Back in 2004, the browser market was pretty much a one horse race. Microsoft had come to dominate with Internet Explorer after quashing Netscape Navigator some years before, and IE6 had some 95% of PC market share. But Firefox 1.0 was released to give the monopolist some competition, eventually reaching some 32% share of its own before Google’s Chrome (released in 2008) began to take over.
But Firefox has hung around, and has just released the 100th version of the open source browser. Here’s what’s new in Firefox 100:
Subtitles and Captions in Picture-in-Picture
Firefox released Picture-In-Picture in 2019 with version 71, and has continued to enhance the feature, making it available across Windows, Mac, and Linux, and adding support for multiple Picture-In-Pictures. Today, Firefox is adding subtitles and captions to Picture-In-Pictures, a request coming from Mozilla Connect, a feedback and ideas hub for Firefox.
Picture-In-Picture subtitles and captions will be initially be available for videos on YouTube, Prime Video, and Netflix, and websites that support the WebVTT format, including Twitter.
New mobile browser wallpapers
To celebrate version 100, Firefox is making two new mobile wallpapers, originally released for Android and iOS in the United States, globally. You can get the new wallpapers, Beach vibes and Twilight hills, by checking the wallpapers feature in your Settings.
Clutter-free tabs and history on Android and iOS
Firefox 100 is introducing a new simplified and clutter-free way to organize your tabs and history:
For clutter-free history, instead of an endless sea of URLs leaving you feeling overwhelmed, we’ve organized it for you in an intuitive way. One of the ways we’ve done this is by grouping history items by the original item, for example if you’re looking for shoes and you’ve looked at several models, you can find them grouped in one folder under your search term. Another way we’ve organized your history is removing duplicate sites thus reducing the visual clutter. Lastly, you can now search within your history. Keep in mind that we are doing this in a privacy preserving way so you can rest assured that your data isn’t being sent back to Mozilla.
Clutter-free tabs and history are available for Firefox on Android today, and will roll out on iOS later this week.
HTTPS-only mode on Firefox for Android
Firefox first introduced HTTPS-only mode in their companion privacy-first Firefox Focus app, and now their bringing it to Firefox for Android. The feature automatically converts urls to https:// whenever available, meaning you’ll get the most secure connections to websites you visit, regardless of whether you used an https url or not.
More features: first-run language switcher, and credit card autofill to more countries
Firefox 100 is making it easier to set your default language when you first set up the browser, allowing you to choose from over 100 languages if your browser default language and your device’s default language don’t match.
The new browser version will also bring credit card autofill to more countries; first introduced in North America, the feature is now coming to the UK, France, and Germany.
How to get Firefox
You can get Firefox on your desktop, on Android, or on iOS.
Are you a Firefox user? Let us know in the comments below.
