Firefox Release Notes

Today’s Firefox release includes two features that help users view and read website content more easily, quickly. Like all accessibility improvements, these features improve browsing for everyone.

• Firefox has offered a page zoom feature for more than a decade that allows users to set the zoom level on a per-site basis. For users who need to zoom most websites, having to adjust zoom for each new site can be an annoyance. To address this, we have implemented a new global default zoom level setting. This option is available in about:preferences under "Language and Appearance" and can be scaled up or down from 100% as needed and sets the default zoom level for all sites. Per-site zoom is still available to make adjustments to individual sites as needed.
• Many users with low vision rely on Windows' High Contrast Mode to make websites more readable. Traditionally, to increase the readability of text, Firefox has disabled background images when High Contrast Mode is enabled. With today’s release of Firefox 73, we introduce a “readability backplate” solution which places a block of background color between the text and background image. Now, websites in High Contrast Mode are more readable without disabling background images.

Various security fixes.

Improved audio quality when playing back audio at a faster or slower speed.

Firefox will now only prompt you to save logins if a field in a login form was modified.

WebRender rollout has been expanded to include Windows 10 laptops running NVIDIA graphics cards with drivers newer than 432.00 and screen sizes smaller than 1920x1200.

WAMP-formatted WebSocket messages (JSON, MsgPack and CBOR) are now nicely decoded for inspection in the Network panel.

Improved auto-detection of legacy text encodings on old web pages which don’t explicitly declare the text encoding.

Users with 0patch security software may encounter crashes at startup after updating to Firefox 73. This will be fixed in a future Firefox release. As a workaround, an exclusion for firefox.exe can be added within the 0patch settings.