Mozilla Firefox 98 has arrived on schedule to serve as the latest update to the revered open source web browser.
If you found the last few Firefox releases a little lite on changes you will be frustrated to hear that that trend doesn’t end here. Still: while there aren’t very many “shiny new things” to gawk at or poke in Firefox 98 will find, as always, an attentive array of smaller improvements, performance tweaks, and security enhancements.
Firefox 98 touts an ‘optimised download flow’ that changes some of the browser’s long-standing behaviours.
For instance, Firefox 98 no-longer asks you what to do when a download is initiated. In older versions of the browser a prompt appears asking you to pick an app to open the file in, or save it to disk instead. Firefox 98 automatically downloads items to the specified download location, no end-user input needed.
If you’re not okay with this, don’t panic. You can change your download action setting manually and Firefox will adhere to it thereafter.
You can also delete downloaded files directly from the downloads panel in Firefox 98. This saves you having to open the panel, click “open containing folder”, find the file, and then delete it in a file manager.
Finally, and despite what you may have read elsewhere, Wayland support is not enabled by default in Linux builds of Firefox 98.
You can enable Wayland support in Firefox manually (though keep in mind it’s not ready for prime time) to get a look at how well the browser’s support for the next-gen display server is coming along, though you’re (arguably) better off running the latest Firefox Nightly build to find out.
Get Firefox 98
Firefox is free, open source software available for Windows, macOS, and Linux (with mobile version for iOS and Android also available). You can download Firefox 98 straight from the official Mozilla website from March 8, or grab the Linux runtime from the Mozilla FTP right now.
Remember: if you use Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or similar you will get Firefox 98 as a regular software update via your go-to update mechanism. You don’t have to do anything other than wait. And if you’re on Ubuntu 21.10 and above? Well, you’ll get the update silently, in the background, via the Snap Store.