Firefox 151 Now Available With Document Picture-in-Picture API
Firefox 151 release binaries are now available as the latest monthly update to Mozilla's open-source web browser.
While there was talk of Firefox 151 shipping a native JPEG-XL image decoder, that feature was punted to Firefox 152 beta. But there are updates to its built-in VPN support, private browsing improvements, various settings changes, support for merging multiple PDFs directly within the Firefox PDF viewer, and a number of new developer APIs.
One change worth noting on the Linux (and macOS) side is that local profile back-ups are now available with support for restoring them across platforms. This is for more easily transferring / restoring Firefox profiles on macOS and Linux without manually copying the hidden directories.
One of the new developer APIs in Firefox 151 is support for the Document Picture-in-Picture API. The Document Picture-in-Picture API allows for having an always-on-top window that can be populated with arbitrary HTML contents. The intended use-case here is for custom controls or details on video conferencing calls or similar behavior to provide a more featureful experience over the existing video picture-in-picture API support.
More details on this arbitrary HTML Document Picture-in-Picture API support "documentPictureInPicture" can be found via the Mozilla documentation. Google Chrome has been shipping this support going back to Chrome 116.
The official Firefox 151.0 release binaries can be downloaded as always from ftp.mozilla.org.
While there was talk of Firefox 151 shipping a native JPEG-XL image decoder, that feature was punted to Firefox 152 beta. But there are updates to its built-in VPN support, private browsing improvements, various settings changes, support for merging multiple PDFs directly within the Firefox PDF viewer, and a number of new developer APIs.
One change worth noting on the Linux (and macOS) side is that local profile back-ups are now available with support for restoring them across platforms. This is for more easily transferring / restoring Firefox profiles on macOS and Linux without manually copying the hidden directories.
One of the new developer APIs in Firefox 151 is support for the Document Picture-in-Picture API. The Document Picture-in-Picture API allows for having an always-on-top window that can be populated with arbitrary HTML contents. The intended use-case here is for custom controls or details on video conferencing calls or similar behavior to provide a more featureful experience over the existing video picture-in-picture API support.
More details on this arbitrary HTML Document Picture-in-Picture API support "documentPictureInPicture" can be found via the Mozilla documentation. Google Chrome has been shipping this support going back to Chrome 116.
The official Firefox 151.0 release binaries can be downloaded as always from ftp.mozilla.org.