Mozilla Firefox 130 is out with a variety of changes that make this phenomenally popular open-source web browser a touch more productive.
On Linux, Firefox 130 enables overscroll animations by default, having added them on other platforms a few years back. This is a familiar visual effect from mobile systems: when you try to scroll beyond the edge content an elastic animation indicates “nuh-uh”.
Now, lest anyone end up confused, these new (on Linux) Firefox over-scroll animations only play if you’re using a touchpad/trackpad to overscroll. You don’t see the effect when using a mouse. To help you get an idea of how they look, here’s a GIF:
It’s a small change, it won’t revolutionise the world, yet it does bring feature-parity with other platforms – and keeping up with the Windows-Joneses is important.
Language fan? You may be interested to hear Firefox 130 now lets you select a portion of text within a full-page translation and translate that to another language. Confused? Translate whole page first, then select some text to re-translate that portion.
In the screenshot above I translated an English webpage to Danish using Firefox’s local translation feature. Next, I highlighted a paragraph within the Danish translation and translated that portion to French. This could be useful for, er…
For me, the best change in Firefox 130 is Firefox Labs. This new section in Settings makes it easy to opt-in to try-out experimental features in development for future releases. If you’ve used Firefox Nightly builds you may be familiar with this page.
A handful of ‘experiments’ are offered in this release, including the handy auto-open picture-in-picture option I wrote about recently, and the ability to access an AI chatbot of your choice from a sidebar, or selecting text and clicking the sparkle emoji.
Finally, Firefox 130 introduces Web Codecs API support on desktop.
You may recall hearing about this feature before, as the first shoots towards the goal sprung up inFirefox 123 earlier this year. The Web Codecs API gives websites/services/apps “low-level access to audio and video encoders and decoders” if needed for better performance.
Mozilla also says it has fixed the issue with the Copy and Paste context menu actions sometimes not appearing when they should. This fix may also be back-ported to ESR in a future point release.
Naturally. there’s more to this release than just the hand-picked highlights above. Bugs got squashed, UI kinks ironed out, performance improved, and web compatibility bolstered. Read through the developer change-log for more details.
Update to Mozilla Firefox 130
To benefit from all of the changes mentioned above, you’ll need to update to Firefox 130. Depending on your OS or installation method, this may be automatic, or you may need to wait for a package manager to distribute the update to you.
On Ubuntu, the Firefox Snap is silently updated in the background; the Firefox Linux binary downloads the update in-app, and applies it when the browser is restarted; while the Firefox DEB from the Mozilla APT repo will appear in Ubuntu’s Software Updater tool.
Otherwise, download Mozilla Firefox from the official website, which provides installers for macOS and Windows, binaries for Linux (including ARM), and links to the setup docs for the official Mozilla APT repo should you want a Firefox DEB.