Firefox 156 includes faster PDF handling, DNS-over-HTTPS fixes, and a patch for VPN-related connectivity loss.
Summary created by Smart Answers AI
In summary:
- PCWorld reports that Mozilla Firefox 156 delivers a notable 45 percent speed improvement when opening PDFs, making the browser more efficient for everyday users.
- The update also brings better CPU and memory handling for large JPEG files, benefiting those on lower-powered hardware.
- Additional fixes address VPN connectivity stability and DNS over HTTPS issues, ensuring smoother and more reliable browsing overall.
Today, Mozilla released Firefox 156 to the Release channel, which is basically all users in the general public. It’s a pretty limp update by all accounts, without any standout new features and just a handful of minor bug fixes spread out across components.
The built-in PDF reader launches about 45 percent faster than before, which is great if Firefox is your PDF reader of choice. (And don’t forget Firefox 150 turned it into a real PDF editor, too.)
For users who have “DNS over HTTPS” enabled—which you should for better browser privacy and security—this update fixes a bug that caused some sites that don’t support HTTPS to fail to load.
It also fixes another networking bug: unexplained loss of all network connectivity when the built-in VPN is enabled. The built-in VPN, which was introduced in Firefox 149, is a good free option for hiding your IP address and location while browsing the web, although it isn’t as secure or feature-rich as some of the best VPN services.
Firefox now has better memory and CPU usage when large JPEG files are shrunk down to fit a page, which should help with web browsing performance on weaker machines and hardware.
The rest of the release notes address other situational bugs, like subtitles sometimes not appearing in Picture-in-Picture mode as well as Firefox sometimes blocking an auto-hiding taskbar on Windows.
In about two weeks, Firefox 157 will be released. That update should add support for JPEG XL (JXL), a modern image format that offers the same quality as JPEG at a significantly smaller size. Although JPEG XL was launched in 2021, Safari is the only browser to support it yet. For a short period, Chrome also supported it, but that ended in 2022.
This article originally appeared on our sister publication PC för Alla and was translated and localized from Swedish.