Firefox 160 Adds a New Floating “Mini Window” Mode
Firefox 160 introduces a beta feature called Mini Window, which lets you keep a web page or part of one in a compact, floating window that stays above other windows. It’s designed for multitasking—similar to Picture-in-Picture, but for web content.
To open a whole page in a Mini Window, right-click its tab, choose Move Tab, then Move to Mini Window. The window is resizable, with its address bar and navigation controls set to hide automatically. You can also add the Mini Window button to the toolbar and use it to open either the full page or a selected section. To pop out just part of a page, right-click and choose Move Section to Mini Window, then select the area you want.
Mozilla is asking users to share feedback as the feature is tested.
Other changes in Firefox 160
Picture-in-Picture windows gain playback-speed controls, ranging from 0.25× to 2× where supported. The control appears only when the window is large enough.
The address bar’s context menu now offers Paste and Search for plain text, while Paste and Go is used for URLs. Other additions and improvements include:
- Drag history entries from the sidebar to the tab strip to open them.
- Make MathML content in saved PDFs more accessible to screen readers.
- Block websites from requesting to handle links such as
mailto:. - Add Matroska (MKV) support with FLAC, MP3 or PCM audio.
- Use Metal for WebGL graphics on macOS.
- Make Smart Window’s Organise Tabs available in French.
- Support real-time speech-to-text through the Web Speech API.
The release also includes address-bar contrast improvements, fixes for touch-based text selection and cursor placement, and remedies for some sign-in freezes on intranet sites using NTLM or Kerberos. Mozilla has also published a set of security fixes.
Firefox 160 is available from the Mozilla FTP server. Existing users will receive the update through their usual update channel; Ubuntu users will get it automatically through the Snap Store.