The report highlights that it’s a pretty limp patch by all accounts, without any standout fresh functions and just a handful of minor bug fixes spread out across components. Today, Mozilla dropped Firefox 156 to the Launch channel, which is basically all users in the general public.
The report highlights that (And don’t forget Firefox 150 turned it into a real PDF editor , too.). The built-in PDF reader debuts about 45 percent faster than before, which is great if Firefox is your PDF reader of choice.
As part of the ongoing story, for users who have “DNS over HTTPS” enabled—which you should for better browser privacy and security —this patch fixes a bug that caused some sites that don’t support HTTPS to fail to load.
The report highlights that the built-in VPN, which was introduced in Firefox 149 , is a good free option for hiding your IP address and location while browsing the web, although it isn’t as secure or capability-rich as some of the best VPN services . It also fixes another networking bug: unexplained loss of all network connectivity when the built-in VPN is enabled.
In a fresh development, firefox now has better memory and CPU usage when large JPEG files are shrunk down to fit a page, which should help with web browsing performance on weaker machines and devices.
As part of the ongoing story, the rest of the drop notes address other situational bugs, like subtitles sometimes not appearing in Picture-in-Picture mode as well as Firefox sometimes blocking an auto-hiding taskbar on Windows.
Industry observers note that that patch should add support for JPEG XL (JXL), a modern image format that offers the same quality as JPEG at a significantly smaller size. Although JPEG XL was launched in 2021, Safari is the only browser to support it yet. For a short period, Chrome also supported it, but that ended in 2022. In about two weeks, Firefox 157 will be dropped.