Firefox 93 Primed For Release With AVIF Image Support, Canonical Managing Official Snap

While the formal announcement has yet to hit the wire, releasing today is Firefox 93.0 as the newest monthly feature update to Mozilla's web browser.

Though there have been some rather light releases this year out of Mozilla's new expedited release schedule, Firefox 93 aligns with being one of the more exciting releases in recent history. After prior failed attempts, Firefox 93.0 finally has AVIF image support enabled for the release.

AVIF image support as the image standard based on the AV1 video codec and offers great bandwidth savings is now working in Firefox stable. The AV1 Image Format has been working in Chrome since August of 2020 and is already supported in other browsers too including WebKit-based browsers and Brave.

In addition to the AVIF image support, Firefox 93's PDF viewer now has better support for filling out forms, new insecure download protections, and other improvements.

With Firefox 93, Canonical is now building an official Firefox Snap. This Firefox Snap additionally has added support for ARMv7 hard-float and AArch64/ARM64 with the Firefox 93 build. This comes as Ubuntu 21.10 is transitioning to the Snap-based Firefox package as its default browser in place of the traditional Firefox build offered via Debian packages.

While awaiting the official announcement today, Firefox 93 binaries can be downloaded already from Mozilla.org.