What's New with Firefox 142 (mozilla.org)

I really like those local AI features. It's tempting me yo move to vanilla Firefox over LibreWolf...

> Link Previews show a snapshot of a page before you open it, helping you decide what’s worth your time. Just long press any link to preview and reduce distractions.

On macOS there is a native affordance for this by using force click. It's kind of annoying that Firefox chose to not support this and instead made it click-and-hold only.

That link preview bothers me a bit from a privacy standpoint. Hovering over a link will now hit that website. Hmm.

I wonder how the link preview will work on mobile. In the past, click and hold on a partially obscured URL on mobile basically worked like "hover" on the desktop and revealed the whole link (useful to see if the link was malicious, or had click tracking, or just didn't go to the site you thought it did).

I hope there's still a way to do that feature. If nothing else, by disabling the preview which I doubt I would find as useful.

edit just retested on mobile. click and hold is basically the context menu. If you tap on the first item in the context menu (the link ended in …) you get the full link wrapped.

So, more correct to say that click and hold is the right click context menu on mobile, even though I mostly just used it for that display whole link feature. Perhaps they could put the preview as a sub item of the context menu.

Link Preview is a little weird, but also interesting, you can run a local AI model that summarizes the page for you, so its not using ChatGPT, or any of the cloud APIs.

If you turn off the ai part the preview just pulls in the title and the first chunk of text on the page. Actually still fairly useful for shortened links or ambiguous urls, etc

I have found the majority of these relay services utterly useless. A large number of sites are using some kind of email verification service/API that detect all these relay/trash domains (mailinator etc.) and you can never sign up unless you have a legit domain. I'd be astonished if mozmail.com wasn't already on this list.

I'm not saying I don't value the idea behind this, but at least with Apple they are using their primary domain as a relay meaning it's too risky to block all the legitimate addresses.

Lately, I’ve experienced memory leaks in Firefox that I’m too amateur to diagnose, that leads to Firefox eating 8gb of memory in some web renderer process. So when I excitedly check the changelog hoping for a summary of possible changes, I’m disappointed that there isn’t a verbose changelog for advanced users. I’m sure I could search bugzilla, but it makes me sad that the only “important” things are the headlining features.

Anyone else was under a naive impression that the preview would go through the Mozilla servers? something like DuckDuckGo has(had? haven't used it for a while)

I'm on FF 142.0.1 (64 bit) windows and i've no link preview.

I think it's a good news they're introducing some paid features for pro users

You can trigger the Preview functionality by holding the Shift key while hovering over a URL.

This feels much snappier - and therefore more useful.

Additional settings can be found and adjusted via about:config.

I'm genuinely perplexed why people find link previews useful. The page image is too small to really see, and it's not as if rapidly opening and closing a tab actually takes effort. It may be faster than the long click depending how comfortable you are with keyboard controls.

I have other questions as well -- does the link preview ignore your plugins? So if you loaded the web page, would uBlock Origin prevent tracking which is _not_ prevented when loading the preview? If you have a phishing test url with a unique identifier, do you flunk the test even if you don't click through?

Every new release of 2025 is full of AI features which end up being either useless and/or annoying. I always turn them off if I can. This is the most tiresome hypecycle in history.

Anecdotally but Firefox has become slower and slower in the past few years for me. I have no idea what is going on behind the scene but it's getting nearly unusable. Tried Edge yesterday and it was so much faster, but the amount of ads pushing is yikes.

Does Firefox still block clipboard history apps from accessing private windows with no way to turn it off? Haven't used Firefox since that change.

I wonder if it addressed something practical and meaningful...like implementing a spell check that at least covers all of the English language. Maybe then they can start working on the 5 year trek to also make the spellchecker somewhat competent.

Or maybe we'll just keep packing features, because everyone here knows, features are what save products! Not usability!

> For users in the United States, article recommendations on your New Tab page are now grouped into topic sections like Sports, Food, and Entertainment to make stories more organized and easier to scan. You can also follow topics you’re interested in and block ones you’d prefer not to see, giving you more control over what shows up when you open a new tab.

Ladybird cannot come fast enough…

Here's a feature request: Disallow any and all unsolicited attention-seeking pop-ups or notifications from the browser itself.

Nothing new with the security of the browser? I expect some security improvements knowing the severe security state of Firefox.

At least they're finally working on improving the browser UI.

This is a promising move in the right direction. Allowing users to pay for Relay Premium lets them take advantage of their reputation for privacy to make money. Let's hope they promote it and give it more than three months before dropping it.

Link previews reminds me of classic (XUL) Firefox extensions from a couple of decades ago that provided previews when the mouse was hovered over a link (with a short delay). "Cool Previews" was one of those extensions. I'm sure there must be WebExtensions that have the same feature with configurability in how they work.

This built in feature requires a click and hold though.

So... Nothing really useful or what users are asking for a long time...

And we then ask why people aren't using Firefox...

tab groups organized by domain or regex seems like a more deterministic and power user friendly feature compared to organizing it by an LLM