The Mozilla Foundation has released a new version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Firefox 32 is available through the Firefox website, and the new version will be making its way into Linux repositories and distro releases over the next few weeks.
As one could surmise from the release number (32), new releases come fairly frequently for Firefox; however, the latest release is attracting some attention, with new security features and improved HTML5 support.  One significant change is the addition of public key pinning, which helps prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. Public key pinning lets a website owner specify which certificate authorities have issued valid certificates for the site and reject certificates issued by other authorities. Key pinning is advocated by many security experts, although one could argue that it does abandon the hierarchical unity of the global certificate authority system and, perhaps, returns to an older interpretation of what it means to be “trusted.” Time will tell whether public key pinning and other similar concepts will prove popular enough to change the overall security of the Internet.
Also in Firefox 32, the password manager offers better performance and provides additional user-viewable historical information. See the Firefox site for a summary of HTML5 improvements.