Firefox 126 released with privacy and performance improvements

Firefox 126 is now available to users of the stable version of the browser. It finally brings the ability to copy links without site tracking parameters to the stable branch. Also, it improves performance, supports zstd compression, and adds hardware acceleration for AV1 on Macs with M3.

What's new in Firefox 126

• The "Copy Link Without Site Tracking" option  can now remove parameters from nested URLs. The option has been improved with support for blocking over 300 tracking parameters from copied links, including those from major shopping websites. The option is now available for the URL box too, and resides in its context menu.
• Added support for encoding content using the Zstandard (zstd) compression algorithm, in addition to the previously supported gzip, brotli and deflate algorithms. When sending requests, Firefox now sets the "Content-encoding" HTTP header to "gzip, deflate, br, zstd". Facebook users will benefit from this change.
• Added experimental support for selection translation . Previously only translation of an entire page was supported by the integrated translator. The new option appears when you right-click on a selected block of text.
• Firefox now collects extra telemetry from search queries of different categories. The categories cover 20 general content types, such as sports, business and travel. Mozilla says the information collected is necessary to develop new search capabilities. Data is saved without identification of users. To remove information about the user's IP address, OHTTP (Oblivious-HTTP) technology is used, which provides redirection of encrypted HTTP messages through additional intermediate nodes, so that the end server receives the request not from the user's IP, but from the IP of the transit node.
• The ability to paste-and-go to the link from the clipboard, added to Firefox 125, has been temporarily disabled. Performance issues are cited as the reason for the outage.
• Builds for macOS on Mac computers with an M3 CPU include hardware acceleration for AV1 video decoding.
• Introduced a simpler and more unified dialog for clearing user data.

Download Firefox 126

On Windows, you can update to the latest version of Firefox by going to the About Firefox section of the browser's menu.

Linux users should use the OS' package manager to get the latest version available for the distro. E.g. in Ubuntu/Mint with the official mozillateam PPA connected, you can run the apt update && apt install firefox command in a root terminal.

Alternatively, you can download the installers here: https://releases.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/126.0/.  There, pick the browser that matches your operating system, language and platform. Files in there are organized into subfolders by a platform, UI language, and include full (offline) installers.

The official release notes are here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/126.0/releasenotes/.