The new Mozilla Firefox 136 release delivers a number of notable new features—features Mozilla may be hoping help it re-earn some goodwill from users following last week’s privacy palaver.
Last month’s Firefox 135 release rolled out a refreshed tab page to more users, added in-page translations from Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, enforced certificate transparency, and ditched the ‘Do Not Track’ setting.
This month sees a long-anticipated features make their stable release debut: vertical tabs!
Right-click an empty space in the tab bar, select Turn on Vertical Tabs from the context menu and—bam!—they appear instantly as a a vertical strip of icons on the left-hand side of the browser (and the header bar on Linux sees toolbar items move next to window controls):
Vertical tabs show in favicon-only mode by default. Hovering over an icon shows a close button and a thumbnail preview. Hit the toggle to the left of the back navigation button to expand vertical tabs so you can read tab titles and use a close button at the far end.
Mouse between the divide to resize as well, should you want to find a ‘sweet spot’.
Mozilla say early testers reported “feeling more organized after using vertical tabs for a few days”. If you’re someone with a lot of tabs open, give it a try.
Firefox 136 also sports a redesigned sidebar experience, providing easy access to some of the browser’s built-in tools, including embedded AI chatbots (of your choice; previously a labs feature), bookmarks, browsing history, and tabs on other devices.
The new Firefox sidebar is automatically enabled when trying vertical tabs (and stays enabled if vertical tabs are disabled). If you don’t plan to try it, you can enable the updated Firefox sidebar in Settings > General > Browser Layout.
When vertical tabs are enabled sidebar buttons are at the bottom, but if regular tabs are active sidebar buttons are near the top.
After that, click the new toolbar icon to the left of the preview page arrow (this icon can be repositioned) to open/close the sidebar. The sidebar can be moved to the right-hand side (and will move vertical tabs too as they’re coupled).
Other Changes
Beyond those shiny additions there’s a raft of smaller improvements.
Using Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) strict mode? It’s now possible to selectively unblock some social media embeds that would otherwise be blank—*cough*Disqus*cough*—with one catch (for now): support is limited to a few embeds but more will be added soon.
Firefox 136 also enables video hardware decoding on AMD for Linux users by default on Mesa 24.2 or greater, plumbs in wp_linux_dmabuf_feedback Wayland protocol support, and offers official stable binary builds for Linux ARM64 (AArch64) systems.
Plus:
- Clear saved form info separately from browsing history
- Copying images out of Firefox save as PNG (to preserve transparency)
- Firefox is now HTTPS-First (falls back to HTTP if secure connection fails)
- Address autofill enabled for users in the United Kingdom.
- New Tab Page Weather widget roll out to Mexico, Brazil, Argentina & Chile
- Background tabs use efficiency cores on Apple Silicon
- Following Linux, macOS installer DMG now use LZMA compression
- New Tab story cards move ‘Save to Pocket’ button to overflow menu item
The usual developer and web platform changes—like support for the CookieStore API—bug fixes, translation updates, etc also feature in this update.
Check out the official change-log for more information on what this update has to offer.
Getting Firefox 136
Reading this post on Ubuntu? If so, you probably have Firefox installed and you’ll be upgraded to Firefox 136 in the background starting today (if the browser is running you’ll be notified to quit it to apply the update).
If, for reasons, you don’t have Firefox installed on Ubuntu and you want it, you’re spoiled for choice: there’s the official Snap package, official Flatpak, and official Firefox DEB from the Mozilla APT repo.
Linux Mint users will receive this update as a DEB-based update that can be installed through the Mint Update tool—may need to run and update check first, if update schedule has been customised.
You can also download distro-agnostic Linux binary on the Mozilla website—official binaries are now available for ARM64 Linux distros for the first time too—which you download, unpack, and run by double-clicking on the firefox file inside.
Users on macOS and Windows who already use Firefox will get this update automatically in the background from today, while those who don’t have it can download an installer for their system from the same download link as Linux users (see above).