Firefox 98.0.1 has one big change: Remove Yandex and Mail.ru as custom offerings

Mozilla released Firefox 98.0.1 on Monday with one entry in its release notes.

“Yandex and Mail.ru have been removed as optional search providers in the drop-down search menu in Firefox,” Mozilla said.

“If you previously installed a customized version of Firefox with Yandex or Mail.ru, offered through partner distribution channels, this release removes those customizations, including add-ons and default bookmarks. Where applicable, your browser will revert back to default settings, as offered by Mozilla.

“All other releases of Firefox remain unaffected by the change.”

The changes will impact any Firefox release marked as a distribution from Yandex, Mail.ru, or OK.ru.

The move comes less than a week after the browser maker released Firefox 98. The big change for this release was an overhauled download experience. In terms of real-world impact, the standout for myself has been needing to point the browser back to the non-standard directory that I use for downloaded files.  

“You can now click on a file in the Downloads panel to open it even before it has finished downloading. Firefox will open the file as soon as it is available,” Mozilla said last week.

“Any files you download will be immediately saved on your disk. Depending on the current configuration, they’ll be saved in your preferred download folder, or you’ll be asked to select a location for each download. Windows and Linux users will find their downloaded files in the destination folder. They’ll no longer be put in the Temp folder.”

Firefox 98 also removed the default search engine for a number of users when Mozilla and the search engine ended their agreement.

The release also included support for the dialog HTML element, which also landed in Safari 15.4 on Monday.

The browser also gained support for cascade layers and CSS containment, which will help its score in the Interop 2022 benchmark.

The new version of Safari also introduced new viewport height and width units to determine the largest, smallest, and dynamic size of a dimension while scrolling, which is necessary as mobile browsers hide the address bar when scrolling. The browser also added support for font-palette, focus-visible psuedo-class, and retired supporting a bunch of WebKit prefixes.

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