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With Firefox 119 out the door, it’s time for Mozilla to focus its efforts on the next major release of the open-source web browser, Firefox 120, which has been promoted to the beta channel today.
Firefox 120 promises to be an interesting release for Linux users as it will finally let Ubuntu users using the Firefox Snap to import browser data from the Chromium Snap. The importing of browser data from the Chromium Snap was implemented in Firefox 112, but it didn’t work when Firefox was installed as a Snap app.
Also for Linux users, the upcoming Firefox 120 release updates the Picture-in-Picture feature with support for corner snapping. To use this feature while watching a video in PiP, just hold the Shift key as you move the PiP window and it will automagically jump to a corner of your choice.
Some cool new privacy features will apparently make it into Firefox 120, such as a new “Website Privacy Preferences” section under Privacy & Security settings that tells websites not to sell or share your data or to send a “Do Not Track” request. These privacy features are disabled by default.
The long-awaited Cookie Banner Reduction privacy feature is also present in this beta (yes, again), but it’s been renamed to Cookie Banner Blocker as apparently Mozilla still working on perfecting it. The description is also more clear saying that “When a site asks if they can use cookies in private browsing mode, Firefox automatically refuses for you”. However, at the moment of writing, there’s no telling if this will be available in the final release.
Another new privacy feature comes in Firefox 120 in the name of a “Copy Link Without Site Tracking” context menu action that prevents disclosure of sensitive information or identifying you in some way. Mozilla says that this feature works by removing superfluous query and tracking parameters from the copied links. However, this feature is not present in the first beta release that I’ve tested.
Among other changes, Firefox 120 looks to introduce new keyboard shortcuts for editing (Alt + enter) and deleting (Alt + Backspace) selected credentials on about:logins, adds support for TLS trust anchors on Android, and adds a new User Activation API to allow JavaScript to check if the user is or has been active on a web page.
For web developers, the upcoming Firefox release enables WebAssembly GC by default to allow languages like Dart or Kotlin to run on Firefox and adds support for lh and rlh units to be parsed and computed correctly as lengths.
Mozilla plans to release Firefox 120 on November 21st, 2023. Until then, you can try out the latest beta version by downloading the binary from the official website. However, please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, so don’t use it for production work.
Last updated 6 months ago
