Mozilla Firefox 117 is now rolling out to users across Windows, macOS, and Linux.
But don’t get excited about its arrival, okay?
Given the rapid release cadence this browser uses the days of blockbuster, feature-packed Firefox updates are long gone. We still get ace new features, but we get them in dribs and drabs, spread out over the course of a year, rather than in a single blockbuster update.
Which is why updates like Firefox 117 seem unexciting (though to be clear: I’m not saying unexciting is a bad thing, lest anyone jumps me down in the comments).
Case in point?
The headline feature in the Firefox 117 release notes is a hidden preference that allows users to “disable Firefox forcing the context menu to appear when pressing shift+right-click on a webpage as it can sometimes cause undesirable outcomes on certain sites.”
A local, privacy-friendly translation feature had been expected to ship in Firefox 117 but, for reasons unknown, isn’t present – presumably it’s been held back for a future release.
On Linux, Firefox 117 no longer shows a screen sharing indicator under Wayland. Mozilla say this “never worked as well as on other platforms”, and reason that since most desktop environments (like GNOME) show their own screen share indicators, no-one will miss it.
On the fixes front, YouTube video lists (I presume they mean playlists) now ‘scroll correctly when navigating with a screen reader’ – which is good to hear.
And that, web development buffs, and security fixes, is that.
Download Firefox 117
You can (as always) download Firefox from the official Mozilla website, or fetch the latest release direct from the Mozilla FTP.
However, most Linux users should wait for their distro to package Firefox 11 up and issue it as a standard software update.
On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS or above Firefox is updated automatically in the background via Snap (though you can remove the Firefox Snap and install Firefox as a Deb on Ubuntu instead).