Mozilla Firefox 96.0 release

Firefox 96.0's release date is January 11, 2022. It is the first Firefox Stable release of 2022. The new Firefox version includes some improvements and fixes, including security fixes.

All other Firefox channels are upgraded around the same time. Firefox ESR moves to Firefox 91.5 ESR, Firefox Beta and Dev editions to version 97, and Firefox Nightly to version 98.

Executive Summary

• Firefox 96 is a security update.
• Firefox changes how cookies are handled that come from the same domain but use different schemes, e.g. HTTPS and HTTP. The sites are considered different "with respect to the cookie SameSite directive".

Firefox 96.0 new features and improvements

Changes in cookie handling

Firefox 96.0 enforces the Same-Site=lax cookie policy by default now. It is one of three available values for the Same-Site policy and blocks cookies from being sent in third-party contexts. Firefox will use the lax value automatically for sites that don't specify a Same-Site directive.

Mozilla explains:

Cookies are not sent on normal cross-site subrequests (for example to load images or frames into a third party site), but are sent when a user is navigating to the origin site (i.e., when following a link).

This is the default cookie value if SameSite has not been explicitly specified in recent browser versions (see the "SameSite: Defaults to Lax" feature in the Browser Compatibility).

Download page:

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/96.0/