Firefox 109 Released with Manifest V3 Extensions Support

Firefox 109 is now available to download, bringing the following new features.

The first Firefox release of 2023 arrives. Firefox 109 is now available to download via its official website and other distribution channels.

This monthly release comes after the prior Firefox 108 release, which was released in December.

Here’s a summary of the new features.

Firefox 109: Best new features

Manifest V3

The breakaway feature of this release is Firefox now officially supports Manifest V3 extensions. And it will be significant because Google recently delayed the launch of Manifest V3 support in the Chrome browser.

Manifest V3 protocol is a brainchild of Google to restrict the ad-blocking and privacy-preserving extensions functionalities to gain more control over Ads. If implemented, the ad-blocking extensions may not work correctly, as many other privacy-related add-ons.

Announced in 2018, Manifest V3 was supposed to launch on January 2023, but Google delayed it again without any planned rollout date.

However, Mozilla officially started supporting this from this version, i.e. Firefox 109 onwards, which might be a cushion for Google’s rollout plan. The current Manifest V2 shutdown is planned for March 2023 as of publishing this. It’s worth mentioning that Google does pay Mozilla a hefty amount every year to keep the default search engine as Google.

However, sooner or later, Manifest V3 will eventually land in all Chrome-based browsers.

So, in Firefox 109, you will get a new extension button on the top toolbar. From this button, you can enable and disable which extension can access data of which browsers. By the way, you can’t remove this button via any settings from GUI.

Other changes

In addition, Firefox Colorways is now discontinued from this release. Announced on Firefox 94, it gave users options to choose from 18 primary colours for the Firefox toolbar and other areas. Many might be missing this feature once it is gone. You might want to check out the addon Firefox color.

Other noteworthy features in this release include the native HTML date picker, now keyboard-driven, enabling the screen readers to read out the dates. Also, you can navigate the calendar grid using the common keyboard shortcuts.

Elsewhere, the Firefox spellchecker dictionary now supports the Spanish for es-ES and es-AR (Spain and Argentina).

If you are a web developer, Firefox 109 introduces scrollend event breakpoint to debug your web pages. Also, the system-color data type in CSS now supports values Mark, MarkText and ButtonBorder. The

The content-visibility CSS property now supports the value auto, which allows content to skip rendering if it is not relevant to the user

You can read more details in the official change log (see bottom of this page).

Download and update

For Linux distributions, if you used Firefox via your distribution’s official repository, then you should get this update within a couple of days from today.

However, you can also download the compressed version of this release from the below page. For other download options, do visit our Firefox download guide.

Download Firefox 109

Happy browsing!