Mozilla Firefox 106 Is Now Available for Download with PDF Annotation, Firefox View

The Mozilla Firefox 106 web browser is now available for download ahead of its planned October 18th launch, a major release that introduces various new features and enhancements.

Mozilla says that Firefox 106 finally brings the long-anticipated two-finger swipe horizontal gesture for navigating back and forward on a website without having to hold down the Alt key. ~~However, it doesn’t work on my Fedora Linux 37 laptop running the GNOME 43 desktop environment on top of Wayland.~~ An update to Firefox 106.0.1 enabled the two-finger swipe gesture navigation on my Fedora Linux 37 machine!

Firefox 106 also introduces annotation capabilities to the built-in PDF viewer so you can write text, draw, or add signatures on PDF files. This feature has been in testing for a while now, but it’s enabled by default in Firefox 106. The PDF annotation capabilities are pretty basic in this release, allowing you to write text or draw. You’ll be able to change the size and color of the text tool, as well as the thickness, opacity, and color of the draw tool.

Another interesting new feature of the Firefox 106 release is called Firefox View, which is implemented as a pinned tab, promising to help you get back to the content you’ve previously discovered by allowing you to switch seemingly between your devices running Firefox. If you don’t like it, you can remove it by right-clicking on the pinned tab and choosing “Remove.”

For those installing or running Firefox for the first time, Firefox 106 introduces a brand-new welcome screen to help you set up the web browser to suit your needs. The new welcome screen lets you set Firefox as the default browser, import items from an old installation or another web browser, choose a default color scheme, and install Firefox on a mobile device using a QR code.

On top of all that, Firefox 106 also brings major WebRTC changes to improve Windows and Wayland screen sharing, RTP performance and reliability, statistics, and more. There are also the usual bug and security fixes to make Firefox more stable and reliable on your system.

As mentioned before, Mozilla plans to announce the Firefox 106 release on October 18th, 2022, but if you don’t want to wait until then, you can download the binaries for 64-bit or 32-bit Linux systems right now from the official website.