Mozilla's Firefox 145 is heeeeeere: Buffs up privacy, bloats AI

Firefox 145 is out, with more privacy, better profile handling, better image search for Google users... and, almost inevitably, more LLM bot integration.

Mozilla has released Firefox 145. The release notes in that link make an interesting contrast with the snazzy What's new page which users see on installing the update.

Setting aside Mozilla's branding exercises for one moment, we thought we'd start with the modest new features in the release notes. The top feature here is the ability to add and read comments in PDF files. In a previous life, the Reg FOSS desk was a technical writer, and this feature will be very welcome for people collaboratively writing and editing.

A more familiar example might be the Track Changes feature in Microsoft Word: as well as showing when someone else has added or removed text, this also lets co-workers add comments, which appear down one side of the document. PDF files can do this too, but you could be forgiven for not noticing, as it's an extra feature that many basic PDF viewers don't support. In his late 20-teens, this vulture spent hours a month on PDF comments, and at that time, KDE's Okular was the only Linux PDF viewer we could find that could handle them.

The release notes also highlight better protection against fingerprinting and pop-up summaries of tab groups' contents. The built-in password manager is now accessible from the sidebar, you can share links to just part of the text on web pages, and the automatic translation feature can mirror web content when translating between left-to-right scripts (like anything in the Roman, Cyrillic or Greek alphabets) and right-to-left languages (such as Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese). Readers of digital manga translated into Western scripts may be familiar with this.

On Windows, a new Firefox desktop launcher will automatically install the app if the launch icon is synched on to a machine which doesn't yet have Firefox. Meanwhile, as we warned last time, there's no 32-bit Linux version of Firefox 144.

Meanwhile the What's New page has some more marketing-oriented news. Firefox has a new mascot, new merch, and it's easier to set new-tab wallpaper. Tab groups handling has been refined.

Firefox has supported user profiles for many years, but profile management is getting improved. You can still get at the old system via the magic about:profiles URL, if you haven't got this yet. Google users can search inside images with Google Lens. This vulture does still use Google, but via the magic &udm=14 URL that we told you about in May. That means no Google Lens for us.

And, finally, the irrepressible rise of automated plagiarism bots continues to spread its slop everwhere, including the brains of Mozilla management. Firefox now integrates what Mozilla's blurb calls Perplexity's "AI-powered answer engine" into the address bar. Some Reg contributors like it, but most of our coverage thus far leans toward the negative. We went straight to Preferences | Search, found "Perplexity" in the list of search engines, and removed it. No restart needed. We concur with a paper from the journal Ethics and Information Technology last year: ChatGPT is Bullshit. ®