Mozilla Firefox 101 Is Now Available for Download, This Is What's New

The Mozilla Firefox 101 open-source and cross-platform web browser is now available for download as a minor update that introduces a handful of changes and various improvements.

Firefox 101 is quite a minor update, so don’t expect any important changes. Probably the most interesting change in Firefox 101 is the fact that Mozilla re-implemented the dialog prompt for saving or opening files, which was removed in Firefox 98 when Mozilla implemented an optimized download flow.

Now, users will be able to re-enable that dialog prompt via a new option added right after the General > Applications section in Settings. There are actually two new options added there, namely “Save files” (default) and “Ask whether to open or save files”.

Of course, users will be able to configure Firefox to handle MIME types for different files, such as saving a file or opening it with an application installed on your computer. Mozilla thoroughly details this change in a support article.

Other changes in the Firefox 101 release include support for the prefers-contrast media query to allow websites to detect if the user requested web content to be displayed with higher or lower contrast, the ability to use as many microphones as you want at the same time during video conferencing, and the ability to use the magnifier in Firefox for Android to position the cursor in forms on web pages on Android 9 or later, as well as the latest security fixes.

For web developers, Firefox 101 also introduces three new CSS viewport sizes, namely small (s), large (l), and dynamic (d), proper parsing of AV1 codec parameters in media support queries, enablement of the WebDriver BiDi protocol by default, as well as many other changes detailed here.

Mozilla plans to officially announce the Firefox 101 web browser tomorrow, May 31st, 2022, but you can download the final release right now as binaries for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows systems from the official FTP server.