Today, Mozilla published the final build of Firefox 125 as the latest stable release for their popular open-source and cross-platform web browser that introduces new features and many improvements.
Highlights of Firefox 125 include a new URL Paste Suggestion feature that allows users to quickly access URLs copied to the system clipboard without the extra step of pasting them onto the address bar. Firefox will automatically detect that a URL is copied on the clipboard and offer to open it when focusing on the address bar.
This is a welcome productivity enhancement in Firefox, which should shorten the time spent copying and pasting URLs into the address bar. Here’s the URL Paste Suggestion feature in action!
Mozilla Firefox 125 also brings support for highlighting in PDF documents, AV1 codec support for Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), a new option to let users enable Web Proxy Auto-Discovery (WPAD) while configuring Firefox to use the system proxy, and expanded download protection to proactively block downloads from URLs that may not be trustworthy.
For users of tab-specific Container add-ons, Firefox 125 lets you search in the address bar for tabs that are open in different containers. For users in the US and Canada, this release will prompt you to save your addresses when submitting an address form so you can more easily complete forms in the future.
Firefox 125 also improves keyboard navigation of the Firefox settings by allowing users to reach the first option in a group of radio buttons where no option is selected with the Tab key rather than reaching every option, as well as to navigate between options with the arrow keys when there’s a selected option.
For Android users, Firefox 125 no longer includes the variant and extension of BCP47 in the Accept-Language header of HTTP requests, which translates to better interoperability with other web browsers.
For web developers, Firefox 125 enables WebAssembly multi-memory by default for more efficient interoperation between wasm modules and better polyfills for upcoming wasm standards like the component model, adds support for Unicode text segmentation to JavaScript, and adds support for the content-box and stroke-box keywords of the transform-box CSS property.
Furthermore, it updates the align-content property to work in a block layout to enable block direction alignment without employing a flex or grid container, eliminates the SVGAElement.text method in favor of the much more broadly-implemented SVGAElement.textContent method, and enhances the support for the popover global attribute.
Additionally, Firefox 125 implements support for contextlost and contextrestored events on HTMLCanvasElement and OffscreenCanvas enabling the user code to recoup from context loss with hardware-accelerated 2Dcanvas. It also adds support for the navigator.clipboard.readText() web API which prompts users with a paste context menu to confirm when trying to read clipboard data not supplied by the identical-origin page.
Mozilla will officially announce the Firefox 125 release tomorrow, April 16th, 2024. Until then, you can download the official DEB package for Ubuntu/Debian distros or the tarball binary for other GNU/Linux systems, as well as binaries for macOS and Windows systems from Mozilla’s download server.
Last updated 10 hours ago