Firefox Gets RLBox Security Addon To Fight Malicious Code & Bugs

The non-Chromium browser Mozilla Firefox is getting a new security feature called RLBox as part of the Firefox 95 update. Mozilla said in the announcement that RLBox is designed in a way “that makes it easy and efficient to isolate sub-components to make the browser more secure.”

At its roots, RLBox is a sandboxing technology meant to minimize the effects of malicious code and unexpected bugs that might pop up in the Firefox browser. The feature was made in collaboration with researchers at the University of California San Diego and the University of Texas.

While sandboxing is a common sight in many web browsers, Mozilla has taken a modular approach where subcomponents of the browser can be isolated in the form of modules. Mozilla hopes RLBox modules will be isolated and capable enough to prevent the spread of any zero-day vulnerability in a browser subcomponent.

As of now, Firefox is getting five RLBox modules that include Hunspell spell checker, Graphite font engine, Ogg container format, and Woff2 web compression format. The current implementation of RLBox is built on top of the prototype Mozilla released for macOS and Linux machines last year.

The new Firefox security feature is rolling out to all supported platforms, including Windows 11/10, Android, and iOS devices. It will be a part of the Firefox 95 update that is scheduled to arrive on December 7 itself.