Firefox 95 Brings Security, Performance to Mac

Mozilla has released Firefox 95, featuring a new version of its security sandboxing subsystem called RLBox and additional performance and efficiency improvements for the macOS version of the web browser.

According to the release notes, RLBox is a new technology that hardens Firefox against potential security vulnerabilities in third-party libraries, MacRumors reported on Friday.

The sandbox subsystem works by compiling a process in WebAssembly before re-converting it into native code, which restricts its access to system memory and stops it from jumping to unexpected parts of the programme, thus limiting its potential for exploiting vulnerabilities.

"This technique, which uses WebAssembly to isolate potentially-buggy code, builds on the prototype we shipped last year to Mac and Linux users. Now, we're bringing that technology to all supported Firefox platforms (desktop and mobile), and isolating five different modules: Graphite, Hunspell, Ogg, Expat and Woff2," Mozilla's Bobby Holley was quoted as saying.

In other improvements, Firefox 95 reduces CPU usage on macOS during event processing, and reduces the power usage of software decoded video on macOS, especially in fullscreen. This includes streaming sites such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, the report said.

This version also provides faster content process startup and improves page load performance by speculatively compiling JavaScript ahead of time, it added.