With the release of Firefox 120 hitting the stable software repositories of various popular GNU/Linux distributions, Mozilla has now promoted the Firefox 121 release to the beta change for public testing, so it’s time to take a look at the new features and improvements.
Since we’re gearing up for the year of the Wayland desktop, Firefox 121 promises good news for Linux users by enabling Wayland support by default instead of XWayland. This change will enable support for touchpad/touchscreen gestures, per-monitor DPI settings, better graphics performance, and more.
However, Mozilla notes the fact that due to the current limitations of the Wayland protocol, Firefox will require an extra user interaction or a shell or desktop-environment tweak for Picture-in-Picture windows, recommending GNOME users use the PiP on top and KDE Plasma users set a special window rule in settings.
Also for Linux users, Mozilla now builds DEB packages alongside the binary package for Firefox, allowing Ubuntu/Debian users to install the latest version of the open-source web browser on their systems. Mozilla recently announced its own repository of DEB packages for Firefox Nightly, so we could see this migrated to the stable builds with the upcoming Firefox release.
The upcoming Firefox release is set to introduce a feature which allows users to underline links on websites. Mozilla suggests that this feature may be particularly valuable for people with achromatopsia. The Cookie Banner Blocker feature also seems to be activated in other countries, and the Quick Actions in Address Bar is back in beta versions.
For web developers, Firefox 121 offers an enhanced Debugger that brings in an option to turn off the debugger; keyword on the current page. It adds support for the hanging and each-line identifiers to the CSS text-indent property, as well as assisting the text-wrap: balance, thereby improving the appearance of brief multi-line text sections.
In addition, Firefox 121 will finally support the :has() selector, offer support for the elimination of tail calls in the WebAssembly language to enhance support for functional languages, and provide support for lazy loading iframes using <iframe loading=lazy>.
Mozilla expects to launch Firefox 121 on December 19, 2023. In the meantime, you can download the latest beta version of Firefox 121 from the official website to experiment with the new features. However, it is worth noting that you should avoid using a pre-release version for production work.
Last updated 6 hours ago