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With the release of Firefox 120 hitting the stable software repositories of various popular GNU/Linux distributions, Mozilla has now promoted the Firefox 121 release to the beta change for public testing, so it’s time to take a look at the new features and improvements.
Since we’re gearing up for the year of the Wayland desktop, Firefox 121 promises good news for Linux users by enabling Wayland support by default instead of XWayland. This change will enable support for touchpad/touchscreen gestures, per-monitor DPI settings, better graphics performance, and more.
However, Mozilla notes the fact that due to the current limitations of the Wayland protocol, Firefox will require an extra user interaction or a shell or desktop-environment tweak for Picture-in-Picture windows, recommending GNOME users use the PiP on top and KDE Plasma users set a special window rule in settings.
Also for Linux users, Mozilla now builds DEB packages alongside the binary package for Firefox, allowing Ubuntu/Debian users to install the latest version of the open-source web browser on their systems. Mozilla recently announced its own repository of DEB packages for Firefox Nightly, so we could see this migrated to the stable builds with the upcoming Firefox release.
Other than that, the upcoming Firefox release promises to allow users to force-underline links in websites. According to Mozilla, this feature may be useful to people with achromatopsia. Moreover, the Cookie Banner Blocker feature appears to be enabled in other countries and the Quick Actions in Address Bar feature is again present in beta versions.
For web developers, Firefox 121 promises an improved Firefox Debugger that introduces a new option to disable the debugger; keyword on the current page, adds support for the hanging and each-line keywords to the CSS text-indent property, and adds support for the text-wrap: balance to improve the appearance of short multi-line text blocks.
Furthermore, Firefox 121 will finally add support for the :has() selector, adds support for the tail call elimination in WebAssembly language to improve support for functional languages, and adds support for lazy loading iframes (<iframe loading=lazy>).
Mozilla plans to release Firefox 121 on December 19th, 2023. Until then, you can download the latest beta release of Firefox 121 from the official website if you want to take the new features for a test drive, but please keep in mind not to a pre-release version for production work.
Last updated 5 months ago
