It's been a little over 24 hours since Mozilla made official the launch of Firefox 108. Among its novelties, perhaps the most outstanding was the support for WebMIDI, but it must be recognized that it was not one of the most exciting launches in memory. After the launch of a new stable version, the company makes two three more versions available to anyone interested: the Beta, the Dev, which is very similar to the first, and the Nightly. In January they will launch Firefox 109, and some new features of that version are already known.
Currently in the Beta channel, Firefox 109 will include a button where the extensions will be hidden. This is something that has been available in Chrome/Chromium for a long time, and its purpose is to hide all extensions so that they only appear when we want them to. Of course, it is possible to leave some extensions visible, but there are many that we do not need to always have in the bar taking up space.
Firefox 109 will arrive on January 10
In the screenshot you can see how the extensions are now and how they will be very soon. The green window (above) is from Firefox 108, and, not being my default browser, I have up to 5 icons taking up space. The red window is from Firefox 110, currently on the Nightly channel, but we can see the same if we download Firefox Beta, an icon shaped like a puzzle piece that shows all the extensions that we have not left visible on purpose.
This novelty of the button is published at the same point in which there is another published that, from my point of view, has nothing to do with it: manifest version 3 will be activated (MV3), but making it clear that MV2 is still supported and activated. To complete the list of improvements that they can tell us about at the moment, they say that the versions of Firefox in Spanish from Spain (es-ES) and Spanish from Argentina (es-AR) now come with an integrated dictionary that can be used with the spell checker from Firefox.
Firefox 109 will arrive in 2023, specifically the January 10, and more news is expected in addition to these two.
It makes absolutely no sense to have the "extensions button" used by Chrome and its derivatives in Firefox... Pablinux, I am very surprised that you have so many extensions visible, I use a minimum of 12 extensions almost daily and I have another 6 disabled because I use them very little bit; However, only one is visible out of necessity, Video DownloadHelper unfortunately continues to be, at the Firefox extension level, the best video downloader that is not focused solely and exclusively on YouTube and that can also convert them into other video formats, since either while you download them or if you already have them on your hard drive... And I say unfortunately because it has been more than a year without an update, at some point it will stop working.
In Firefox there is a tool called “Overflow Menu”, when you click on the toolbar (the one where the extension icons are placed) and select “Customize toolbar…”, you drag to the overflow menu all the icons that you do not want to see, if you find some tools in Firefox interesting you can also place them in the Overflow Menu, when you click the "Done" button the changes are saved in the browser, leaving an icon with this symbol >> that when placing the mouse over indicates “More tools…” and if we click the extensions they are there, being able to open in that space. However, to be honest, the Overflow Menu space presents some limitations by default that some extensions cannot handle correctly, such as the case of Video DownloadHelper whose display is not adapted to the maximum allowed, however, others such as Ublock Origin use these limitations intelligently without problem. visualization emas.
In fact, in this update to v108, I think they introduced for the Overflow Menu for convenience a button for each extension that allows you to access the extension's configuration panel as if you were in about:addons, something that I don't remember was provided. in <=v107. I don't see any point in this change at all, but I find it more striking that you use "flex space", which in my opinion only does is shorten the address bar if there is a sense of real purpose, meaning, usefulness, I also don't see the point of Mozilla providing the old "Search Bar" in Firefox, with the Swift Selection Search extension I can search in any search engine that I have configured (or that I personally configure) beyond the default one, being able to immediately search in youtube or wikipedia or amazon, etc, if an extension like that were included in the default browser it would make life easier for everyone.