What just happened? Those who prefer Mozilla'southward Firefox over the likes of Chrome will be pleased to hear that the latest version of the browser has arrived, bringing protection from supercookies and finally removing Adobe Flash Role player support.

Past killing off Flash in Firefox 85 (download here), Adobe's once universally popular software is now no longer supported on whatever major browsers. The move has been a long time coming; Mozilla disabled the Flash plugin by default in 2022.

Back in 2022, Adobe itself was one of several tech giants to denote it would no longer back up Flash Player after 2022, with better and secure options such equally HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly taking its place.

Both Chrome and Edge dropped back up for Flash this calendar month. There's no setting to re-enable support in Firefox 85.

Elsewhere, Firefox 85 is crushing supercookies. "In short, supercookies can be used in identify of ordinary cookies to store user identifiers, but they are much more than difficult to delete and cake. This makes it near incommunicable for users to protect their privacy as they browse the web," writes Mozilla.

"Over the years, trackers have been found storing user identifiers as supercookies in increasingly obscure parts of the browser, including in Flash storage, ETags, and HSTS flags. The changes we're making in Firefox 85 greatly reduce the effectiveness of enshroud-based supercookies past eliminating a tracker'due south ability to use them across websites."

The protection works by using a unlike epitome enshroud for every website a user visits. That means while Firefox 85 still loads cached images when users visit the same site, those caches are not shared across sites.

"To further protect users from connection-based tracking, Firefox 85 besides partitions pooled connections, prefetch connections, preconnect connections, speculative connections, and TLS session identifiers," Mozilla says.

Other changes include Firefox 85's password manager now assuasive all saved credentials to be removed with a single click, a bookmarks folder being added to the bookmarks toolbar, and the browser remembering users' preferred location for saved bookmarks. There is likewise the usual slew of security fixes.