The Mozilla Foundation has announced the general availability of a new stable version of the free and open-source web browser Firefox, version 97.
First, starting today (February 8), Mozilla will expire the 18 colorway themes that have been included with Firefox since version 94, which appear after a browser upgrade or first install, and allow users to choose a colorway for their browser from among 18 suggested colors. (See the picture above).
These colors will no longer appear in the theme settings of any Firefox versions, except the enabled colorways, before the expiration date. In other words, if you “enabled” a colorway in the add-ons' manager, that colorway is yours forever.
Alternatively, Firefox 97 offers 6 amazing new colorways to choose from, for a limited time. You can review and activate the color you want, so you can keep it even after they expire in the future again.
On the other hand, Firefox finally, with this version, got a new design of scrollbars similar to those in Windows 11, joining Chromium-based browsers that got the same feature previously.
On macOS, Mozilla has made improvements to system font loading that will make opening and switching to new tabs faster, and on Linux, the support for directly generating PostScript for printing has been removed.
On iOS, Pocket article recommendations are now scrollable horizontally on your Firefox homepage, and searching for saved logins should now work as expected.
Finally, HTTPS-only mode has been added to Firefox Focus for Android version 97 and is enabled by default, which forces all connections to websites to use HTTPS to improve users' online security, and you can now name new shortcuts when adding to your homepage.
Firefox 97 can be downloaded from the official browser website through this link, or if you are a Linux user you will have to wait for this new version to be available in your distribution repositories, or you can download it as a Snap or Flatpak.
