Firefox web browser 136.0 is out today with many new features!

The new release introduced a new setting option, allowing to add sidebar toggle button in top-left, to quickly show/hide the side-bar. Where, you can quickly access the AI chatbox, history, tabs from other devices, and settings.

Firefox 136.0 also introduced new Vertical Tabs mode that can be enabled/disabled by the menu option when you right-clicking on tool-bar. This mode shows all open and pinned tabs in left side-bar, and makes the header more compact that looks native in GNOME desktop.

For Linux, the release enabled hardware video decoding for AMD GPUs. And, the official apt repository and tarballs now support arm64 (aarch64) CPU architecture type, while Flatpak support for arm64 is coming soon.

Other changes in the release include new “Saved form info” option in the Clear Recent History dialog to clears things like names, emails, and other items you enter in forms separately, as well as:

• Allow to unblock certain social media embeds that are blocked in ETP Strict and Private Browsing modes.
• Upgrade page loads to HTTPS by default and gracefully falls back to HTTP if the secure connection fails.
• Move background tabs to lower power cores in macOS, reducing energy usage.
• Support hardware-accelerated playback of HEVC video on macOS.
• Support Weather forecast on the New Tab in additional regions including Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile.
• Enable address autofill for users in the United Kingdom.
• Move Save to Pocket action from a button to context menu.
• Use LZMA compression for the macOS DMG installer packages.
• Use Cmd+Enter instead of Ctrl+Enter for completing search strings to .com addresses in macOS Sequoia.
• Prefer PNG format when copying images out of Firefox.
• Add support for sending and receiving the AV1 video codec over WebRTC.

There are as well security fixes and development updates, including:

• support for the Intl.DurationFormat object, enables language-sensitive duration formatting.
• support for the CSS :open pseudo-class for styling elements that can be toggled open to display more content.
• support for the :has-slotted pseudo-class, allowing authors to style the contents of a element when it is not empty or not using the default value.
• use Codemirror 6 in the Developer Tools debugger editor.
• support for the text replacement feature in an input field on macOS.
• ability to specify value plaintext-only for the contenteditable attribute.
• simulcast support over WebRTC, with the H264 video codec.
• Add support for ARIA elements reflection and CookieStore API.

How to Get Firefox 136.0

The official announcement (not ready at the moment of writing) as well as the download link are available in Mozilla website via the link below:

For Ubuntu user, the system developer will update the Firefox package. Just keep system up-to-date, you’ll get Firefox 136.0 in next few days. For other software sources (e.g, PPA, and Mozilla apt repository), see this step by step guide.