Eighteen (18) years after the release of Firefox 1.0 (in 2004), the 100th version of the popular open source web browser reached Philippine shores Tuesday evening.
Global non-profit Mozilla originally conceived Firefox to provide a robust, user-friendly, and trustworthy web experience. Over the years, the web browser is well lauded for helping netizens avoid pop-ups, shielding web users with increased online fraud protection, making tabbed browsing more efficient, plus giving people the ability to customize their web experiences with add-ons.
As an open source project, Firefox is backed by a community of past and current users who helped shape the product into what it has become today.
New Features in Firefox 100
Introduced in 2019, Picture-in-Picture allows you to watch a video contained in a separate and small window from within your browser, making it still viewable when you switch tabs or use other applications on your computer. In the latest version of Firefox, Picture-in-Picture now supports captions/subtitles displayed on YouTube, Prime Video, Netflix videos, and websites that use WebVTT formats like Twitter and coursera.org. In addition, video overlay is now enabled for Windows machines running Intel GPUs — reducing power usage during video playback.
Hardware-accelerated AV1 video decoding is now enabled on Windows with supported GPUs (Intel Gen 11+, AMD RDNA 2 Excluding Navi 24, GeForce 30). For Mac users, HRD video is now supported giving users (with HDR-compatible screens) a more enjoyable experience with higher-fidelity video content.
Twitch users will notice the performance improvement, particularly with the volume slider, thanks to Firefox’s refined fairness between painting and handling other events.
In terms of accessibility and usability, with the 100th edition of Firefox, spell checking is now available in multiple languages. In addition, scrollbars on Linux and Windows 11 won’t take space by default. Support is now added for credit card autofill and capture for users in the United Kingdom.
With privacy always at the forefront of any Mozilla project, Firefox now ignores less restricted referrer policies. This includes unsafe-url, no-referrer-when-downgrade, and origin-when-cross-origin for cross-site subresource or iframe requests to prevent privacy leaks from the referrer.