Firefox 147 arrives with improvements to floating videos, Safe Browsing V5, and advancements with Mutter

  • Firefox 147 is now available as the latest stable version.
  • Introduces improvements for Mutter under Linux.
  • Floating videos or Picture-in-Picture can detach when you move a tab to the background.
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Firefox 147

Firefox 147 It is now availableand arrives five weeks after the previous versionMozilla typically releases new versions of its web browser every four weeks, but we've just passed Christmas, and that's probably why this one... Firefox 147 It may have been delayed by a week. In any case, its launch is now official, and we're going to tell you all about what's new.

At least in terms of quantity, Firefox 147 introduces a large number of new features. Among them are some notable improvements for Linux, such as enhancements to Mutter and compatibility with the Freedesktop.org XDG Base Directory specification. What follows is the list with all those new features.

What's new in Firefox 147

  • WebGPU support is now enabled for devices with Apple Silicon processors on all supported versions of macOS.
  • Firefox now supports compression dictionaries, a standard already adopted by several major sites that can significantly reduce the data transferred when loading a page, resulting in faster load times, especially in bandwidth-limited situations.
  • Video playback performance on systems with AMD GPUs has been improved by enabling copy-free playback for hardware-decoded video when available, achieving parity with Intel and NVIDIA GPUs.
  • Firefox now supports the Safe Browsing V5 protocol and is migrating from Safe Browsing V4 to the local list mode of the Safe Browsing V5 protocol.
  • Users with Enhanced Tracking Protection set to Strict will have local network access restrictions enabled by default, and Firefox will now require explicitly allowing public websites to access local network resources.
  • Firefox now allows you to customize keyboard shortcuts to replace combinations that are difficult to type or remember, eliminate conflicts with other software, and create a custom set, accessible as an experimental feature from about:keyboard.
  • Firefox now supports the Freedesktop.org XDG Base Directory specification.
  • The Picture-in-Picture player window can optionally open automatically for a video playing in a tab when that tab moves to the background.
  • Firefox now uses the same quality values ​​in the Accept-Language headers as other major browsers, adjusting language preferences to improve compatibility with some servers.
  • Compatibility with the Navigation API was added, which allows initiating, intercepting, and managing browser navigation actions and solves the limitations of previous mechanisms.
  • The Unicode ICU library was updated to version 78, incorporating support for Unicode 17 and new languages.
  • ES modules are now supported in service workers, bringing Firefox in line with other major browsers and improving compatibility with modern web applications.
  • Support for CSS module scripts was added, allowing the import of stylesheets using the JavaScript module system and import attributes.
  • The CSS properties counter-* and quotes are now supported by the ::marker pseudo-element.
  • CompressionStream and DecompressionStream now support the Brotli format.
  • Firefox now supports the :active-view-transition-type selector and the associated changes to the View Transitions API.
  • Firefox now exposes the document's active view transition using the Document.activeViewTransition property.
  • Support for CSS anchor positioning was added, allowing you to link elements and define their size and position relative to their anchors.
  • Firefox now supports storage access headers, allowing servers to enable non-partitioned cookies via HTTP headers if storage access was previously granted.
  • The CSS units relative to the root font rcap, rch, rex, and ric were implemented.
  • View transitions now display their pseudo-elements in the Elements panel and the associated animations in the Animations panel.
  • In anchor positioning, elements with a valid anchor name display an anchor badge in the Elements view and the corresponding CSS rules are shown in the Rules panel.
  • The JSON viewer now includes a button to import the resource into Firefox Profiler and get a breakdown of its size.
  • You can now add and edit pseudo-element selectors in the CSS rules panel.
  • Fixed an issue that prevented some Windows users from selecting a tab when the cursor was at the top of the screen and the Firefox window was maximized.
  • A bug was fixed that caused HTTP/3 requests with non-UTF-8 headers to time out or revert to HTTP/2.
  • A draggable button can now be dragged if the action is initiated from the button itself.
  • For GNOME Mutter users on Linux, window and render surface sizes have been updated to fit the actual pixel grid and provide crisp rendering on fractionally scalable displays.

Now available

Firefox 147 can now be downloaded from its official website. In the next few hours, it will begin to arrive in the official repositories of the different Linux distributions, and they will also update the snap and flatpak packages.