom.
Other changes and fixes
- Wide Color Gamut WebGL is now supported on Windows and macOS systems. This brings "a richer, more vivid range of colors to the videos, games, and images". Support is limited to wider color (P3) profiles in 8-bit.
- The new macOS screen and window sharing feature is now supported in macOS 15. Mozilla plans to extend support to macOS 14 in a future release.
- Firefox will reopen automatically on macOS, if it was open before a system restart.
Developer changes
- WebRender hardware accelerated rendering is now enabled for most SVG filter primitives.
- Firefox blocks favicons served via HTTP, if they cannot be upgraded to HTTPS.
- Copy Without Site Tracking is now inactive in the context menu, if the link does not contain any tracking parameters.
- The text-emphasis-position property now supports the auto value.
- The JSON parse with source proposal is now supported.
- HTTP/2 Server Push is deactivated by default with the preference network.http.http2.allow-push now set to false.
- Added support for a post-quantum key exchange mechanism for TLS 1.3.
- Added support for Certificate Compression which reduces the size and increases the speed of a TLS handshake.
Enterprise changes
There is only one change. Firefox 133 and Firefox 128.4 will support single sign-on for Microsoft Entra accounts on macOS. Users may enable it already by setting network.http.microsoft-entra-sso.enabled to true.
Security updates / fixes
Mozilla fixed 11 security issues in the Firefox release. The aggregate severity rating is high. Mozilla does not mention exploits in the wild in the announcement.
Outlook
Firefox 133 will be released on November 26, 2024. This is the last major stable release of Firefox in 2024. The next release after that is Firefox 134 on January 7, 2025. Firefox 115.18 and Firefox 128.5 will also be released on November 26, 2024.
Additional information / resources
- Firefox 132 release notes
- Firefox 132 for Developers
- Firefox 132 for Enterprise
- Firefox Security Advisories
- Firefox Release Schedule
Closing Words
The integration of Microsoft PlayReady is a gamechanger for users who play certain video content on their computers in a browser. While some Firefox community members will certainly not have any of that, the bulk of users benefits from the integration. Those who do not need it can disable it and that is that.
What is your take on this new Firefox release? Anything particularly that you like or dislike? Feel free to leave a comment down below.
About the 132 update which is not being rolled out to everyone yet, though you can manually update, this is the item you should be looking for on the security fixes:
(high) CVE-2024-10458: Permission leak via embed or object elements
Basically this means 3rd party elements on a page could get permissions it should not.
Permission is a broad term, but includes looking at the whole of the page, manipulating elements.
Which even idiots can recognize is not something you want.
On that basis alone this should be a urgent update, before it becomes rampantly abused on (hacked) adservers / malvertisement servers etc.
You could have put a bit more effort into explaining the relevance of this ‘Playready’ thing.
Honestly I had no clue and tried to look it up.
Wikipedia article is very uninformative. Seems to the something launched 17(!) years ago.
Microsoft is not much more helpful on the matter.
What I walked away with is this: it is a DRM system initially integrated with ‘silverlight’ (the MS would-be Flash replacement from before 2010) that is long dead. That is not in use today.
Why should this suddenly be a 1080p ‘baseline’ enabler? In 2024! Where have they been? 1080p is old news, talk about a blast from the past. Maybe in 15 years it will add support for h264? Meanwhile h264 is already losing a lot of ground to 265, av1 and hevc.
Why this old restrictions crap should be relevant today and, more so, why this could be relevant in firefox is still a mystery to me after reading this.
It sounds like just another technical means to prevent people from exercising their legal right to record what they watch, that is being strapped on exactly to do that. While they with huge hipocracy want to record your screen indiscriminately with “recall” – taking away your options and giving them so themselves.
The mere mention of MS stuff being put in FF makes me want to rip it out with extreme prejudice and do horrible, obviously needed, things to those in charge. That old president in the Fillipines had the right idea.
