Mozilla has released Firefox 142, rolling out several features aimed at improving both user experience and developer functionality — and yes, AI is involved too.
Last month, Firefox 141 added AI to the browser’s existing Tab Groups feature, although not without blowback from users who blamed it for degraded system performance. The same update added unit conversion in the URL bar, and reduced memory usage on Linux.
For a look at what’s new in this month’s update, read on.
Firefox 142: What’s New?
Topic-based new tab page stories (US only)
Firefox users in the United States will being to see recommended stories on the New Tab page grouped by topics, such as Sports, Food, and Entertainment. Topics make stories — and sponsored content — easier to scan.
Additionally, you can follow topics of interest, and block topics you don’t want to see. This gives you more control over the kind of content hijacking your eyeballs every time you open a new tab (which likely wasn’t to view recommend stories).
Firefox’s new tab page recommendations aren’t anywhere near as hysterical and ragebait-y as those surfaced on other browsers’ new tab pages, but having the means to curate content (albeit content selected by Mozilla) is welcome over what went before.
Link previews go stable
Firefox 142 sees its Link Previews feature graduate to stable builds, and longer requiring a keyboard shortcut to trigger. Right-click on a link and select Preview Link to see a thumbnail, brief description, and estimated reading time.
Previews can optionally include AI-generated key points. Enabling this downloads an on-device model to parse links. Bullet point summaries generated by the AI very slowly, often incorrect, banal, or lacking the point – clicking through and reading is faster.
Link Previews is available to users in the USA, Canada, the UK and Australia using the browser on a device with “more than 3 GB of available RAM”, though it’s not clear if that’s free RAM or just installed RAM.
Link Previews are part of a progressive rollout. You may not have access to feature after you update to Firefox 142.
Extensions can now use local LLMs
If you haven’t hit AI fatigue yet you’ll be thrilled to hear Firefox 142 supports the wllama API. This means web extension developers can now add local large language model (LLM) features to their add-ons using on-device models available from the transformer.js library.
Local AI inference can be slow, and does tend require ample resources to handle even basic tasks since it runs on CPU. Whether anything useful will come of this, or merely “AI sparkles” gimmicks and inefficient solutions looking for problems… TBD, I guess!
One tab visible in collapsed tab groups
Using tab groups? Firefox 142 lets you keep an active tab visible in a collapsed tab group, so you can “focus on just one tab in a group without the clutter. Your active tab stays in view, keeping things tidy even with the group collapsed,” they say.
To use focus tab, just be viewing the tab you want visible when collapsing the tab group, and the tab will remain on show so you can perform tab-related actions.
Tracking protections … get exceptions
This update also makes Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) more flexible. New exception lists aim to prevent website features getting broken by aggressive tracker blocking. Mozilla splits exceptions into baseline (core functionality) and convenience (minor features).
Open Settings > Privacy, scroll to ETP, and look for the new checkboxes under the Strict and Custom tiers, with the notice: “Allow Firefox to automatically apply exceptions required to avoid major website breakage”.
Rounding out the release
The Firefox 142 release notes lists a few other changes.
Backend adjustments mean you’ll see fewer duplicate results when searching browsing history in the address bar. In older builds, it wasn’t uncommon to see multiple suggestions of the same site returned.
On Windows, clicking a persistent notification when Firefox is closed re-opens the browser with the page the notification was for, rather than before, when it’d open the the browser with a new tab.
To remove web extensions from the sidebar right-click on an extension icon and — I bet you’re ahead of me — select the Remove from Sidebar option to do it.
Scroll speed is less sensitive in the bookmark adding dialog; if at least one tab is pinned you can quickly pin other tabs by dragging them into the pinned area.
For developers, the Network panel always show Netmonitor Request Headers/Cookies/Params, even if they haven’t yet finished loaded, while the Debugger adds an option to control when the debugger overlay appears.
Firefox 142 supports the Prioritized Task Scheduling API, which allows developers to assign and manage task priorities, and the URLPattern API, which allows developers to match and parse URLs using standardised pattern syntax.
Round this release out is the usual flurry of security fixes.
Download Firefox 142
Ubuntu users will receive the Firefox 142 update automatically, in the background, from Tuesday August 19 onwards.
Linux Mint users can update to the latest version through the Mint Update tool, as Firefox is provided as a .deb package.
If you use Ubuntu but you don’t have Firefox installed, and want it, you have ample choices: the official Snap or Flatpak build; the Mozilla APT repo to install the Firefox DEB; and the option to download a distro-agnostic Linux binary from the Mozilla website directly.