Firefox 104 has seen the light as the latest stable version of Mozilla’s browser. As usual, we find some new features and certain corrections that come to improve the experience with the application.
Possibly the main beneficiaries of Firefox 104 are laptop users, since the browser, as of this release, will “throttle” its own GUI when the app is minimized or occluded for the purpose of improving performance and battery usage.
Since the arrival of multithreading and especially Quantum, Firefox is an application that is perfectly comparable to Chromium in terms of resource consumption. Like it or not, it is the price that Mozilla has had to pay so that its browser can compete against the omnipresent and omnipotent Chromium, the technological base of Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi and Brave, among others. The UI “throttling” is a small, but probably valuable addition for notebook users.
Continuing with more things related to energy management, the new version of Mozilla’s browser has included a energy analysis tool in Firefox Profile that can be used to analyze the energy consumption of websites, although for now it only works on Windows 11 and Apple Silicon. For Linux, an apparent browser freeze has been fixed when moving tabs between windows and a bug that introduced lag when writing on Google Docs.
Picture-in-Picture (PiP) is one of the most outstanding features of Firefox, which in version 104 has incorporated support for show subtitles on Disney+, the streaming content service of the corporation behind Mickey Mouse. Other novelties are the support for writing, drawing and signatures in the PDF document viewer and the possibility of being able to paste without formatting.
Firefox 104 is now available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android. In the first two, you can force the update by following the path Main Menu > Help > “About Firefox” and on Android it arrived in the Play Store days ago. In Linux, the traditional thing is to wait for distribution maintainers to package it, although more and more users are relying on Snap and Flatpak compilations, both maintained, at least in part, by Mozilla itself. The details of the launch have been published in the corresponding notes.
We remember that Mozilla has worked in recent times to strengthen the privacy of Firefox through features like URL cleaning and cookie protection. On the other hand, promoting its use is today more important than ever if you want to prevent Chromium from taking over the web, which could have, as we saw with Internet Explorer, catastrophic consequences.
