Mozilla Firefox 127 is Now Available, Here is What’s New

Mozilla has announced the latest version of their web browser, Firefox, which just so happens to be my favorite web browser so naturally I wanted to dig into this news. Firefox 127 is now available and this version brings a lot of great improvements both with features and security. A few weeks ago on the This Week in Linux podcast I went through the roadmap that Mozilla shared for the future of Firefox, and well, none of that is included in this version. That’s not surprising though because its only been a few weeks and that roadmap was over the next year or so. However, there are still quite a few changes in this release to be excited for.

The most notable and probably the most exciting feature this release is all of the improvements to the screenshot tool. The Screenshots feature in Firefox has gotten a big update! It now supports taking screenshots of file types like SVG, XML, and more as well as various “about:” pages within Firefox. For those that don’t know, about: pages are sections of the browser itself rather than actual pages so this could be nice for many reasons such as troubleshooting. I utilize the screenshot feature of Firefox all the time, the visuals you see in the video editions of our podcasts are often made with the Firefox screenshot tool. Sure, my beloved KDE Plasma has a screenshot tool built into the DE but Firefox’s screenshot has the ability to capture the entire page in one image. This alone is a reason to use the feature but also being able to quickly take screenshots of specific sections of a webpage is very nice.

One of the things I felt was missing from their screenshot tool was keyboard shortcuts to make it more efficient and well Mozilla added exactly that this release. As well as adding theme compatibility and High Contrast Mode (HCM) support. Probably the most important thing for me is the performance improvements for capturing large screenshots because previously there have been times where I want a fullsize screenshot of a webpage but the page is so absurdly tall that the screenshot tool wouldn’t be able to do it. I tested this and am happy to report that even with a very large website it was able to take the fullsize screenshot within just a few seconds! My test case was the release notes for Nextcloud Hub 8 which for those curious resulted in an image with the dimensions of 2,994 x 32,766 pixels and just under 18mb filesize. This is a pretty big deal for my usecase so thanks a lot Mozilla!

Mozilla has also been working on performance and security improvements in this version of Firefox. They now offer the ability for developers to specify domain names for important assets that can be resolved preemptively with the new support for DNS prefetching for HTTPS assets which should help pages load faster. On the security side of things, Mozilla has made some changes related to loading assets from HTTP vs HTTPS.

Firefox will now automatically try to upgrade <img>, <audio>, and <video> elements from HTTP to HTTPS if they are embedded within an HTTPS page. If these assets don’t load properly using HTTPS then Firefox will simply not load those assets. I think this is good news even the not loading part because at this point there’s no excuse to not have support for HTTPS since having a security certificate is either very cheap or completely free through Let’s Encrypt.

Another feature Firefox 127 comes with is the ability to close duplicate tabs. This might not be a problem for some people but those of us who have dozens and dozens of tabs at once time this could be so helpful. For example, during my research for making content there are times where I accidentally open duplicate tabs and being able to close them automatically may not be a game changing feature, it is a welcomed feature from this writer/podcaster.

Finally for those of you who are unlucky to have to use Windows for whatever reason, you can now set Firefox to automatically launch when you start or restart your Windows system.

Are you a Firefox user? Do you prefer another browser, if so which one? Let me know in the comments.