Firefox is the last remaining browser with its own rendering engine, giving it an important role in keeping the internet open and standardized. Following the release of a completely rewritten and redesigned version of the browser on Android, Mozilla has been sticking to regular release schedules over the last year, and that’s not changing with the latest version, Firefox 88, either. The new release is now rolling out via the Play Store, but you can also get it from APK Mirror straight away.
While we haven’t seen too many breath-taking changes, Mozilla reports that it fixed a bug in Firefox for Android that prevented some fullscreen videos from working correctly on websites using a desktop viewport, something that shouldn’t occur too often but can be incredibly annoying if you do run into it. Version 88 is also the first Firefox release to completely disable FTP by default, and Mozilla is looking to remove support for the File Transfer Protocol altogether in Firefox 90, a process Google has already finished in Chrome. You’ll need a dedicated FTP browser to access remote servers in the future. There are also a few more changes mostly relevant to developers, like support for new CSS classes and JavaScript improvements.
Unfortunately, we haven’t spotted support for any new add-ons in the Android version of the browser, so you’ll have to keep using the Nightly release of the browser if you need more than the small amount of greenlit extensions.
Firefox 88 is slowly becoming available in the Play Store for everyone, even though Mozilla’s calendar says it should only be released on April 19. We might learn more about under-the-hood tweaks then, but since we haven’t spotted any significant user-facing changes during our initial hands-on, we wouldn’t expect too many novelties for regular folks. If you’re still eager to get your hands on Firefox 88 right now, you can download it from APK Mirror.
