Firefox 129 Released with Tab Hover Preview & Reader View Tweaks
Mozilla Firefox 129 is now available download, and comes with a couple of features customisation fans are sure to enjoy.
It’s been 4 weeks since Firefox 128 dished out a unified cookie, cache n’ data clearing experience, the ability to translate portions of text on a web page, and introduced a new privacy-respecting ‘alternative to user tracking’ API.
Does Firefox 129 improve on all of that?
Of course it does — for more details, scroll on!
Mozilla Firefox 129: What’s Changed?
Revamped Reader View
Avid users of Firefox’s built-in Reader View (which strips a web page of all unnecessary clutter so you can focus on the core content, i.e., text and images) will find revamped Reader View settings UI, new options, and a separate theme panel.
The browser already offered a decent set of character and layout options but the interface to tweak them was a little awkward/unconventional, UI-wise (see image above).
Firefox 129 overhauls the UI, giving you a better overview of what each option does, introduces sliders with pips and labels, adds a monospace font style, font weight options, separate character and word spacing settings, and more.
Reader View themes get their own dedicated section, with new Contrast and Grey options. If you want to roll your own style, you can; set your own text, background, and link colours for Firefox Reader View from the new Theme > Custom tab.
Tab Hover Previews
When hovering over a background tab a thumbnail preview is now shown. Mozilla says this ‘makes it easier to locate the desired tab without needing to switch tabs’.
Not seeing any hover previews after upgrading to Firefox 129? Don’t fret; Mozilla says it’s turning this feature on remotely as part of a progressive rollout.
Other changes
Do you use the Sidebar feature in Firefox? If so, you’ll be pleased to know the sidebar can be resized up to 75 percent of the main window width in Firefox 129. In earlier builds sidebars had a narrower maximum resize width past, as the screenshot above shows.
When you install an add-on in Firefox 129 you’ll find an option to grant permission for the extension to run in private windows is now part of the initial install dialog, where previously the option was only shown in a second dialog after the add-on had been installed.
Beyond that, Firefox 129 makes HTTPS the default protocol in the address bar on non-local sites (something I already thought it did, if I’m honest). The browser will fall back to HTTP if an address can’t be loaded over HTTPS.
HTTPS DNS records also now use the underlying OS DNS resolver in Windows 11, Linux, and Android. Prior builds needed DNS over HTTPS to be enabled manually.
Cherry-picked Linux-specific changes and fixes include:
- PipeWire camera support for ARGB/ABGR formats
- Wacom Intuos 3 6×8 now correctly detected as pen, not mouse
- Ability to use mouse and stylus pen input devices simultaneously
- Fix for GPU issue causing crash when viewing Google Maps on Arch Linuxs
- Firefox Flatpak now opens directories using XDG Portals by default
For more details on the makeup of this release hit up the official release notes, and for developer-specific changes check out the developer release notes for Firefox 129.
In all, another welcome update to the world’s most-loved open-source web browser (someone hand Chromium a tissue, I’m out…).
New Tab wallpapers?
I downloaded the stable Firefox 129 release to write this post and found that Firefox’s new tab wallpapers feature was working out-of-the-box for me. This is why screenshots in this article show it in action! But this feature is not mentioned in the official release notes.
Mozilla is able to enable/disable some features (like the new tab hover mentioned above) remotely so it may be that this feature is being accidentally enabled remotely, or was intended to be included by later pulled for reasons unknown.
Despite this, you can manually enable this (and other upcoming features in the works, like the new tab weather widget) yourself, should you want to try it out. I imagine new tab wallpapers will be part of Firefox 130, due for release in September.
Getting Mozilla Firefox 129
Mozilla Firefox is free, open-source software, available for Windows, macOS, and Linux (with mobile versions available on Android and iOS).
This update will roll out to Ubuntu users (of the snap) in the next day or so, automatically, in the background – so keep an eye out for that.
If you’re using the Mozilla Team PPA, the official Mozilla APT repo, the official Firefox Flatpak from Flathub you’ll get this update shortly too.
You can, as always, download Firefox from the Mozilla website, if you don’t already have it. The website offers a binary Linux build: download, extract, enter the folder, and double-click on the ‘firefox’ executable to launch it.