Firefox 72.0.2 Is Released

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Firefox 72.0.2 disables double buffering for video playback on Windows after several reports of video stuttering. It also fixes a bug which prevented it from opening files with a whitespace on Windows, a hang when opening the about:logins page to view stored passwords on all platforms and a rendering issue causing CSS tags to be ignored in some cases.

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Firefox showing Mozilla's website where they advertise it as a privacy focused web browser even though it enabled telemetry by default.

The latest version of Firefox released by Mozilla, who recently fired 70 employees, including seasoned programmers, does not have much to offer GNU/Linux users.

Several Windows users with low-end graphics cards reported stuttering video playback in Firefox. Version 72.0.2 fixes this by setting gfx.direct3d11.use-double-buffering to false by default. This change does not affect GNU/Linux users since Direct3D is not used by the Linux version. Bug 1608485, "1080p 60fps Fullscreen videos stutter", does not mention any similar problem with the GNU/Linux version.

A Windows-only bug preventing Firefox (and Thunderbird, which shares the same code) from opening files with white spaces in the name is also fixed in this release.

A bug which made the about:logins page which lists all the user-login information Firefox has stored use 100% CPU for several seconds before opening (bug 1606992) on machines with many stored password did affect GNU/Linux users as well as Windows and macOS users.

The "Scratchpad" feature is removed in this release. The Scratchpad has been deprecated in favor of the web console's editor mode since version 70. It is no huge loss since the web console supports everything the Scratchpad did.

Lastly, Firefox 72.0.2 has a fix in the rendering engine for a bug which made Firefox ignore all but the first CSS element within a shadow root (1604989). Some web pages would render incorrectly in previous Firefox versions due to this flaw.

Firefox 72.0.2 can be downloaded from mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/. GNU/Linux users should simply wait for their distributions to update the version available in their repositories.

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