Mozilla releases Firefox 103 with improved performance on high-refresh rate monitors

The Firefox logo on a black, yellow and pink background

Mozilla has released Firefox 103. It’s jam-packed with new features, but doesn’t bring ground-breaking interface changes. Some highlights from the release notes include improved performance on monitors with refresh rates of 120 Hz or more, and highlighted required fields on PDF forms. Picture-in-picture subtitles have also been expanded to support more services. The release notes are as follows.

New

Improved responsiveness on macOS during periods of high CPU load by switching to a modern lock API.

Do you always forget something? Required fields are now highlighted in PDF forms.

Improved performance on high-refresh rate monitors (120Hz+).

Enjoying Picture-in-Picture subtitles feature? It just got better: you can now change subtitles font size directly from the PiP window. Additionally, PiP subtitles are now available at Funimation, Dailymotion, Tubi, Hotstar, and SonyLIV.

Buttons in the Tabs toolbar can now be reached with Tab, Shift+Tab, and Arrow keys. View this article for additional details.

Windows' "Make text bigger" accessibility setting now affects all the UI and content pages, rather than only applying to system font sizes.

Rejoice! You can now conveniently access Firefox, which will now be pinned to the Windows taskbar during installation on Windows 10 and 11. (This will also allow for Firefox to be launched quicker after installing.)

Fixed

Non-breaking spaces are now preserved—preventing automatic line breaks—when copying text from a form control.

Fixed WebGL performance issues on NVIDIA binary drivers via DMA-Buf on Linux.

Fixed an issue in which Firefox startup could be significantly slowed down by the processing of Web content local storage. This had the greatest impact on users with platter hard drives and significant local storage.

Various security fixes.

Changed

Removed a configuration option to allow SHA-1 signatures in certificates: SHA-1 signatures in certificates—long since determined to no longer be secure enough—are now not supported.

If you are on Windows or macOS, Firefox should update itself automatically. On Linux, Snap versions of Firefox should update automatically, but in most cases, you’ll need to run your update manager and download available updates. On Windows, you can download the update manually by pressing the menu button, then going to Help > About Firefox. It will then download available updates and ask you to restart Firefox. You can install a fresh copy of Firefox, too.