Firefox 144.0 is out! Perplexity AI Search & AES-256-CBC Encryption

Firefox 144.0, the October release of Mozilla’s web browser, is available to download today!

The new browser release continues improving the tab group feature support. It now supports dragging a tab into a collapsed tab group without automatically expanding it.

The profile management is now available to all users globally. You can now name profiles and customize them with avatars and color themes, then quickly switch between them while keeping bookmarks, tabs, and browsing history completely separate.

The picture-in-picture (aka pop-out video) now supports Shift + Click on the close button or use Shift + Esc shortcut key to exit (meaning merge back browser window) while keeping playback uninterrupted.

Firefox 144.0 now includes Perplexity AI search for desktop users, allowing to get AI-powered conversational answers directly from the address bar via the unified search button.

The AI search engine seems to be disabled by default, at least in my case, as I can’t find the option and the about:config page shows the “browser.urlbar.perplexity.hasBeeninSearchMode” key set to false.

Besides that, it added new “Search Image with Google Lens” option when you right-clicking on any image in browser. Which, allows to quickly find similar products, places, or objects, copy, translate, or search text from images. Though, you need to set Google as default search engine for being able to use the feature.

For security reason, the passwords stored in Firefox are now encrypted on disk using AES-256-CBC algorithm, while logins synced through Firefox Sync already use AES-256-GCM. The new encryption algorithm is much faster and secure than the older 3DES-CBC, which is deprecated.

Other changes in Firefox 144.0 include:

• New Azerbaijani, Bangla, and Icelandic translations.
• Only use or open window in current virtual desktop, when open link from another application in Windows.
• And various security fixes.

They are as well many changes for web developers:

• Support the Element.moveBefore API.
• Add support math-shift compact.
• Support PerformanceEventTiming.interactionId, allowing to group related input events.
• Support the command and commandfor attributes.
• Add support the View Transitions API Level 1.
• Disable dithering when linear-gradient, conic-gradient, and radial-gradient are rendered using hardware WebRender.
• Add support upsert proposal.
• Support the lock() and unlock() methods of ScreenOrientation interface on Windows tablets and Android devices.
• Support worker transfer for RTCDataChannel.
• Add support the resizeMode getUserMedia constraint, allowing to crop and downscale video captured from a camera.
• Add support the WebGPU GPUDevice.importExternalTexture API on Windows.
• WebCodecs on Windows now has a batch-encoding path for VideoEncoder.
• Rename Gecko-specific CSS2Properties to CSSStyleProperties.
• Jump to a CSS custom property’s definition from within the var() function in style rules.

Get Firefox 144.0

The official release note as well as the download link will be soon available in Firefox website via the link below:

While the source code, and installers for Linux, Windows, and macOS are available to download at this page.