You know the drill by now: a new month rolls around, and a new version of the inimitable Mozilla Firefox rolls off the release server for us all to enjoy.
And bang on cue, Firefox 125 has arrived.
The big-ticket new feature in this update is URL paste suggestions:
Firefox knows when a URL is in the clipboard
Mozilla has stated that this functionality offers an easy method for users to quickly visit URLs that have been copied to the clipboard and subsequently pasted into Firefox’s address bar.
So how does it operate?
Upon copying a URL to the system clipboard and then directing focus towards the URL bar (specifically in Firefox 125), you will observe an autocomplete result appearing at the top of the suggested dropdown list. This will feature a badge indicating “visit from clipboard” located at the extreme end. By clicking this suggestion, you will be directed to the URL.
While it may not be a revolutionary feature, it eliminates the need for manual pasting, either through right-clicking and opting for ‘paste’ or ‘paste & go’, or by using the standard keyboard short-cut of ctrl + v that we’ve all grown used to.
Elsewhere, if you make use of Firefox’s built-in PDF viewer/editor you’ll be pleased to know you can now highlight in PDFs directly. Or you can once the progressive rollout of this feature reaches you, Mozilla say.
Firefox 125 changes also include:
- AV1 support in Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)
- Expanded download protection proactively blocks downloads from sus’ sites
- Address Bar search shows tabs open in containers (if using such add-ons)
- New web proxy auto-discovery option
- Unicode text segmentation in JavaScript
Some noteworthy browser compatibility features:
- WebAssembly now supports multi-memory mode
- The use of
align-contentis now functional in block layouts - There’s support for
content-box&stroke-boxvalues intransform-boxCSS - The addition of
navigator.clipboard.readText()Web API support
If you are located in Canada or the USA, you will now get prompted to save your address the first time you fill out an address form using this browser version. This feature will enable the auto-filling of future forms, reducing the amount of typing you need to do!
That, in essence, is what Firefox 125 entails.
Alas, I’ve got a share-size bag of Doritos and Duck Tales on the Game Boy to finish – the actual Game Boy I had as a sprout, no less. I found it in a cupboard last week – so I’m going to pass on repeating where to download Firefox from this time – though I’ve a feeling you know already 😉.