Firefox 126 It’s now available as a new stable version of Mozilla’s web browser, which has been fighting for years not to fall into irrelevance. On this occasion, we won’t find any major news, and the most useful thing went to Apple, but there are still interesting things that deserve to be highlighted.

Since we said that Apple took the most useful part, we will start there because AV1 video playback can now be hardware accelerated on Macs with M3 processors. AV1 shows great promise in video formats, especially for a quality-to-size ratio that is better than its competitors, and which is gradually making its way to platforms such as YouTube. Playing it through the GPU should improve efficiency compared to CPU usage, resulting in more autonomy provided by the battery.

Another important novelty that has reached at least all desktop builds of Firefox (Windows, Linux and macOS) is a new option “Copy without web browsing” which allows you to remove nested parameters from the copied URL. This support is able to block more than 300 tracking parameters from copied links, including those belonging to major shopping sites. This is a small addition that improves privacy, an aspect that Mozilla, without really being the number one, does better than its competitors in the mainstream web browser scene, with Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge leading the way.

Another highlight of Mozilla Firefox 126 is zstd support for web content compression, which comes as an alternative to the existing broti and gzip. zstd excels at providing higher compression levels with the same CPU usage, which can also be used as lower CPU usage for the same compression level. Web content compression is widely used by sites like Facebook.

As the last catchy novelty is Add telemetry and generate search counts by category, more specifically in twenty types of high-level content, which includes “sports”, “business” and “travel”, among others. Collected data will not be linked to specific users and will be collected using OHTTP to remove IP addresses and other potentially identifying metadata. This is in addition to no profiling being done or data being shared with third parties.

As those who follow the history of Mozilla’s web browser will know, it has long included a native translator that provides the benefit of more privacy, but at the cost of providing worse translations. Firefox now supports Catalan translations.

Details about Mozilla Firefox 126 are available in the release notes, while the application can be obtained for Windows, macOS and Linux in the corresponding download section. If you have it installed, it can be forced to update via Main Menu > Help > “About Firefox”, although for Linux it’s logical to wait for it to arrive via the distribution’s repositories, Snap and/or Flathub (Flatpak). On Android, it is provided through the Google Play Store.