Mozilla has just released Firefox 69, with multiple feature enhancements and stronger privacy protections. The update also includes security fixes for 20 vulnerabilities, one of them critical.
Mozilla just published release notes on Firefox 69, which includes Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) that enhances user privacy protections. For example, ETP can now block third-party tracking cookies and crypto miners by default. To add, ETP can also block fingerprinters as part of an optional strict setting.
Firefox 69 users will see the purple shield icon in the address bar when ETP is working.
Other notable new Firefox 69 features include:
- Block Autoplay: users have option to block any video from playing automatically.
- A new “New Tab” page experience that connects users to the best of Pocket’s content (available for users in US or using the en-US browser).
- Enabling more password-less experiences on the web via support for Windows Hello (and Web Authentication HmacSecret extension).
- Support for receiving multiple video codecs.
- Windows 10: performance and UI improvements.
- macOS: battery life and download UI improvements.
Security fixes
In addition, Firefox 69 includes 20 security updates for one critical vulnerability and 11 high severity vulnerabilities. Also, eight other issues rated Moderate or Low were also fixed.
The critical vulnerability CVE-2019-11751 could allow malicious code execution through command line parameters. This issue only affects Windows users.
Disables Flash by default
Finally, Mozilla has removed the “Always Activate” option for the Flash plugin.
In other words, Firefox will ask for your permission before activating Flash content for each website you visit. The disabling of Flash by default follows similar steps to Chrome 76, released in late July.