With Firefox 146 released, which is exciting for delivering fractional scaling on Wayland, Firefox 147 Beta is now available and it’s also quite exciting to Linux users for another reason.
Firefox 147 Beta is exciting in finally shipping XDG Base Directory specification support for the Linux build! As covered last month, Mozilla is finally supporting the XDG Base Directory specification in Firefox. To date Firefox has just positioned all files under ~/.mozilla rather than the likes of ~/.config and ~/.local/share while moving forward Firefox will respect those common XDG Base Directory specified locations in the user’s home directory. This has been a feature request for Firefox on Linux going back two decades.
Firefox 147 Beta also brings WebGPU support to all macOS configurations, zero-copy video hardware decoding is now enabled for AMD GPUs, support for the Safe Browsing v5 protocol, automatic Picture-in-Picture player window if a playing video is ever backgrounded, and support for IETF RFC 9842 Compression Dictionaries.
More details on the changes with Firefox 147 Beta via the release notes. Firefox 147.0 stable will be out in January.
