Mozilla News Archives

Since the release in May of Firefox 151, Mozilla has been relying on the zlib-rs library for Gzip compression/decompression. This subtle change to use this Rust-based Zlib implementation has yielded some performance benefits and better memory safety but also some headaches when dealing with Intel CPU bugs.

The Firefox 152.0 release binaries are now available ahead of tomorrow's official unveiling. With Firefox 152 there is now the JPEG-XL support code being compiled by default for the release albeit still disabled at run-time by default behind a preference for now.

As an exciting development for GPU-accelerated video decoding within the Mozilla Firefox web browser, initial support for Vulkan Video has landed in the web browser!

The latest nightly builds of Firefox 153 have rolled out a new appearance for the browser's settings area.

Firefox 151 release binaries are now available as the latest monthly update to Mozilla's open-source web browser.

Mozilla today published their Firefox 150 release binaries as the latest milestone for this open-source web browser with growing AI ambitions.

Mozilla today announced "Thunderbolt" as an open-source AI client built for control and independence. Mozilla Thunderbolt, while having the worst possible name, is built for organizations and others wanting to deploy self-hosted AI infrastructure.

Firefox 149.0 release binaries are now available with a wide assortment of improvements for this month's update to the cross-platform Mozilla web browser solution.

Thunderbird announced today the availability of their public roadmaps where they are making it easier for end-users to comprehend what they are currently working on for this mail client not only for the desktop builds but also their Android and iOS versions too.

Following the Firefox 148 release with the new AI controls, Mozilla promoted Firefox 149 to beta today.

Firefox 148 release binaries are now available ahead of the official release announcement on Tuesday. Most notable is the new AI controls found with Firefox 148 for those wishing to disable Firefox's growing AI capabilities.

With the concerns raised over comments by Mozilla's new CEO with wanting to evolve Firefox into a "modern AI browser", the Firefox 148 release due out later this month aims to address some of those concerns by having a new AI controls area within the web browser's settings.

The latest Firefox Nightly builds have now enabled the Split View mode by default to easily view two web pages at once within a single window.

In late 2023 Mozilla began providing Debian packages of Firefox Nightly builds complete with an APT repository. Those on Debian/Ubuntu distributions have a much easier path for enjoying Firefox Nightly since then and now Mozilla engineers are providing similar RPM builds of Firefox nightly too.

Firefox 147.0 release binaries have hit the Mozilla servers today as the latest monthly update to this open-source web browser. Firefox 147 is exciting for Linux users in finally delivering XDG Base Directory Specification support.

Mozilla Corporation has named its new CEO in replacing interim CEO Laura Chambers.

With Firefox 146 released, which is exciting for delivering fractional scaling on Wayland, Firefox 147 Beta is now available and it's also quite exciting to Linux users for another reason.

The Mozilla Firefox 146.0 release binaries are now available with a very exciting improvement for Linux users relying on Wayland.

A 21 year old bug report requesting support of the XDG Base Directory specification is finally being addressed by Firefox. The Firefox 147 release should respect this XDG specification around where files should be positioned within Linux users' home directory.

Firefox 145 release binaries are now available. Most notable with this release is what's not there: the 32-bit Linux builds are no more.

Firefox 144.0 is now available but it's not a particularly exciting browser release. But with Firefox 144 stable now comes Firefox 145 beta and that is a bit more noteworthy as it ditches 32-bit Linux support.

Within the nightly builds of the Firefox web browser is finally the ability to support playback of Matroska "MKV" content.

Mozilla announced today that they will be ending 32-bit Linux support for the Firefox web browser in 2026.

The Firefox 142.0 release binaries are now available ahead of the official release announcement due out on Tuesday. Firefox 142 isn't bringing many notable changes but one is likely to cause some contention around Firefox Extensions.

The Mozilla Firefox 141.0 release binaries are out today for this monthly update to this cross-platform, open-source web browser.

The Thunderbird mail client developers today formally announced Thunderbird 140 as the newest Extended Support Release (ESR) for this cross-platform alternative to Microsoft Outlook.

