Firefox 125 is out with improved AV1 video streaming, PDF highlighting, and more

Firefox 125.0.1 is now available in the Release channel. The browser's latest feature update delivers improved video streaming thanks to the AV1 codec for Encrypted Media Extension support, the ability to highlight PDF documents, security improvements for potentially risky links, and more. Here are the details.

What is new in Firefox 125.0.1?

New features

• Firefox now supports the AV1 codec for Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), enabling higher-quality playback from video streaming providers.
• The Firefox PDF viewer now supports text highlighting.

  

• Firefox View now displays pinned tabs in the Open tabs section. Tab indicators have also been added to Open tabs, so users can do things like see which tabs are playing media and quickly mute or unmute across windows. Indicators were also added for bookmarks, tabs with notifications, and more!

  

• Firefox now prompts users in the US and Canada to save their addresses upon submitting an address form, allowing Firefox to autofill stored address information in the future.

• Firefox now more proactively blocks downloads from URLs that are considered to be potentially untrustworthy.

• The URL Paste Suggestion feature provides a convenient way for users to quickly visit URLs copied to the clipboard in the address bar of Firefox. When the clipboard contains a URL and the URL bar is focused, an autocomplete result appears automatically. Activating the clipboard suggestion will navigate the user to the URL with 1 click.

• Users of tab-specific Container add-ons can now search in the Address Bar for tabs that are open in different containers. Special thanks to volunteer contributor atararx for kicking off the work on this feature!

• Firefox now provides an option to enable Web Proxy Auto-Discovery (WPAD) while configured to use system proxy settings.

Changes

• In a group of radio buttons where no option is selected, the tab key now only reaches the first option rather than cycling through all available options. The arrow keys navigate between options as they do when there is a selected option. This makes keyboard navigation more efficient and consistent.

Developer

• Following several requests, we have reintroduced the option to disable the Pause Debugger Overlay (devtools.debugger.features.overlay). This overlay appears over the page content when the debugger pauses JavaScript execution. In certain scenarios, the overlay can be intrusive, making it challenging to interact with the page, for instance, evaluating shades of color underneath.
• We've added a new drop-down menu button at the bottom of the source view in the Debugger panel, specifically designed for Source Map related actions. Users can now easily disable or enable Source Maps support, open the Source Map file in a new tab, switch between the original source and the generated bundle, toggle the "open original source by default" option, and view the Source Map status such as errors, loading status, etc.

Web Platform

• Firefox now supports the popover global attribute used for designating an element as a popover element. The element won't be rendered until it is made visible, after which it will appear on top of other page content.

• WebAssembly multi-memory is now enabled by default. Wasm multi-memory allows wasm modules to use and import multiple independent linear memories. This enables more efficient interoperability between modules and provides better polyfills for upcoming wasm standards, such as the component model.

• Added support for Unicode Text Segmentation to JavaScript.

• Added support for contextlost and contextrestored events on HTMLCanvasElement and OffscreenCanvas to allow user code to recover from context loss with hardware accelerated 2d canvas.

• Firefox now supports the navigator.clipboard.readText() web API. A paste context menu will appear for the user to confirm when attempting to read clipboard data not provided by the same-origin page.

• Added support for the content-box and stroke-box keywords of the transform-box CSS property.

• The align-content property now works in block layout, allowing block direction alignment without needing a flex or grid container.

• Support for SVGAElement.text was removed in favor of the more widely-implemented SVGAElement.textContent method.

To download Firefox 125, head to Menu > Help > About Firefox. Alternatively, go to the official website and download the installer. Full release notes are available here.