We set out in 2023 to reimagine Firefox’s design to be fast, modern and inviting the first time you run it and every day after. We’ve always had your back on privacy, and still do. Now with today’s new Firefox release we’re also bringing you a modern new look designed to streamline and calm things down so you have a fresh new web experience every time you use Firefox.
We’re living in a frenetic time, where people are dealing with tough changes in our daily lives and hard to solve problems are popping up everywhere. We think the browser should be a piece of software you can rely on to have your back, pleasant to look at and working seamlessly with the web.
We’re also on a mission to save you time, whether that’s by making pages load faster, using less memory, or by streamlining everyday use of the browser. Good design is invisible. So if things just work, you don’t really think about it. But a ton of thought has been put into the flow. Our users who have tried the new Firefox have said, “the fact that I was using a new web browser slipped into the background of my consciousness.” And that’s just what we were going for.
A sleek, clean Firefox design backed by research
Going into the Firefox redesign, our team studied how people interact with the browser, observing their patterns and behaviors. We listened to feedback and gathered ideas from regular people who just want to have an easier experience on the web. We obsessed over distractions, extra clicks and wasted time. The resulting new design is simple, modern and fast and delivers a beautiful experience to support what people do most in Firefox.
Bright and buoyant throughout
The fresh new Firefox is easy on the eyes, bright and buoyant on screens of all sizes — computers, phones and tablets. A new icon set, crisp typography and thoughtful spacing throughout all reflect a modern aesthetic.
Streamlined toolbar and menus
The toolbar is naturally where you start every web visit. It’s the place where you type a URL to go somewhere online. After web page content, it’s what you look at most in Firefox. The new toolbar is simplified and clutter-free so you get to the good stuff effortlessly.
Menus are where key Firefox actions and commands live. We’ve consolidated extra menus to reduce clutter and be more intuitive through the three bars menu in the upper right or by right-clicking to activate it on your computer screen. The new look reorganized and streamlined our menus to put the best actions quickly at your fingertips.
When privacy protections are engaged in Firefox, the shield icon in the toolbar glows subtly indicating that we’re working behind the scenes to protect you from nosy trackers. Fun fact: Firefox has blocked more than 6 trillion — that’s trillion with a T — trackers since we rolled out enhanced tracking protection, stopping thousands of companies from viewing your online activity.. We’re talking about tracking cookies, social media trackers, fingerprinters, cryptominers and more. Go ahead and click on the shield to see who and what Firefox is blocking… you might be surprised by what you find out.
A new look for tabs
Based on our research, we found out that more than half of you have 4+ tabs open all the time, and some of you have more, a lot more. And we feel that! Tab as much as you like, friends. Tabs got a makeover so they are now gently curved and float above the toolbar. It’s an exciting change that also serves as a reminder that tabs aren’t stationary. So grab those tabs, move them around and organize them as you like. Tabs also got a glow-up to be a touch brighter when active.
Shhhhhh…. notifications
No one likes to be interrupted when they’re in the flow, but if you must be alerted to something, at least it can look good. We’ve updated notifications and alerts of all kinds in Firefox to take up less space for less jarring interruptions. Plus, non-essential alerts and messages have been removed altogether. Media autoplay is turned off by default, so you won’t be interrupted by a random video blasting unexpectedly. Spotting a noisy tab is easy, and unmuting/muting takes just a quick click on the tab itself.
Expanded privacy protections
Mozilla makes it our mission to put your privacy and security first in the technology we develop. Our goal is for you to worry less every time you go online. The latest Firefox release comes to you with next-level security and privacy that you’ve come to expect from us.
The best private browsing mode out there
All browsers have a private browsing mode, but none match Firefox. The popular Total Cookie Protection moves from the optional strict setting to always-on in private browsing. This feature maintains a separate “cookie jar” for each website you visit while browsing privately. Any time a site deposits a cookie, Firefox locks it up in its own cookie jar so that it can’t be shared with any other website.
An even better Firefox for iOS and Android
The fresh new look covers Firefox everywhere, from desktop browsers to Android and iOS mobile devices. The iOS experience is optimized for iPhone and iPad, with key actions now taking fewer steps for quicker searches, navigation and tab viewing. With refinements in iconography and menu names, the whole browsing experience is more cohesive and harmonious across every platform.
Shape Up Your Floats
CSS Shapes lets a floated element sculpt the flow of content around it beyond the classic rectangular bounding box we’ve been constrained to. For instance, in the above screenshot and linked demo, the text is wrapping to the shape of the grapes vs the image’s border. There are properties for basic shapes all the way up to complex polygons.
You can learn more in Josh Marinacci’s post on the new CSS Shapes tooling from yesterday.
Variable Fonts Are Here
No punny title, I’m just excited! OpenType Font Variations allow a single font file to contain multiple instances of the same font, encoding the differences between instances. In addition to being in one file, font creators can expose any number of variation axes that give developers fine-grained control on how a font is rendered. These can be standard variations like font weight (font weight 536 looks right? no problem!) or things that were never previously available via CSS (x-height! serif-size!). In addition to the candy-store possibilities for typography nerds, being able to serve a single file with multiple variants is a major page weight savings. Dan Callahan goes much deeper on the grooviness to be found and how Firefox makes it easy to tweak these new custom values.
