Mozilla released Firefox 159.0 a moment ago. The new stable version of the open source browser introduces just a few new features, fixes bugs and also security issues.
Mozilla highlights two new features in the official release notes. The first adds the /watch command to Smart Window, the optional AI feature of the Firefox browser. This enables watching webpages for changes. The second change enables the native macOS share picker on devices running the operating system.
Other than that, Mozilla lists mostly fixes for issues in the release notes. Notable is a fix for excessive memory use in Firefox for Linux on devices with AMD graphics when “viewing map or place results on sites such as ChatGPT”.
Furthermore, the issue that Firefox failed to load certain sites due to “falling back to HTTP/2 when the site rejected an HTTP/3 request” has been fixed as well.
Lastly, there is also a fix for rapid memory usage “when sites such as the Zoom web app were left open in a minimized window”.
The fixed security issues have an aggregate rating of high, the second highest after critical. Plenty of fixes this time, but no mentioning of exploits in the wild. Still, I recommend upgrading as soon as possible. Updates for the supported Firefox ESR releases fix security issues as well.
The two-week development cycle reduces the number of new major features in browsers such as Firefox or Google Chrome further. It is not a major problem, as the benefits of shipping new versions seem to outweigh this for the developers.
However, users who liked to browse new releases to see what is new will likely be disappointed more often.