Firefox 96 release notes for developers

This article provides information about the changes in Firefox 96 that affect developers. Firefox 96 was released on January 11, 2022.

Changes for web developers

HTML

No notable changes

CSS

• The hwb() function for use as a CSS color value has been implemented. The hwb() functional notation expresses a given color according to its hue, whiteness, and blackness. An optional alpha component represents the color's transparency. (Firefox bug 1352755).

• Firefox now provides support for the {{CSSxRef("color-scheme")}} property. This allows an element to indicate which color schemes it can comfortably be rendered in. Common options include "light" and "dark", or "day mode" and "night mode". (Firefox bug 1576289).

• The {{CSSxRef("counter-reset")}} property now supports the reversed() function for creating reversed CSS counters, which are intended for numbering elements in descending order. This can be used with the list-item counter to automatically number ordered lists in reverse order, starting from the number of elements in the list (list-item is a counter that is automatically applied for ordered lists, such as those created using {{HTMLElement("ol")}}). Firefox uses this feature internally to support the <ol> reversed attribute. (Firefox bug 1706346).

JavaScript

No notable changes.

HTTP

No notable changes.

APIs

• {{domxref("navigator.canShare()")}} is now supported on Android, allowing code to check whether {{domxref("navigator.share()")}} will succeed for particular targets. The feature is behind a preference on desktop operating systems. (Firefox bug 1666203).
• The Web Locks API is enabled by default, allowing web apps running in multiple tabs or workers to coordinate the use of resources. (Firefox bug 1740044).

Canvas

• Image encoder support has been added for the WebP image format. This allows canvas elements to export their content as webp data when using the methods: {{domxref("HTMLCanvasElement.toDataURL()")}}, {{domxref("HTMLCanvasElement.toBlob()")}}, and {{domxref("OffscreenCanvas.convertToBlob", "OffscreenCanvas.toBlob")}}. (Firefox bug 1511670).

DOM

• The {{domxref("IntersectionObserver.IntersectionObserver()","IntersectionObserver()")}} constructor now sets the default rootMargin if an empty string is passed in the associated parameter option, instead of throwing an exception (Firefox bug 1738791).

Media, WebRTC, and Web Audio

• A number of deprecated non-standard statistics fields have been removed from the WebRTC API {{domxref("RTCStatsReport")}} interface, including: bitrateMean, bitrateStdDev, framerateMean, framerateStdDev, and droppedFrames. (Firefox bug 1367562).

WebDriver conformance (Marionette)

• Added the command WebDriver:GetElementShadowRoot to retrieve the shadow root (open or closed) hosted by a given element (Firefox bug 1700073).
• Fixed a bug in WebDriver:ExecuteScript and WebDriver:ExecuteAsyncScript that caused a cyclic object value error when trying to return the ShadowRoot of an element (Firefox bug 1489490).
• WebDriver:Print has been enhanced to support page ranges when printing documents as PDF (Firefox bug 1678347).

Changes for add-on developers

• Added {{WebExtAPIRef("runtime.getFrameId")}} that gets the frame ID of any window global or frame element from a content script (Firefox bug 1733104).