News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
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.
Mozilla Firefox announced new 135.0 release on Tuesday. See what’s new in this monthly release.
The new release enhanced some features to make them work for all users. AI Chatbot, the experimental feature that’s introduced since Firefox 130, now is available to all users.
Just go to Settings -> Firefox Labs, then select AI between Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, Le Chat Mistral, then you may chat with AI in sidebar after login.
Firefox AI Chatbot made available to all users
Besides AI, the new browser release also extended the credit card autofill feature to all users globally, made the refreshed New Tab layout to users in all countries where Stories are available.
And, the built-in translations now support translating Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. While Russian is now available as a target language to translated into.
New Tab layout now works in all countries support Stories
Firefox 135 includes safeguards to prevent sites from abusing the history API by generating excessive history entries. Which however make navigating back and forward buttons difficult by cluttering the history.
Other changes in the new browser release include:
The release also includes some web development changes. It introduced a new console command $$$ allows to search the page including within shadow roots. It added support for the WebAuthn getClientCapabilities() method, and a post-quantum key exchange mechanism (mlkem768x25519) for HTTP/3.
The release note and official packages are available at the link below:
For Ubuntu 22.04+ users with default Firefox Snap package, it will automatically update to the latest, though user may manually check updates via command:
sudo snap refresh firefox
For native DEB package, user can choose either the official apt repository or MozillaTeam PPA, and here’s a step by step tutorial talking about it.
A new monthly release of Mozilla Firefox web browser, version 134.0, is out today! Though, it’s not yet officially announced at the moment of writing.
According to the Mozilla Github releases page, the new Firefox release added support for touchpad hold gestures for Linux.
Meaning kinetic scrolling (aka momentum scrolling or inertia scrolling), the continuous scrolling after lifted fingers from touchpad, can be interrupted by placing two fingers on the touchpad.
Mozilla announced the new Firefox web browser 130.0 release this Tuesday!
The new Firefox release introduced “Firefox Labs” page in Settings, allowing to try out experimental features which are in development and evolving, which could impact how the web browser works.
So far, it includes AI chatbot allowing to chat with ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral. Though few of them need login first.
Firefox web browser announced new 128.0 release one day ago on Tuesday.
This is a new monthly release that introduces some handy new features. They include context menu option to translate a selection of text. Rather than translate full web page, user can now highlight single or a selection of text, then use right-click and select to translate the text.
Mozilla announced a new monthly release of its Firefox web browser on March 19.
In the new release, the caret browsing mode, keyboard navigating just like in text editor, also works in the built-in PDF viewer.
The Qwant search engine has been expanded to all languages in the France region along with Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland.
In MacOS, Firefox now uses the macOS fullscreen API for better user experience for fullscreen spaces, menubar and the Dock. In Windows, it populates the taskbar jump list more efficiently, for a smoother overall browsing experience.
Firefox Caret Browsing setting option
Mozilla Firefox web browser version 123.0 now is available to download!
In the new monthly release, Firefox View page now have “Search” function, allows to search a page from each tab of recent browsing, recent closed tabs, open tabs, tab from other devices, and history.
Firefox 123.0 also added a new menu option to easily report web compatibility issue for currently tab.
For Ubuntu machine with NVIDIA graphics card, here’s how to implement hardware acceleration for video playback in Firefox web browser.
Firefox so far only supports VA-API for GPU decoding to offload CPU and save power. Both Intel and AMD GPUs support VA-API. However, NVIDIA so far supports the api only through the open-source Nouveau driver.
If you have only NVIDIA GPU running with proprietary driver, then hardware video acceleration does not work out-of-the-box for Firefox.
For choice, there are libvdpau-va-gl1 driver (h.264 only) or libva-vdpau-driver, but both seems no longer updated. The best choice so far is the free open-source nvidia vaapi driver.
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Mozilla announced new 122.0 release for its free open-source Firefox web browser this Tuesday!
This is a new monthly release that include minor new features. For Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and their based systems, Firefox now provides official .deb packages through an apt repository.
Meaning now, there are 5 official ways to install Firefox in Ubuntu Linux:
Besides providing .deb package for the Stable release, the apt repository also includes the packages for Beta, Nightly, and Dev versions of the popular web browser.
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Firefox web browser announced the new monthly 121.0 release this Tuesday!
For Linux, the release finally default to Wayland session when available, meaning for Ubuntu 22.04 and higher (exclude Snap), Fedora Workstation, and other Linux with recent GNOME Desktop.
With Wayland, it has better support for touchscreen & touchpad.
User can use 2-finger swipe left/right to navigate forward and backward, and 2-finger pinch gesture to zoom in/out. It as well has per-monitor DPI settings, better graphics performance, and more.
Sadly, this feature does NOT enabled for Firefox Snap in my case for Ubuntu. User can choose to either install Firefox as .deb package, or manually enable Wayland support for the Snap pacakge.
Besides Wayland for Linux, Firefox 121.0 also adds Voice Control commands support on macOS systems, and prompts Windows users to install the Microsoft AV1 Video Extension to enable hardware decoding support.
Other features in Firefox 121.0 include:
:has() selector, the hanging and each-line keywords, balance keyword, lazy loading iframes.Most Linux that pre-installs Firefox, will build the latest package soon and publish into system repositories.
For Ubuntu, the snap package has been updated to v121.0. It should update to the new release automatically.
If NOT, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal, and run command to do the update manually.
snap refresh firefox
For the portable Linux tarball, as well as the official release note, go to the link below:
