The Firefox 142.0 release binaries are now available ahead of the official release announcement due out on Tuesday. Firefox 142 isn’t bringing many notable changes but one is likely to cause some contention around Firefox Extensions.
Firefox 142 isn’t particularly exciting for this August web browser update but does improve the drag-and-drop support for blob images, better scrolling speed in the bookmarks dialog, and some other refinements. For web developers Firefox 142 brings the Prioritized Task Scheduling API for greater control over task priorities. There is also the URLPattern API as a means of matching and parsing URLs in a standardized pattern syntax.
What may cause some frustration by users tired of hearing about “AI” is opening up Firefox Extensions to using local Large Language Models (LLMS). With Firefox 142 the door is opened for Extensions to leverage LLMs:
“Firefox now supports the wllama API for extensions, enabling developers to integrate local language model (LLM) capabilities directly into their add-ons.”
The wllama project provides WebAssembly bindings for Llama.cpp for on-browser LLM inferencing.
For those wondering about wllama API use for Firefox Extensions/add-ons can learn more via the bug tracker with Enable wllama for extensions.
Firefox 142.0 binaries are available from ftp.mozilla.org. More details on the developer changes with Firefox 142.0 via developer.mozilla.org.
