Mozilla has delivered the latest version of its web browser, alleviating a long-standing irritation for Linux users… but making its “AI” integration even more pervasive.
Firefox 141 is the latest normal release of the Moz browser, and along with it come point-releases for the last two ESR versions, as well. Last month we reported on Firefox 140. That’s now up to Firefox 140.1.0 and it’s joined by Firefox 128.13.0 too.
The changes in this release are quite minor, but we think that quite a few Firefox users on Linux will find them welcome. Firefox’s four-weekly release schedule means that new versions come along frequently – last month’s version 140 was already up to version 140.0.4. This means that most Linux distros make keeping Firefox current a priority. Ubuntu and many of its relatives ship Firefox as a Snap package, and the snapd system daemon installs updates in the background when the system is idle. You may be totally unaware of it, up ’til now you got a message telling you that you had to restart Firefox.
But no longer! Now, even if the program is updated in the background, you can keep using it until you have a moment to close the app and relaunch it.
Background updates
This isn’t only an issue for snap users. Other distros can refresh and update their packages in the background as well, including Debian’s native .deb packages using the unattended-upgrades service, which is installed and running by default on both Debian and Ubuntu.
Although there are multiple articles out there on how to disable this, it’s not a bad idea: silently installing security fixes before the user even knows they need them makes life a little bit safer. On the PiHole the Reg FOSS desk installed a few months back, we configured unattended-upgrades to install all available upgrades, and reboot automatically if needed at 3AM or so. We check about once a month and it’s always bang up-to-date. For us, that’s ideal: it’s a dedicated box that does nothing else.
Our suggestion is: don’t turn it off, turn it up to the max instead.
Alongside the ability to keep on working after a background upgrade, Linux users should also see it using less memory. (We’ve not seen this ourselves yet, as most of our Linux boxes run the alternative Waterfox fork, and that’s still based on version 128, with a version-140 based edition in beta.)
These are welcome changes, but it’s not all about Linux. As usual the new version also comes in macOS and Windows editions as well. Two other changes get higher billing in the release notes, possibly because they’re applicable to users across all the main platforms.
The tab groups feature that reappeared in Firefox 137, released on April Fool’s Day, now has AI enhanced group naming. Yes, an LLM bot will kick in and try to suggest an appropriate name for groups of tabs. Will Mozilla’s management ever learn to read the room? The announcement says that this is on-device, so at least it won’t spin up a rackful of servers in a datacenter somewhere to full speed just for this.
Also, if you use a vertical tab bar, as all sensible right-thinking folks do, then the little area of controls at the bottom of the tab bar is now resizable. This change we thoroughly approve of. We’ve gone round all our machines removing and disabling our vertical-tab-bar addons and switching to the native implementation, and while we’re at it, disable the AI chat bot integration. The extra controls are handy but being able to shrink them is welcome.
The combined seach-and-URL bar can now do in-browser units conversion. This genuinely sounds very handy; Google used to do this, but it has stopped working for us since its recent enshittification – although that might be our own de-enshittification tweaks.) More countries get address-autocompletion, and nine more languages have been added to Firefox’s on-device machine translation.
Windows users now get WebGPU support, meaning that Javascript apps can directly make calls to the computer’s 3D accelerator. This will follow on macOS and Linux in time. (Which is amusing, since it was Apple that invented it.) On Windows 11, Firefox will now pick up the OS’s font settings for some controls.
It’s almost all good – all right, all good unless, like this vulture, you are passionately opposed to anything to do with “generative AI.” Roll on the update, and leave Chrome to the custom vehicle enthusiasts. ®