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Now that Firefox 123 is officially out on the stable channel, Mozilla has promoted the next major release, Firefox 124, to the beta channel for public testing, so here’s a first look at what to expect from this release.
Mozilla Firefox 124 appears to be a small update, probably the smallest so far, as it only promises to update the Caret Browsing mode to also work in the PDF viewer. Caret browsing is a feature that lets you navigate and select text or elements on a web page using the keyboard.
For web developers, Firefox 124 beta adds support for the Screen Wake Lock API, which prevents devices from dimming or locking the screen when an app needs to keep running, support for the AbortSignal.any static method, and the ability to use HTTP(S) and relative URLs when creating WebSockets.
For Android users, Firefox for Android received support for the HTML drag and drop API when using a mouse. According to Mozilla, it accepts plain text or HTML text by the drop operation from external apps.
Once again, the beta version carries the long-awaited “Quick actions” option in Address Bar settings, which lets you quickly perform various actions directly from the URL bar, as well as the Cookie Banner Blocker in the Privacy & Security settings, which enables Firefox to automatically refuse cookie banners.
The nightly build of Firefox 124 also promised a simpler and more unified dialog for clearing user data that streamlines data categories and provides insights into the site data size corresponding to the selected time range. However, this feature appears to be missing in the beta version.
Mozilla plans to release Firefox 124 on March 19th, 2024. Until then, you can try out the latest beta release by downloading either the tarball binary or the DEB package for Ubuntu/Debian distros from Mozilla.org. Please try to keep in mind that these are pre-release versions, not suitable for production use.
Last updated 2 months ago
