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The Mozilla Firefox 124 open-source and cross-platform web browser is now available for download ahead of its official unveiling on March 19th, 2024, so it’s time to take a closer look at the new features and improvements.
Mozilla Firefox 124 looks like a small update that only updates the Caret Browsing mode to also work in the PDF viewer and adds support for the Screen Wake Lock API to prevent devices from dimming or locking the screen when an application needs to keep running.
The Firefox View feature has been updated as well in this release to allow users to sort open tabs by either recent activity (default setting) or tab order. Also, Firefox 124 expands Qwant’s availability to all languages in the France region along with Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland.
This release also adds support for using HTTP(S) and relative URLs when creating WebSockets, as well as support for the AbortSignal: any() static method, which takes an iterable of abort signals and returns an AbortSignal (more details are available here).
For Android users, Firefox 124 enables the Pull to Refresh feature, which is now more robust than ever, by default and adds support for the HTML drag and drop API when using a mouse, which accepts plain text or HTML text by the drop operation from external apps.
For macOS users, this release uses the fullscreen API for all types of full-screen windows, promising a better match to the expected macOS user experience for full-screen spaces, the Menubar, and the Dock. If you want to disable this feature, you’ll need to set the full-screen-api.macos-native-full-screen preference to false in about:config.
For Windows users, this release adds the ability to populate the Windows taskbar jump list more efficiently. According to Mozilla, this change should allow for a “smoother overall browsing experience.”
During public beta testing, Firefox 124 also offered the long-awaited Cookie Banner Blocker feature that instructs Firefox to automatically refuse cookie banners for you and the Quick Actions feature that lets you quickly perform various actions from the address bar. However, these features were available up until the sixth beta version and they aren’t present in the final release.
Firefox 124 also contains fixes for 12 security issues. For more details on that, check out the release notes.
As mentioned before, Mozilla will officially announce the Firefox 124 release tomorrow, March 19th, 2024. Until then, you can download the official DEB package for Ubuntu/Debian distros or the tarball binary for Linux, as well as binaries for macOS and Windows systems from Mozilla’s download server.
Update 19/03/2024: Mozilla officially released the Firefox 124 web browser, which is now rolling out as an OTA (Over-the-Air) update to supported systems, so I’ve updated the article with more changes about Firefox View, Qwant, and Windows systems.
Last updated 1 month ago
