Firefox 155: Faster Page Loads and the Smart Window AI Panel

Mozilla has posted ready-made binary builds of Firefox 155 on ftp.mozilla.org, getting ahead of the formal announcement scheduled for Tuesday. By Phoronix's assessment, this release is noticeably more packed with new features than the several before it.

Faster connections

The main change concerns page loading speed. Firefox 155 employs the Happy Eyeballs version 3 mechanism: the browser tries several ways of connecting to a site simultaneously and picks the one that responds first. Whereas previously only the IPv4 and IPv6 options were checked in parallel, it now uses modern DNS records to determine which protocols the server supports, and it also tries HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 at the same time — to find the fastest connection.

In addition, support for QUIC version 2 has been added for HTTP/3 connections. The browser makes use of it whenever the server selects this option during a compatible version negotiation.

Smart Window and fixes

Firefox 155 introduces the Smart Window — an optional window for browsing web pages with artificial-intelligence features. With the user's permission, it gains access to open tabs and browsing history. At launch the feature is available only in the United States, Canada and France.

Linux users will benefit from another fix: it resolves a problem that prevented the system from entering sleep mode after a long browser session.

For developers

The release also brings a host of changes for web developers. Among them are support for the Compact Import Section and Wide Arithmetic (128-bit arithmetic instructions) in WebAssembly, the font-width property as the standard name for font-stretch, improved WebRTC compatibility, and support for the CSS progress() function.

Source: Phoronix