Firefox 104 saw the light as the latest stable version of the Mozilla browser. As usual, we find some new features and some fixes that come to improve the app experience.

Probably the main advantages of Firefox 104 are laptop users, because the browser from this release “dulls” its own GUI when the app is minimized or hidden to improve performance and battery usage.

Since the advent of multithreading and especially Quantum, Firefox is an application that is completely comparable to Chromium in terms of resource consumption. Like it or not, it’s the price Mozilla had to pay for its browser to compete with the ubiquitous and all-powerful Chromium, the technology base of Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, and Brave, among others. User interface “throtting” is a small but probably valuable addition for laptop users.

The new version of the Mozilla browser, which continues to do more things related to power management, includes a an energy analysis tool in the Firefox profile that can be used to analyze the energy consumption of websites, although it only works on Windows 11 and Apple Silicon so far. On Linux, fixed an apparent browser freeze when tabbing between windows and a bug that caused a delay when typing in Google Docs.

Picture in Picture (PiP) is one of the most prominent features of Firefox, which in version 104 includes support for view subtitles on Disney+, the streaming content service of the company behind Mickey Mouse. Other new features include support for writing, drawing and signatures in the PDF document viewer and the ability to insert without formatting.

Firefox 104 is now available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android. In the first two, you can force the update by going to Main menu > Help > “About Firefox”, and on Android it arrived in the Play Store days ago. Linux has traditionally waited for distribution maintainers to package it, although more and more users rely on Snap and Flatpak compilations, both managed, at least in part, by Mozilla itself. Details of the launch were published in the corresponding notes.

We remember it Mozilla has recently been working to strengthen Firefox’s privacy through features such as URL cleaning and cookie protection. On the other hand, promoting its use is more important today than ever if you want to prevent Chromium from taking over the web, which, as we saw with Internet Explorer, could have disastrous consequences.