Firefox 140 is out now for the stable channel. After a period in testing, several features from the beta released in May made their way to the stable channel, bringing some much-needed quality-of-life improvements. The main highlights are a new Tab Unload feature and the ability to add a custom search engine.
To use the tab unload feature, you simply right-click on a single tab or a selection of tabs and hit "Unload Tab". This kicks the tab out of your computer's memory, freeing up system resources without you having to close it for good. If you are someone who keeps a lot of tabs open, this could definitely help if your machine starts to chug.
The other big thing is support for a custom search engine. If you want to use something other than the pre-packaged options, you can now add it by right-clicking a search field on a site or by manually adding it in the settings. If you are a fan of vertical tabs, you can now drag a divider to resize the pinned tabs section.
On the flip side, some things are getting the boot. The Pocket integration, including its toolbar icon and New Tab presence, has been removed completely. This follows the service's shutdown announcement and cleans up the interface a bit, for better or worse, depending on how much you used it.
As you may know, 140 is also the new base for the next Extended Support Release (ESR). This version brings a massive number of updates that non-ESR users have had for a while.
ESR is for organizations that prefer stability over new features. The new ESR brings in a massive number of features that standard users have had for a while, like vertical tabs, tab grouping, a redesigned sidebar, and better privacy protections like bounce tracking protection.
Other notable improvements in the main Firefox 140 release include:
- The full-page translation tool now works smarter, prioritizing the text in your current view to speed things up.
- Address autofill support has been rolled out to users in Italy, Poland, and Austria.
- Firefox builds in Arabic now come with a built-in dictionary for the spellchecker.
- For web developers, there is new platform support for a variety of APIs, including the CookieStore API and Service Workers in Private Browsing Mode.
- You can now remove the dedicated extensions button from the main toolbar.
If you're interested in this release, you can grab a build for your operating system from our Software Stories page. Release notes for Firefox 140 and the ESR version are also available.
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