Firefox 149.0 release binaries are now available with a wide assortment of improvements for this month’s update to the cross-platform Mozilla web browser solution.
Firefox 149 comes with jxl-rs as the Rust-based JPEG-XL image decoder to replace their prior C++ JPEG-XL decoder, faster PDF file handling, support for downloading images from PDFs via the context menu, better robustness of HTTP/3 upload performance, and Firefox on Linux now defaults to the XDG portal file picker where available. The XDG portal file picker will be used where available while still having fallback support for the GTK3 version. Using jxl-rust for the memory-safe JPEG-XL image decoder is the same approach used by Google Chrome since they restored their JPEG-XL support.
Firefox 149 also improves the look of error pages with updated visuals, various new developer API additions, and also a free built-in VPN is available with Firefox 149. The free VPN in Firefox 149 allows up to 50GB of data monthly transfers.
The many developer changes in Firefox 149 can be found via the developer.mozilla.org notes. Firefox 149 release binaries are available at ftp.mozilla.org.
