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Firefox 134 is out, offers some new designs

Firefox 134 is now available in the stable channel, along with two ESR updates, 115.19.0 and 128.6.0. The key changes include a revamped look of the new tab page, an improved address bar, and performance and search improvements.

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What’s new in Firefox 134

Firefox 134 About
Image credits: winaero.com

New tab page

Some users have been offered an updated design concept for the page that opens when creating a new tab.

Firefox 134 New Tab Page
Image credits: Mozilla

The new design features a search bar, a weather forecast widget, and a block of recommendations for visiting sites. The sites that the user most frequently visits and pins for quick access are displayed in a single row rather than in a grid. The number of columns with content dynamically adjusts to the width of the browser window, which optimizes the use of available screen space.

Currently, the new design concept is only available to users from the United States of America and Canada. To activate this feature in other countries, you need to make changes to the browser settings (about:config), by modifying the newtab value that contains the data "US, CA". Add your country code, say for Italia you must change it to "US, CA, IT".

Address bar improvements

In the updated browser interface, when the focus moves to an empty address bar, the drop-down menu offers not only a list of recommended and recently visited web pages, but also a history of recent search queries. This allows the user to quickly make adjustments to the query or repeat it in another search engine.

Firefox New Address Bar
Image credits: winaero.com

In addition, the drop-down menu now includes the buttons for performing additional actions, such as printing the current page or switching to another tab.

Hardware support

  • For the Linux platform: support for additional touchpad gestures has been implemented, such as a two-finger tap to pause idle scrolling.
  • For the Windows platform: support for hardware decoding of HEVC (H.265) video has been added.

Search improvements

Residents of Germany, Austria, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland have gained access to the Ecosia meta-search engine, which is actively involved in protecting the environment, directing a significant portion of its profits to planting trees.

Environmental friendliness

The company uses renewable energy sources to power its servers. Search results are generated by accessing the Bing and Google search engines.

Performance improvements

Improved the accuracy of determining the user activation state. Activation signals the beginning of the user's interaction with the page (mouse movement, button clicks, switching to the menu). After activation, some Web APIs become available, for example, up until now pop-up dialogs were blocked. The changes in the new release are aimed at reducing the number of false positives of pop-up dialog blocking and improving usability.

Security improvements

In addition to new features, Firefox 134 fixes 20 vulnerabilities. Eleven vulnerabilities are marked as dangerous, of which 10 are caused by memory issues such as buffer overflows and access to already released memory areas. These issues could potentially lead to the execution of malicious code when opening specially designed pages. Another dangerous vulnerability (CVE-2025-0244) is related to the ability to spoof the address bar in the Android version using an incorrect protocol scheme.

Download Firefox

To get the newest version of Firefox on Windows, navigate to the browser's menu and select the 'About Firefox' option.

Alternatively, you can download the installers here: https://releases.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/134.0/. Choose the browser compatible with your OS, language, and platform from there. The files are sorted into subdirectories by platform and UI language, and they include complete (offline) installer packages.

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.

The official release notes are here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/134.0/releasenotes/.

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

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