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Mozilla’s Firefox 115 web browser is now available for download as the new ESR (Extended Support Release) series that will receive updates for about a year with regular point releases.
Apart from being the new ESR series, which will slowly replace the Firefox 102 ESR series, Firefox 115 is here to introduce hardware-accelerated video decoding for Intel GPUs on Linux systems using the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) open-source application programming interface that allows apps to use hardware video acceleration capabilities.
Another cool new feature for Linux users in the Firefox 115 release is the ability to open links or search for text that has been copied on your clipboard by middle-clicking on the New Tab button. This is a productivity feature as you no longer have to open a new tab and paste the copied text or link you want to search/open.
Until now, middle-clicking on the New Tab button only opened a new, empty tab. This feature is already available in other web browsers like Chromium, so if you’re a Chromium user you’ll be right at home with this new feature in Firefox 115.
Talking about Chromium, the new Firefox release improves the migration process from Chrome-based browsers by also importing your saved payment methods. Moreover, Firefox 115 refreshes and streamlines the UI for importing data from other web browsers.
Other noteworthy changes include support for undoing and redoing text in password fields, as well as close buttons in the Tab Manager dropdown so you can more quickly close tabs without having to right-click on a tab and then choose the “Close Tab” option.
For web developers, Firefox 115 adds a new “Hide ignore-listed sources” option in the Developer Tools source tree to let you ignore third-party libraries used by Firefox while debugging, adds support for the animation-composition CSS property, and adds the URL.canParse() function to make it easier to check if URLs are valid and parseable.
On top of that, the built-in editor has been updated to behave similarly to other web browsers with contenteditable and designMode when splitting a node and it’s now possible for WebRTC application developers to specify a target in milliseconds of media for the jitter buffer to hold.
For Android users, Firefox 115 comes with a new Search button in the address bar that allows you to easily switch between search engines, as well as to let you search your bookmarks and browsing history.
While Mozilla plans to officially announce the Firefox 115 release on July 4th, the binaries are available for download from here if you want to give it a try on your personal computer.
If you have Firefox installed from your distro’s repositories or using another package format (e.g. Flatpak), you’ll have to wait a few days for the new update to become available.
Last updated 10 months ago
