Mozilla Firefox 132 is available to download today, arriving a couple of weeks ahead of the browser’s big 20th anniversary1 milestone.
But anyone hoping Firefox 132 would prove itself a veritable birthday piñata, fit to burst with a flurry of new features and eye-catching changes should temper their expectations.
Although Mozilla’s engineering team has several exciting new features in the pipeline—vertical tabs, tab grouping, ‘new tab’ page changes, redesigned Settings interface, and a brand-spankin’ new profile system—these features aren’t ready to unwrap – not officially, anyway.
Instead, Mozilla Firefox 132 arrives as a more serviceable update, delivering a smaller set of (nonetheless welcome) improvements, bug fixes, and laying the necessary behind-the-scenes groundwork for more eye-catching changes to come.
Before I dive into what is included in Firefox 132 you may wish to whet your appetite for what’s to come by watching the following new video Mozilla’s put out to celebrate Firefox’s 20th anniversary:
Back to the present, and Mozilla Firefox 132 brings:
- Enhanced Tracking Protection ‘Strict’ mode now blocks 3rd-party cookie access
- Certificate Compression support (Zlib, Brotli, and Zstd)
- HTTP-favicons now blocked if Firefox is unable to be force-load them over HTTPS
- Support for a post-quantum key exchange mechanism for TLS 1.3
- WebRTC apps can query live media track capabilities
Another small change sees the “Copy Without Site Tracking” option (introduced in Firefox 120 and accessed by right-clicking on any URL or link) greyed out should the link in question have no tracking parameters within in it. Makes sense.
Some Linux-specific changes pulled from the issue tracker as ‘fixed’ in v132:
- Stale AppArmor config cleanup in Firefox DEB
- Max frame-rate info available via PipeWire Camera
- Firefox Snap now works with GNOME Screencast functionality
- Playing media URL (e.g., YouTube video) passed to MPRIS during playback
- Hardware acceleration now enabled for Mesa 17 (or higher) under XWayland
On a visual note, the sound icon which shows when you hover over a tab playing media with sound now uses a larger, legible with better contrast:
Elsewhere, graphics-heavy web content now benefits from WebRender hardware accelerated rendering of SVG Primitives. Filters support include feBlend, feColorMatrix, feComponentTransfer, feComposite, feDropShadow, feFlood, feGaussianBlur, feMerge and feOffset.
Firefox 132 also debuts Wide Color Gamut WebGL support on Windows and macOS users. This is said to enable “richer, more vivid range of colors to the videos, games, and images on your screen” and support P3 colour profiles in 8-bit.
Also on macOS, Firefox 132 now supports the operating system’s screen and window sharing selection features in the latest macOS 15 ‘Sequoia’ (with macOS 14 support coming soon). It also improves session resume to ensure tabs are there after a restart/power interruption.
On Windows, Firefox 132 introduced support for encrypted playback through Microsoft PlayReady (selected websites only to start with). This change is the first step in supporting 4K video playback from the major streaming video services.
That’s this release in a nutshell.
Getting Mozilla Firefox 132
I typically sign-off Firefox update posts with a “where to download it” paragraph but honestly? Chances are you already have Firefox installed, be it the official Snap package Ubuntu ships with, the official Flatpak, a DEB (from Mozilla APT repo, or Linux Mint), the official binary, etc.
Whichever way you’ve got it installed, this update begins working its way out to you as of today.
- Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004 – the first stable release. Preview builds had been available since 2002 under the names Phoenix, Firebird, and then Firefox. ↩︎