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The Mozilla Firefox 126 open-source web browser is now available for download ahead of its planned May 14th official launch, so it’s time to take a closer look at the new features and improvements implemented in this version.
Highlights of Firefox 126 include zstd (Zstandard) compression support for web content, AV1 hardware decode acceleration on macOS for M3 Macs, and support for the Catalan language in Firefox Translations.
Firefox 126 also updates the “Copy Without Site Tracking” right-click context menu introduced in Firefox 120 to support blocking more than 300 tracking parameters from copied links, including those from major shopping websites, and to remove parameters from nested URLs.
For Android users, Firefox 126 renames Firefox for Android’s “add-ons” settings to “Extensions” for consistency with Firefox for desktop and the addons.mozilla.org website.
On top of that, Firefox 126 implements telemetry for users in the U.S. that would help Mozilla improve Firefox’s search feature by creating an aggregate count of searches by category. The data will be sent directly to Mozilla’s developers and not shared with third parties. More details are available here.
For web developers, Firefox 126 introduces an option to disable or enable the Developer Tools’ Split console feature, support for CSS Custom :state() and CustomStateSet, support for the Screen Wake Lock API, and support for IDBFactory.databases for enumeration of IndexedDB databases.
In addition, it implements the static URL.parse() method, which returns null unlike the URL constructor, which throws when parsing fails, and enables the CSS zoom property by default following a lot of web compatibility and standardization work in the CSSWG.
During beta testing, Firefox 126 shipped with a revamped Clear Data dialog promising a simpler and more unified way for clearing user data. However, it appears that this change didn’t make it in the final release. Another change that didn’t make it was a new “Show trending search suggestions” option in Search settings.
Mozilla Firefox 126 is available for download right now as a source tarball, DEB package, and binary packages for all supported platforms from Mozilla’s download server. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow, May 14th, if you want to update your existing installations via the OTA (Over-the-Air) update mechanism.
Last updated 2 weeks ago
