Firefox 86 brings multiple Picture-in-Picture, “Total Cookie Protection”

Article note: It's a good thing, and it should be the default everywhere. I wish this didn't feel as "starting to close the gate after the horses bolted" - Cookies are a problem, but having turned our little hypertext rendering tool into a runtime full of leaky things like WebGL, it's going to be hard to really confront ubiquitous tracking without re-constraining the scope of the browser.

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  I installed Firefox 86 on my Ubuntu workstation using Snap to be certain I wouldn't accidentally mess with my working system configuration. [credit: Jim Salter ]

Mozilla released Firefox 86 yesterday, and the browser is now available for download and installation for all major operating systems, including Android. Along with the usual round of bug fixes and under-the-hood updates, the new build offers a couple of high-profile features—multiple Picture-in-Picture video-watching support, and (optional) stricter cookie separation, which Mozilla is branding Total Cookie Protection.

Taking Firefox 86 for a spin

Firefox 86 became the default download at mozilla.org on Tuesday—but as an Ubuntu 20.04 user, I didn't want to leave the Canonical-managed repositories just to test the new version. This is one scenario in which snaps truly excel—providing you with a containerized version of an application, easily installed but guaranteed not to mess with your "real" operating system.

As it turns out, Firefox's snap channel didn't get the message about build 86 being the new default—the latest/default snap is still on build 85. In order to get the new version, I needed to snap refresh firefox --channel=latest/candidate.