Mozilla has announced the availability of Firefox 71. The release isn’t very radical, we had that with Firefox 70 back in October, but there are some welcome refinements and UI refreshes of two less used features. With this release, Mozilla has carried on refining new additions such as Lockwise and Firefox Monitor while bringing picture-in-picture videos to Firefox for Windows.
Perhaps the biggest UI update in this update is the new about:config page which has been re-implemented in HTML. Mozilla has also applied a new refresh to the certificate viewer that offers more features and more detailed information. If you run a business and need a computer that the public can access, you can hide parts of the UI with the newly available kiosk mode, a feature that was first requested 18 years ago.
For those of you running Firefox on Windows, the new picture-in-picture video option is available. Simply select the blue icon from the right edge of a video to put it into a floating window. The window will stay visible as you carry on working in other tabs. The firm has stated that macOS and Linux users will be able to use this feature in Firefox 72 which is due for release in January 2020.
With regards to new privacy additions, Firefox now recognises sub-domains and returns autofill domain logins from Lockwise, integrated breach alerts from Firefox Monitor are now available for users with screen readers, notifications are shown when Firefox blocks cryptominers, and you can get a running tally of blocked trackers in the protection panel which is accessible by clicking the address bar shield. On the tracking front, Mozilla says that it has blocked more than 1 trillion trackers thanks to the Enhanced Tracking Protection feature which it enabled for everybody with Firefox 69.