Firefox 130 lands with a yawn, but 131 beta teases a long-awaited feature

Firefox 130 is landing on users' machines, while version 131 enters beta — with a feature we've all been waiting for.

The latest version of Firefox is here, less than a month after its predecessor – which was chiefly notable because it got not one but two bug-fix releases. (And yes, we do know that Firefox 128 is already up to its third, but that's different. As we said in July, version 128 is an extended support release, so it has about another year ahead of it.)

Version 130 is not a hugely exciting release, in The Reg FOSS desk's humble opinion. It's the new beta that's a bit more interesting, but we'll get to that.

The new current version has two notable features. Firefox is getting smarter about handling discrete blocks of text within a web page, and a visible aspect is that 130 supports partial translations of web pages. Just over a year ago, Firefox's in-browser translation became available if you tweaked its settings. In version 118, translation was enabled by default.

The thing is that the real human world is messy, and it's quite common to encounter a web page that's mostly in one language, but contains bits that are in another. If you don't speak either of those languages, that's a problem. So now, after Firefox 130 translates a web page from one language to your preferred one, you can now highlight a block of text and translate just that bit to or from something else.

Under Settings, there's also a new Labs page, which lets you enable experimental features. This reminds us of the comparable feature in Gmail, which sadly disappeared about three years ago, taking selective quoting in email replies with it. For now, Firefox 130's experimental features are one we'll never use, and one we probably won't want. You can add a so-called AI Chatbot feature in a sidebar for all your automated plagiarism needs – and if you switch tabs away from one playing a video, the video can automatically shrink into a picture-in-picture mode and follow you.

There are some other, less visible changes, too. There's Curve25519 encryption support, which we'd never heard of, but if Daniel J Bernstein approves of it then it's probably a good thing. For us mere mortals, Firefox can now randomly generate and suggest secure passwords, which sounds great – so long as you use a password manager to remember them for you.

The cool new thing we've been waiting to see is in the beta of the forthcoming Firefox 131. This offers tab previews when you hover the pointer over a tab, and not mentioned in the release notes, it may be able to block cookie banners, which would be handy. The feature we liked best is the integrated vertical tabs support. For us, this worked well in testing. Like the default one in the new forked Zen browser, the sidebar defaults to being tiny and only showing page icons, but that's enough to make it very useful.

This is doable in current versions via a choice of extensions, but as we described back in 2022, you also have to mess around enabling user CSS customization, adding your own stylesheet and so on to make it look nice. Now, it's just there, a few clicks away.

It's good to see Mozilla making some slightly more significant changes to its flagship product. Firefox's market share is tiny these days, but then, so is that of Linux on the desktop – and yet, it's a very significant player all the same, especially via Chromebooks. Size, as they say, is no guarantee of strength. More power to the lizard's elbow.