Firefox 106 Release Arrives with PDF Annotation, Wayland Gestures, + More

Firefox 106 release brings bumper updates. Here’s what’s new.

Firefox 106: What’s New

Firefox follows a monthly release cycle, and the new Firefox 106 release brings exciting updates for all of its platforms, including Linux.

Firstly, if you are browsing any PDF file over the web using Firefox, now you can annotate it. The preview tab includes two new tools. Text and Draw.

Each of them brings additional settings such as colour, thickness and opacity.

Now, you can easily annotate any PDF over the web. Most importantly, you can save the PDF with those edits after annotation!

Secondly, the two-finger gesture to navigate the history now works in Linux under the Wayland display server. It was enabled earlier for X.Org and now works for all. You can move forward or go back by swiping two fingers on your laptop’s touchpad.

Also, the Tab pickup feature (for all operating systems) arrives, which enables you to save and pick up tabs the next time you open the browser. This is a neat feature for everyone who wants to keep many tabs open across days! It also benefits if you are using a Firefox web browser with multiple devices.

When you start up Firefox 106, you can now set the preferred colour of your toolbar using Colorways. This version introduces 18 new Colorways to paint your browser as per your choice of colours.

Remember, both the Tab pickup and Colorways work better if you log in with your Firefox account.

Furthermore, Firefox 106 adds more features and updates to the WebRTC protocol via libwebrtc v103. This version of libwebrtc brings better screen sharing for Linux Wayland users, better performance in macOS and so on.

In addition, Windows folks can now pin Firefox private windows in the taskbar. Elsewhere, setting the default PDF viewer as Firefox changes Window’s default app settings for PDF viewer.

macOS users get a cool feature that allows them to extract text from any image from the browser. More importantly, this feature is compatible with the built-in macOS “VoiceOver” feature and aligned with a similar feature in iOS 16.

Finally, a total of six high and moderate CVE security fixes make it an important release.