Now that Firefox 128 has rolled out today to all supported platforms as the new ESR series, Mozilla promoted the next major release, Firefox 129, to the beta channel for public testing. So, it’s time to take a first look at its changes.
Firefox 129 appears to be a small update to the popular open-source web browser, introducing an improved Reader View that replaces the “Type controls” menu with a “Text and layout” menu featuring new options for setting character spacing, word spacing, and text alignment.
Additionally, the Reader View received a new “Theme” menu with extra Contrast and Gray options. These new options aim to provide a more accessible reading experience and further customize the Reader View with custom colors for text, background, and links.
Firefox 129 also promises to enable the address autofill feature for users in France and Germany and add support for multiple languages in the same document spoken in macOS VoiceOver.
For web developers, the upcoming Firefox 129 release promises support for querying the encryption key system config in the mediaCapabilities.decodingInfo() API, support for @starting-style, support for the transition-behavior CSS property, and support for the textInput event.
It also adds support for Float16Array typed arrays and new DataView methods for reading and setting Float16 values, as well as a Math.f16round() static method for rounding numbers to 16 bits. Mozilla says that “the new type is useful for sharing data with a GPU, in particular for use cases where it makes sense to trade off precision for memory consumption.“
Mozilla plans to release Firefox 129 next month on August 6th, along with Firefox 128.1 ESR and Firefox 115.14 ESR. Until then, you can take the beta version for a test drive by downloading the binaries for 64-bit or 32-bit systems from the official website, or install the official DEB package from Mozilla’s APT repository.
Last updated 9 hours ago