Firefox 122 Released with Official deb Package and Enhancements

A round-up of the new features of Firefox 122, which brings a native deb installer and an array of improvements.

To enhance user experience and address various performance and compatibility issues, Mozilla has rolled out Firefox 122 with various new features, improvements, and developer-focused updates.

Let’s delve into the latest release’s key highlights that aim to make your browsing smoother and more feature-rich.

Firefox 122: What’s New

Search Suggestions Elevated

Firefox now takes your search experience up a notch by displaying images and descriptions for search suggestions when provided by the search engine. This addition aims to make your searches more visual and informative, helping you find what you need at a glance.

Passkeys in the iCloud Keychain

For macOS users, Firefox now supports creating and using passkeys stored in the iCloud Keychain. This seamless integration enhances password management, providing a convenient and secure way to store and access your passkeys on Apple devices.

Linux .deb Package:

Firefox now ships with a new official .deb package. That means all Ubuntu, Debian, and Linux Mint users can install Firefox without any third-party repositories. Detailed instructions on how to install are present on this page.

This provides a more streamlined installation process and better user compatibility on these popular Linux distributions. In addition, this is a key move from Mozilla, considering more Snap-coupling which are coming in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

Web Development Updates

Web developers using Firefox will appreciate the integration of MDN Web Docs article suggestions directly in the address bar through Firefox Suggest. This addition streamlines access to valuable web development-related information, making it easier for developers to stay informed and productive.

Improved Line Breaking

Firefox aligns its line-breaking rules with the Unicode Standard, improving compatibility and offering better support for East Asian and South East Asian languages. Additionally, Firefox now supports proper language-aware word selection when double-clicking on text for specific languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Burmese, Lao, Khmer, and Thai.

Enhanced Translations

The translations feature gets a boost in quality, ensuring more stable results when translating webpages. This update tackles issues where translated content would sometimes disappear or interactive elements could break. With improved translation stability, language barriers become less of an obstacle in your online exploration.

Developer Fixes and Web Platform Updates

Several developer-focused enhancements have been introduced, including support for the offset-position property, additions to CSS properties like offset-path, clip-path, and more. Firefox now supports animating the SVG viewBox attribute using SMIL by animations, providing developers with more creative freedom in web design.

Web developers gain valuable insights with the addition of the LargestContentfulPaint API, offering timing information about the largest image or text paint before user interaction. This information aids in optimizing web pages for a smoother user experience.

Firefox now supports the “hr” element in the “select” element, allowing websites to use separators within a select dropdown. The introduction of the showPicker method on select elements further enhances the dropdown behaviour via JavaScript.

Firefox continues its commitment to user privacy by implementing various improvements. Notable additions include recognizing the “webauthn” autocomplete token for passkey suggestions, enabling cacheAPI data storage in Private Browsing mode, tainting filters for user privacy protection, and activating ULPFEC by default to improve video quality on WebRTC services.

How to Get Firefox 122

To enjoy these fantastic updates, visit the official Mozilla website for a fresh installation or download the pre-compiled binaries using the below link. If you’re already using Firefox, watch for the update in your Linux distribution’s repositories – it should arrive in the next few days.

Note: The below link has a pre-compiled .deb package as well for the first time. So, you can use that and install it using “dpkg -i” or “gdebi” in your Debian-based distributions.

Download

Via release notes

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