Firefox 145 ships with a handy tab group improvement, MKV support and better fingerprinting protection

Mozilla has released a new stable version of its open source Firefox web browser a moment ago.Firefox 145 is the latest version of the browser and it comes with several new features, improvements and changes.

On the feature side, Mozilla is adding support for PDF comments, which lets you add, edit or delete comments. There is also a handy option to reveal all tabs of a tab group and a new option to create links to specific parts of webpages. On the downside, support for 32-bit versions of Linux is ending with this release.

The Firefox Extended Support Releases (ESR) 140.5 and 115.30.0 are also released today. As usually, they focus on security fixes and bug fixes, but do not contain new features.

Firefox 145: the major changes and new features

Comments in PDF documents

If you use Firefox to view PDF documents, you may know use new editing tools. Mozilla added support for adding, editing, and removing comments from PDF documents. This is a built-in feature that does not require any plugins or third-party applications.

To add a comment, simply highlight content, right-click on the selection and

The PDF viewer supports a range of editing options already. You can add text or highlight sections, add a signature, draw on the PDF or add images to it. The new commenting option complements these features and may improve the appeal in business scenarios.

Reveal tabs in tab groups

Tab groups is a relatively new feature, at least in the current form, in Firefox. The feature enables you to add multiple tabs to a group, which you can then collapse or reveal. It improves manageability, especially if you happen to have lots of tabs open.

You could create tabs for various activities, such as shopping, gaming, or research, keep them collapsed most of the time to only expand them when needed.

Firefox 145 introduces sort of a preview feature for tab groups. If you want to know which tabs are in a group, you can now hover over the tab group to reveal all its tabs. Previously, you had to click to expand it, and then click again to collapse it.

It is a handy little feature that improves the handling of tab groups in the browser.

Improved fingerprinting

Ashwin reviewed the new privacy feature in a detailed article already and I suggest you check out the article for a deeper dive into what is changing. Put simply, Mozilla is implementing changes that make less users appear unique to fingerprinting scripts that are used on the Internet.

According to Mozilla, the figure drops from over 60 percent when no protections are used to about 20 percent under the new anti-fingerprinting system. That is a big improvement over the previous version, which dropped the figure to about 35 percent.

Other new features in the release

• Firefox supports linking to specific sections of a page now. Highlight content on any webpage, right-click on the selection and then select the new "Copy Link to Highlight" feature of the browser. This creates a link that points directly to the highlighted c content.
• Firefox 145 does not support 32-bit Linux distributions anymore. Mozilla recommends installing the 64-bit version. Another option for the time being is to switch to Firefox 140.5 ESR, which should continue to support 32-bit Linux for the time being.
• Horizontal tabs are slightly more rounded to match the look and feel of vertical tabs.
• Clicking on the Extensions button with no extensions installed displays a text now about the benefits of using extensions. It also includes a link to the add-ons store.
• Passwords can now be accessed and managed directly from the sidebar.
• The translations feature has been improved. It works better now when translating between languages that use different script directions.
• The new tab-page features new wallpapers. Mozilla says these are brand-inspired. Does that mean that they are ads? I could not check, as I do not see them there in Firefox 145.
• New "open links from apps next to your active tab" feature. This opens them next to the active tab instead of at the end of the tab strip as before.
• Enhanced Bounce Tarcking Protection's stateless mode is now enabled in strict mode of the Enhanced Tracking Protection feature. This blocks "more advanced tracking techniques based on redirection".
• Mozilla has changed the shortcut of Firefox for most Windows users. It points to "a small program that will launch Firefox" now, if the browser is still installed. If not, it will prompt to install Firefox.

Developer changes

• The text-autospace property is now supported.
• The math generic font family is now supported as a value of the font-family property.
• Firefox for Android supports separators in <select> menus now.
• Firefox now supports the Atomics.waitAsync() static method.
• The Integrity-Policy and Integrity-Policy-Report-Only HTTP headers are now supported for script resources.
• The source property of the ToggleEvent interface is now supported.
• A CSSStyleProperties instance is now returned for the style property on HTMLElement, MathMLElement, SVGElement, and CSSStyleRule, and the Window.getComputedStyle() method.
• RTCEncodedVideoFrame and RTCEncodedAudioFrame are now serializable objects, and RTCEncodedAudioFrame() and RTCEncodedVideoFrame() copy constructors are supported.
• The Matroska container (.mkv) is now supported for the most commonly-used codecs: AVC, HEVC, VP8, VP9, AV1, AAC, Opus, and Vorbis.
• Cookies created with cookies.set() are now validated, and invalid cookies are rejected.

Enterprise changes

• Fixed the Chatbot option of the GenerativeAI policy, as it did not turn off the Generative AI of the right-click context menu.
• GenerativeAI policy has a new option to turn of all GenerativeAI features
• The EnableTrackingProtection policy has been updated so that BaselineExceptions and ConvenienceExceptions can be set when in strict mode (not in ESR).

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