With Firefox 126 out the door, Mozilla has promoted the next major release of its open-source and cross-platform web browser, Firefox 127, to the beta channel for public testing.
Firefox 127 promises an updated screenshots feature that will finally let you take screenshots of various :about: pages and file types like SVG, XML, and others, and better handle capturing large screenshots. In addition, it features new keyboard shortcuts for added accessibility, theme compatibility, and High Contrast Mode (HCM) support.
Firefox 127 also adds a new “Close duplicate tabs” option in the “List all tabs” tab bar widget and the tab context menu, and adds support for resolving HTTPS DNS records with the operating system’s DNS resolver on Linux, Android 10 and later, and Windows 11.
“Previously this required DNS over HTTPS to be enabled. This capability allows the use of HTTP/3 without needing to use the Alt-Svc header, upgrades requests to HTTPS when the DNS record is present, and enables wider use of ECH,” said Mozilla.
Firefox 127 for Linux users will identify 32-bit x86 CPU architectures as x86_64 (64-bit) in the User-Agent string on Linux systems. This change will also be seen on the navigator.platform and navigator.oscpu Web APIs. This effort is aimed at reducing user fingerprinting information and enhancing website compatibility.
For users on Windows, Firefox 127 provides a new auto-launch feature. This feature enables users to set Firefox to launch automatically each time the PC is started or restarted. For macOS users, it provides tab navigation for links and other elements that are focusable by default, instead of adhering to macOS’ “Keyboard navigation” setting.
This release of Firefox also offers several new features for web developers. It promises support for the Set JavaScript methods for creating unions and intersections of two sets and the navigator.clipboard.read()/write() feature. This function prompts users for confirmation when Firefox tries to read clipboard content that did not originate from a same-origin page.
Also for web developers, Firefox 127 optimizes and enables DNS prefetching for HTTPS documents via the rel="dns-prefetch" link hint, which lets devs specify domain names for important assets that should be resolved preemptively.
Firefox 127 also comes with a change that was supposed to land in the Firefox 126 release, namely the “Show trending search suggestion” option in Settings > Search for displaying Google Trending Searches in the address bar (not enabled by default), and the long-awaited Cookie Banner Blocker feature.
Mozilla plans to release Firefox 127 on June 11th, 2024. Until then, you can take the latest Firefox 127 beta version for a test drive on your personal computer by downloading the binary from the official website. However, please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, not suitable for use in production environments.
Last updated 2 hours ago