With Firefox 129 rolling out today to users worldwide on all supported platforms, Mozilla has promoted the upcoming release, Firefox 130, to the beta channel for public testing, so it’s time to look at the new features and improvements.
Firefox 130 looks to be another small summer update that promises to enable overscroll animations on Linux as the default behavior for scrollable areas and to improve the built-in translation feature by translating selected text portions to different languages after a full-page translation.
Another interesting change in Firefox 130 beta is the introduction of a Firefox Labs section in settings to allow users to easily enable experimental web features. For now, Firefox 130 lets you enable an AI chatbot, an auto-open on tab switch feature for Picture-in-Picture, support for Service Workers in the Debugger panel, and an address bar feature to show results during IME (Input Method Editor) composition.
“An IME (Input Method Editor) is a tool that allows you to enter complex symbols, such as those used in East Asian or Indic written languages, using a standard keyboard. Enabling this experiment will keep the address bar panel open, showing search results and suggestions, while using IME to input text,” explains Mozilla.
For web developers, the upcoming Firefox release promises to update the WebCryptoAPI to support Curve25519 primitives (e.g. Ed25519 signatures and X25519 key generation). Of course, the long-awaited Cookie Banner Blocker feature, which instructs Firefox to refuse cookie banners automatically, is once again present in the beta version.
Mozilla plans to officially release Firefox 130 on September 3rd, 2024, along with Firefox 128.2 ESR and Firefox 115.15 ESR. Until then, you can take Firefox 130 for a test drive by downloading the latest beta build from the official website, but keep in mind not to use this pre-release version for production work.
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