One of the interesting projects engaged in by Mozilla that directly wasn't related to their web browser efforts was DeepSpeech, an embedded/offline speech-to-text engine. To not much surprise given the lack of activity in recent years, last week they finally and formally discontinued the open-source project.

Mozilla Firefox 140 release binaries are available today as what's going to be the web browser project's next Extended Support Release (ESR) version.

Mozilla Firefox 139.0 release binaries have been pushed out to mirrors today ahead of the formal announcement tomorrow. With the Firefox 139 browser update comes a few new features worth mentioning.

Mozilla announced today it's going to be shutting down its Pocket read-it-later bookmarking service this summer.

The Mozilla Firefox source code is now officially available on GitHub as they work to transition from their hg.mozilla.org servers.

Firefox 138 was released yesterday and wasn't particularly exciting besides enhanced profile management and Tab Groups support... Aside from that it was a pretty basic release. In turn Firefox 139 is now in beta and that release does bring some items worth mentioning like faster HTTP/3 upload performance.

The Mozilla Firefox 137 release binaries are now available ahead of the official release set for Tuesday.

With Firefox 136 released, Mozilla has promoted Firefox 137 to its beta phase.

Mozilla Firefox 136.0 release binaries are now available online ahead of tomorrow's official release announcement. Particularly on the Linux side, Firefox 136 is one of the more exciting updates in recent times.

Anticipated for the April release of the Mozilla Firefox 137 web browser is finally supporting HEVC (H.265) video playback in an accelerated manner using the Video Acceleration API (VA-API).

For all of those that were intrigued over the independent code porting the Firefox web browser to the GTK4 toolkit, there has been a bit more progress and all of the code is also now obtainable via GitHub for this unofficial port.

For four years there has been an open bug report for Mozilla Firefox requesting the browser's GTK widget support be updated for GTK4. An independent user/developer has taken it into his own hands and has managed to get Firefox using the GTK4 toolkit up and running on Linux.

Firefox has been shipping their nightly Linux builds the past three months with ForkServer enabled to improve the multi-process browser experience. The results are looking good and Firefox official releases for Linux should soon begin shipping with ForkServer too for this performance win.

With Firefox 135 released, Firefox 136 is now in beta. Most notable with this next iteration of the Mozilla Firefox web browser is finally enabling hardware video acceleration by default for AMD GPUs on Linux.

Mozilla Firefox 135 release binaries are now available for those wanting to grab the latest browser release right away.

Mozilla has published the Firefox 134.0 release binaries today ahead of their official release tomorrow. This first Firefox update of 2025 brings a few new features to Linux users and those on other platforms.

It's not any shiny new web browser feature but Mozilla announced they are moving from .tar.bz2 packages for their Firefox Linux binaries over to using .tar.xz for a faster and lighter experience.

Mozilla Firefox 132.0 release builds are now available for Linux, macOS, and Windows for this newest monthly feature release to this open-source web browser.

The Rust-written Servo web layout engine project that was born at Mozilla and now continued by Linux Foundation Europe with other stakeholders like Igalia has been making steady progress in recent months. The project's September 2024 status report is now available that outlines recent improvements to this open-source browser layout engine.

Firefox 131 is out today with a few improvements worth mentioning for Mozilla's web browser.

The Servo open-source browser layout engine has supported making use of the Firefox Devtools code for the provided web developer tools such as the HTML web page inspector and browser console. But that support had fallen into disrepair. Fortunately, thanks to a useful Outreachy project, the code has been updated and now working nicely with the newer Devtools code.

Mozilla is interested in a Rust-written JPEG-XL image decoder for its memory safety characteristics compared to the existing C++ code they rely on for JPEG-XL image support in Firefox. While Google previously removed JPEG-XL support from Chrome/Chromium, it may be Google that comes to the rescue and writes a Rust-based JPEG-XL image decoder that can then be shipped by Firefox.

Firefox 130 web browser binaries were published today ahead of the official release announcement going out on Tuesday. Firefox 130 isn't too particularly exciting but there are a few changes worth mentioning.

The Mozilla Ocho group leads "innovation and experiments" at Mozilla. Following all of their work on Llamafile for easily distributing large language models as a single file that can be easily executed across different hardware/software, their newest effort is Whisperfile for easy audio-to-text translations.