And lets get down to it shall we, nothing good has ever come from bowing to and getting “vendor locked down” in proprietary formats from MS and certain other large “houses”. Don’t any of you dare try to fool yourselves or anyone else, if it was not for google putting up a lot of work and money for things like vp8, vp9, webm, webp, av1, we could be locked down in MPEG and MS formats behind MS DRM and MS patents and have less freedom than you do on a xbox.
I say MS a lot, but what they are doing with their OS dominance is horrifying.
Trust me, a older person, you do not want to go back to the bad old ways, when MS and Intel and others tried to set proprietary standards. Fortunately they did not succeed in that area.
Remember Indeo, Realplayer, etc? Or that Adobe boogeyman known as flash/shw. No? Then take the advice and be happy you did not suffer through all that. When mpeg2 (aka the video format of 20 years of HDTV) hit the mass market, that was a minor miracle in comparison, which saved us from that hell.
It was far from open and free, but it was not as bad as a corporate monopoly would have been.
And btw, patents on mpeg2 expired earlier this year, so go nuts deep in that if you want to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpeg2#Patent_pool
That is kind of a huge deal, since now you can broadcast mpeg2 (things like DVB or internet streams) without paying royalties for that tech and make gadgets (like a PDVR or TV, usb TV tuner/capture card/gpu with video accell) without paying those extra $0.35 per unit just for touching a single piece of the mpeg2 spec.
Also means that things like webbrowsers are not on the hook for that anymore and finally, after 20 years, it is possible to at least have mpeg2 video decoding in independent browsers that are not chromium based, without selling both kidneys and end up in dialysis to pay to join that club (but you’ll still be denied entry in the DRM clubs that streaming services insist on).
It is not mp4/h264/av1, but it gets the job done for many uses and with a modest computational cost by modern standards.
off topic, thank you
anyone knows what happened to this site?
no more new kernels are available, so sad
https://kernel.ubuntu.com/mainline/?C=N;O=D
@Tom Hawack
Then try to use Eclipse R3dfox for W7.
@An old friend (of ours, of mine?!), Eclipse R3dfox (homepage, GitHub) is in my bookmarks, which means I consider it as a possible alternative. Mind my laziness I’ll consider the future when the present becomes truly problematic, that is when available Firefox ESR will no longer handle Windows 7. Laziness but also intellectual comfort (which may be assimilated to laziness, maybe) in that I’ve been running Firefox for years, have tweaked it, heavily, know it so to say. But time will come when I’ll have to start moving from the warm sauna to the ice-cold fjords…
Thanks for the hint, old chap :)
Thanks Microsoft for the 4k <3
Just installed FF 133b1 and all is well.
Will get regular updates.
PlayReady will only be enabled on Netflix, and Netflix will perform their own A/B testing to their users. That means not every users on Fx132 will be able to see PlayReady.
Related bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1919627
Still no option to install PWA websites as apps (without using ugly external plugins)
They got rid of pwa some years ago, maybe they will never come back to add it to the browser so don’t keep waiting.
of course not. Only people who not understand that this is a security problem without any benefit would want something like that.
I don’t understand what they are writing about. It’s all technical gobbledygook to me.
Among the Firefox 132.0 developer changes : “HTTP/2 Server Push is deactivated by default with the preference network.http.http2.allow-push now set to false.”
Running here Firefox 115 ESR updated to 115.17.0 and the preference remains ‘true’.
I will manually set this pref to ‘false’ given what is mentioned at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Releases/132 :
“HTTP/2 Server Push is deactivated by default with the preference network.http.http2.allow-push now set to false. This feature is no longer supported by any other major browser, and the implementation may be completely removed in a future release. (Firefox bug 1915848)”
Just move to FF 128 asap.
@Truck. I just checked 128 ESR. It also has the preference set to true by default.
@Truck, FF128 ESR not available for Windows 7 … Should I be running a modern OS that I’d update to latest Stable Firefox release as I have for the past 10 years or so. Stuck on 115 ESR until I upgrade the very OS :) The 115 ESR branch is planned to be continued at least until March 2025 as far as I’ve understood. Until then 115 ESR handles the security updates and that remains the essential point, for now.