On Tuesday, August 1, and four weeks after the v115, Mozilla made official the launch of Firefox 116. In its list of novelties we can see everything new that it includes... or almost, since there is at least one novelty for Linux users that does not appear anywhere. That news has to do with graphics/compositor servers, because starting with this release, Firefox will be versioned (we also refer to this as builds) exclusive to Wayland or X11.
What does this translate to? In that from Firefox 116 it is possible to choose, for example, the version for Wayland and it will no longer depend or pull anything related to X11. This will allow us to gain efficiency, and we will probably soon see news with gestures in Wayland or functions that are not compatible with X11. What they have not clarified, or I have not found, is how it will be carried out. Different Linux distributions will probably choose what to offer depending on their default option.
What's new in Firefox 116
Among the novelties that Firefox 116 includes and as always, there are many points, but the ones that usually attract the most attention are those that are seen with the naked eye. In this update, floating videos, also known as Picture-in-Picture, have a slider to control the volume. For keyboard fans, Ctrl + Shift + T now reopens the last closed tab or window in the order they were closed. If there is nothing to reopen, the last session will be restored.
Among the rest of the news:
- Firefox now supports CSP3 (external hashes).
- HTTP/2 upload performance has been significantly improved starting with Firefox 115.0, particularly on those with a higher bandwidth delay product (i.e., networks characterized by both high bandwidth and high bandwidth). latency).”
- Now it is possible to copy any file from our operating system and paste it into Firefox.
- Now it is possible to copy any file from our operating system.
Firefox 116 can now be downloaded since official website, and it has already started to appear in the official repositories of the main Linux distributions.