Mozilla Firefox 131 is now available to download with a small set of improvements in tow.
The first change I noticed when opening Firefox 131 is the new icon for the ‘all tabs’ feature1.
Previously a small downward pointing arrow, this new—more obvious— icon is a small squarish depiction of a tabbed web browser. The change was made ahead of vertical tabs (upcoming feature) that moves this button to the toolbar if vertical tabs are enabled.
Mozilla say “hovering the mouse over an unfocused tab will now display a visual preview of its contents”. Tab hover previews were sort of available in Firefox 129 but in Firefox 131 are now enabled for all users — a nifty if sometimes annoying, addition (disable via Settings).
Firefox’s privacy-preserving text translations pick up some new improvements. The browser is now able to—äntligen!—translate text to and from Swedish, and when it suggests a default translation language it considers ones you’ve previously used.
Text fragments are a modern web convenience that let you you link to a specific section of text in a web page, and Firefox 131 supports fragment URLs (although there is not, as far as I can see, a way to create fragment URLs in Firefox 131 – but add-ons exist for that).
Also, this Firefox release is able to temporarily remember when you grant permissions to websites, such as geolocation access. Mozilla say these temporary permissions are removed automatically once the tab is closed or, if left open, after an hour.
Finally, although it’s not mentioned in the release notes, there’s a new ‘Action’ item you can enable from the Settings > Search panel. When this is enabled you can perform some common browsers actions straight from the URL bar.
Other changes: –
- Implements Seek and SetPosition for MPRIS on Linux
- Support for Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State (CHIPS)
- New bookmarks now save to folder most recently saved to
- Click on search bar holding shift to load search engine homepage
No new additions to Labs (a big-ticket feature in Firefox 130) in this stable release. The Firefox 131 beta builds did offer vertical tabs and a redesigned sidebar (more like Vivaldi’s) in Labs. If you’re keen to test those features (sans about:config fudges) it may be worth trying a Firefox beta.
Every release of Firefox includes an assortment of bug fixes, security patches, performance finesse, and web compatibility bumps too.
Update to Mozilla Firefox 131
To enjoy the myriad of changes above, you need to update to Firefox 131. Depending on your OS or installation method, this could be be automatic, or you may need to wait for a your Linux distribution maintainer to package and push the update to you.
The Firefox Snap on Ubuntu is silently updated in the background; the Firefox Linux binary can update in-app; while the Firefox DEB from the Mozilla APT repo will appear in Ubuntu’s Software Updater tool alongside your other software updates.
You can of course download Mozilla Firefox from the official website too. You’ll find macOS and Windows installers there, as well as binaries for Linux (including ARM), and links to the setup docs for the official Mozilla APT repository.
- Don’t use this tab management feature? Me either; you can remove the icon from the tab bar by right-clicking on it, choosing customise, and dragging it off. ↩︎