Mozilla Firefox 126 is now available download, and in-app updates beginning to roll out to existing users on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android.
As Firefox updates go the 126 release is rather light on user-facing goodies, especially versus last month’s release which intro’d clipboard paste suggestions in the address bar, colourful highlighting tools to the PDF editor, and activity indicators in Firefox View.
The only real user-facing change in Firefox 126 is a toggle to turn-off the vertical split pane feature in the the web inspector. While a tap of the esc key can show/hide split-pane at will some folks don’t want it triggered when they use that, hence the new toggle.
Obviously there’s lots of (more) important stuff on offer including a miscellany of bug fixes, security patches, translation updates, performance improvements, and all the rest — but those aren’t universally interesting in isolation.
Still, I did read that Firefox’s “Copy Link Without Site Tracking” is smarter in this release as it can nix tracking parameters from nested URLs as well as a further 300 smaller elements within tracking URLs, including ones from major shopping websites.
I was curious as to whether the ‘copy link without site tracking’ feature removes tracking parameters appended to the URLs of sponsored shortcuts in the New Tab page. It doesn’t for me – but given those companies paid to be there and want to know if it’s worth it…
Elsewhere, Firefox 126 on Android adds “Linux” to its User-Agent String to try and buff a few web compatibility issues mobile users are experiencing while using the browser, and renames “add-ons” to “extensions” to (supposedly) match the desktop build…
Mozilla mention “the zstd directive of the Content-Encoding HTTP header is now supported, allowing decoding of server-sent content encoded with the Zstandard compression algorithm”, which sounds neat.
Someone should make the desktop build match Android…
A handful of small but beneficial Linux-specific remedies have been implemented. These include an accessibility fix that allows the Orca screen reader to vocalize ‘saved’ values on web pages, as well as ensuring that the insert position caret is made evident when dragging and dropping text into fields.
Features that didn’t get through
It’s unfortunate that some of the features intended for Firefox 126 (some were trialled in beta builds) did not make it into the final release. These include the redesigned and informative user data clearing dialogue, the new tab wallpapers, and trending search suggestions in the URL bar.
—actually; scrap the last one. I see enough algorithmically-gamed “trends” on the sites I visit with Firefox. Not sure I need to have my peripheral vision assaulted by more lists of asinine “trends” people are being manipulated into searching for.
Trends have become a cyclical, self-perpetuating system: social network algorithm ranks contentious topic to drive anger/engagement, bystanders turn to the web to find out why topic is trending, so term/topic trends there, others see it and search to find out — toxicity spreads.
Cynical old man hat off, breezy blog writing snapback on — back to business…
Download Firefox 126
That’s Mozilla Firefox 126 in a nutshell, although it seems a bit smaller this time around, doesn’t it? Just some friendly jabs, Mozilla <3.
If you don’t currently have Mozilla Firefox installed, you can obtain the most recent version from the official Mozilla website. The website offers versions for Windows, macOS, and Linux, but there’s no stable Linux ARM64 build available for download yet.
Already a user? To be honest, there’s no need for some guy named Joe to tell you that you’ll get this update the same way you’ve gotten previous updates: either as an in-application upgrade, through your Linux distro’s repository, or via the software hub where you installed it from, such as Flathub, Microsoft Store, and so on.
If you notice anything I missed, let me know in the comments below, and I can surreptitiously update the post to act like I was already aware of it, haha.