Devtools Commands
The Developer Toolbar was an alternate command repl input in the Firefox Developer tools, apart from the Web Console. I say “was” because as of Firefox 62, it has been removed. It was always a bit hard to find and not as well-advertised as it could be, but did encapsulate some powerful commands. Most of these commands have been progressively migrated elsewhere in the devtools, and this is wrapped up in Firefox 62, so we’ve removed the toolbar altogether.
One of the last commands to be migrated is screenshot, which is a power-user version of the “take a screenshot” button available in the devtools UI. The screenshot command is now available as :screenshot in the Web Console. For example, have you ever needed a high-res screenshot of a page for print? You can specify a higher pixel density for a screenshot via the command: :screenshot –dpr 4
There are a bunch of other options as well, such as specifying output filenames, capture delays, and selector-cropped screenshots. Eric Meyer wrote a great primer on the power of :screenshot on his blog, and it will change your page capture game.
What’s New
Mozilla Firefox 120 release notes:
New
- Keyboard shortcuts have now been added for editing and deleting a selected credential on about:logins. For editing – Alt + enter (Option + return on macOS) and for deleting – Alt + Backspace (Option + Delete on macOS).
- Users on Ubuntu Linux now have the ability to import from Chromium when both are installed as Snap packages.
- Users can now use an added devtools feature to simulate browser tabs to be offline.
- Picture-in-Picture now supports corner snapping on Windows and Linux – just hold Ctrl as you move the PiP window.
- Firefox now imports TLS trust anchors (e.g., certificates) from the operating system root store. This will be enabled by default on Windows, macOS, and Android, and if needed, can be turned off in settings (Preferences → Privacy & Security → Certificates).
- Firefox now supports a setting (in Preferences → Privacy & Security) to enable Global Privacy Control. With this opt-in feature, Firefox informs the websites that the user doesn’t want their data to be shared or sold.
- Firefox supports a new “Copy Link Without Site Tracking” feature in the context menu which ensures that copied links no longer contain tracking information.
- Firefox has enabled Cookie Banner Blocker by default in private windows for all users in Germany. Firefox will now auto-refuse cookies and dismiss annoying cookie banners for supported sites.
- Firefox has enabled URL Tracking Protection by default in private windows for all Firefox users in Germany. Firefox will remove non-essential URL query parameters that are often used to track users across the web, thereby continuing to protect our users’ online privacy.
- Firefox’s private windows and ETP-Strict privacy configuration now enhance the Canvas APIs with Fingerprinting Protection, thereby continuing to protect our users’ online privacy.
Mozilla Firefox 119 release notes:
New
- Support for credit card autofill has been extended to users running Firefox in the IT, ES, AT, BE, and PL locales.
- macOS users can now control the tabability of controls and links via about:preferences.
- To avoid undesirable outcomes on sites which specify their own behavior when pressing shift+right-click, Firefox now has a dom.event.contextmenu.shift_suppresses_event preference to prevent the context menu from appearing.
Fixed
- YouTube video lists now scroll correctly when navigating with a screen reader.
- Various security fixes.
Changed
- Firefox no longer shows its own screen sharing indicator on Wayland desktop environments. The system default sharing indicator will be used instead.
Enterprise
- You can find information about policy updates and enterprise specific bug fixes in the Firefox for Enterprise 117 Release Notes.
Developer
- Web compatibility inspection has been enhanced with our new CSS compatibility tooltip in the Developer Tools Inspector. An icon is now displayed next to properties that could lead to web compatibility issues. When hovered, the tooltip indicates which browsers are not supported and displays a link to the MDN page for the property so the user can learn more about it.
- console.clear() no longer clears the Console output if the “Enable persistent logs” option is enabled.
Web Platform
- Support for improved CSS nesting is now enabled by default.
- Firefox now supports RTCRtpScriptTransform.
- ReadableStream.from is now supported, allowing creation of a ReadableStream from an (async) iterable.
- Firefox now supports the math-style and math-depth CSS properties and the font-size: math value.
Previous Release Notes:
New
- Right-clicking on password fields now shows an option to reveal the password.
- Ubuntu Linux users can now import their browser data from the Chromium Snap package. Currently, this will only work if Firefox is not also installed as a Snap package, but work is underway to address this!
- Do you use the tab list panel in the tab bar? If so, you can now close tabs by middle-clicking items in that list.
- You’ve always been able to un-close a tab by using (Cmd/Ctrl)-Shift-T. Now, that same shortcut will restore the previous session if there are no more closed tabs from the same session to re-open.
- For all ETP Strict users, we extended the list of known tracking parameters that are removed from URLs to further protect our users from cross-site tracking.
- Enables overlay of software-decoded video on Intel GPUs in Windows. Improves video down scaling quality and reduces GPU usage.
- The deprecated U2F Javascript API is now disabled by default. The U2F protocol remains usable through the WebAuthn API. The U2F API can be re-enabled using the security.webauth.u2f preference.
Fixed
Changed
- The deprecated U2F Javascript API is now disabled by default. The U2F protocol remains usable through the WebAuthn API. The U2F API can be re-enabled using the security.webauth.u2f preference.
Web Platform
- Clear button, newly added to the date picker panel, allows users to quickly clear the input with type date or datetime-local and provides a familiar experience across browsers.
