The latest version of Mozilla Firefox, 131, has been released and comes with a few enhancements.
One of the first things I noticed when launching Firefox 131 was the redesigned icon for the ‘all tabs’ feature1.
Instead of the previous small downward arrow, the new icon is a more prominent, square-shaped representation of a tabbed browser. This update comes in anticipation of the upcoming vertical tabs feature, which will display this button in the toolbar when vertical tabs are activated.
Tab hover previews are now available for all users; the new icon for ‘all tabs’ provides a visually upgraded experience.
Mozilla has announced that “hovering the mouse over an unfocused tab will now present a visual preview of its contents.” These visual tab hover previews were introduced in Firefox 129 for select users. With Firefox 131, this feature is now accessible to everyone — a handy, though occasionally bothersome, enhancement (you can disable it via Settings).
Furthermore, the browser’s privacy-conscious text translation features have received notable updates. It can now —finally!—translate text to and from Swedish, and it has improved its suggestions for translation languages based on your previous usage.
Text fragments enhance web navigation by allowing you to link directly to a specific part of a webpage. Notably, Firefox 131 offers support for fragment URLs; however, there currently isn’t an option to create fragment URLs directly in Firefox 131 – but you can find add-ons that provide this functionality.
Additionally, this Firefox version has the capability to temporarily save permissions that you grant to various websites, like access to your geolocation. According to Mozilla, these temporary permissions will be automatically deleted when the tab is closed or, if the tab remains open, after an hour.
Lastly, while it’s not explicitly highlighted in the release notes, there’s a new ‘Action’ feature that can be activated in the Settings > Search section. Once this feature is enabled, you can execute several common browsing actions directly from the URL bar.
Other updates include:
- Implements Seek and SetPosition for MPRIS on Linux
- Support for Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State (CHIPS)
- New bookmarks now save to the folder most recently saved to
- Click on search bar while holding shift to load search engine homepage
No new additions to Labs (a significant feature in Firefox 130) in this stable release. The Firefox 131 beta builds did present vertical tabs and a revamped sidebar (similar to Vivaldi’s) in Labs. If you’re interested in testing those features (without needing about:config adjustments), it could be worthwhile to try a Firefox beta.
Each update of Firefox comes with a variety of bug fixes, security updates, performance enhancements, and improvements in web compatibility as well.
Update to Mozilla Firefox 131
To take advantage of the extensive updates mentioned above, it is essential to upgrade to Firefox 131. The process for this can vary based on your operating system or the method of installation. It may occur automatically, or you may need to wait for your Linux distribution maintainer to bundle and release the update.
If you’re using the Firefox Snap on Ubuntu, it will receive updates quietly in the background. Alternatively, the Firefox Linux binary allows updates to be done directly within the application. For those using the Firefox DEB from the Mozilla APT repository, updates will show up in Ubuntu’s Software Updater alongside other software updates.
You can also download Mozilla Firefox directly from the official website. There, you will find installers for macOS and Windows, as well as binaries for Linux (including ARM), and references to the setup documentation for the official Mozilla APT repository.
- Don’t utilize the tab management feature? Neither do I; you can easily delete the icon from the tab bar. Just right-click on it, select customize, and drag it away. ↩︎