Mozilla released Firefox 115 last month, marking the end of the road for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1, as well as some older versions of macOS. Firefox 116 starts rolling out later today, with updates to the sidebar, Picture-in-Picture mode, and more.
The Firefox web browser has used side panels for years to display bookmarks, recent history, synchronized tabs, and information from installed extensions. However, accessing the sidebar is a bit difficult. It shows up if you use the keyboard shortcut for bookmarks (Ctrl+B on Windows/Linux, Command+B on Mac) or history (Ctrl+Shift+H/Command+Shift+H), and then you can switch between all the available sidebar options by clicking the panel title. You can customize the toolbar with a button to open the side panel, but it’s not there by default, and there’s no keyboard shortcut at all for opening synchronized tabs.
Mozilla is attempting to clean up the sidebar in Firefox 116. The menu for switching the sidebar is now keyboard-accessible, using Shift+Tab, arrow keys, or other accessibility features. There’s probably still more work needed to improve the sidebar, but at least it’s a bit more usable now.
Raspberry Pi fans will be excited to hear that Firefox 116 includes hardware accelerated H.264 video decoding on the Raspberry Pi 4. On previous versions, playing H.264 content (which many online videos use) often caused CPU usage to skyrocket, and larger videos could lag and stutter. OMG! Linux spotted the bug report that states Firefox 116 on ARM now supports the Video4Linux Memory-to-Memory (V4L2-M2M) API, which should fix playback issues for H.264 video on the Pi 4.
There are a few other helpful changes in this release. The popup Picture-in-Picture player now includes a volume slider, following other improvements added to PiP mode in Firefox 113. Upload performance has also been improved when using HTTP/2. Finally, Firefox now supports the Audio Output Devices API, which allows web apps to output sound to (permitted) devices without changing the computer’s default audio output.
How to Update Firefox
Firefox will automatically install the update on your computer, phone, or tablet when it’s available. To immediately check for and install any available updates, click the menu icon at the top-right of the browser toolbar and select “About Firefox.”
You can download Firefox from Mozilla’s official website, the Google Play Store, Apple App Store, and Microsoft Store.
Source: Mozilla (1, 2), OMG! Linux
