Firefox 115 Beta Brings Cookie Banner Reduction, Quick Actions in Address Bar

The upcoming release also lets you open links or search for clipboard text using middle-click on the New Tab button.
Firefox 115 Beta

Now that Mozilla officially released the Firefox 114 web browser earlier today, which will be coming soon to the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distributions, it’s time to take a closer look at the next major release, Firefox 115, which entered public beta testing today.

Firefox 115 looks to bring two new features that were supposed to land in Firefox 114, but, for some reason, they didn’t make it. I’m talking about Cookie Banner Reduction, a feature implemented in the Privacy & Security panel that, when enabled, tries to reject cookie requests on cookie banners on supported websites automatically.

Cookie Banner Reduction on Firefox 115 Beta

The second feature is a Quick Actions button implemented in the address bar, which lets you perform various actions directly from the URL bar more quickly, such as clearing cookies or history, taking a screenshot, opening settings, viewing the page source, switching to a tab, etc. This feature can also be found in the Privacy & Security panel under Settings and it’s enabled by default.

Quick Actions on Firefox 115 Beta

Another cool new feature that is expected to land in Firefox 115 is the ability to open links or search for text that you have copied on your clipboard using middle-click on the New Tab button.

I already gave you a first look at this feature when Firefox 115 was in the Nightly channel and it looks like it’s still available in the beta version. This aims to be a productivity feature to help you open links or search for text copied on your clipboard just by middle-clicking on the New Tab button.

On Linux, this will be a lot faster because you can copy text from websites to the clipboard just by selecting it (no need to press Ctrl+C or access the right-click context menu and select the Copy action). So, as you can imagine, this will save you a lot of time if you do a lot of research. Here it is in action!

On top of that, Firefox 115 also appears to enable hardware video decoding for Intel GPUs on Linux systems and adds undo and redo support in password fields. It also looks like Firefox 115 will let you import payment methods you’ve saved in Chrome-based browsers to Firefox.

The final Firefox 115 release is scheduled to see the light of day on July 4th, 2023. Until then, you can test drive the new features mentioned in this article by downloading the latest beta version from Mozilla’s download server, but keep in mind that this is a pre-release version that shouldn’t be used for production work.

Last updated 10 months ago

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