Firefox 144.0 is out with new profile management, tab group improvements, and security fixes

Mozilla releases Firefox 144.0 and several Firefox ESR versions today. The new releases introduce new features, improve other features, and fix some security issues as well. As such, most users of the browser may want to upgrade their version of Firefox to the latest as soon as possible.

The big new feature of the release is the long-awaited profile management update. Profiles help users distinguish between different tasks or personas in Firefox, similarly to how Chromium-based browsers offer the functionality. Firefox did support it for ages, but this update should improve the accessibility of the feature.

Firefox 144: the major changes and new features

Profile Management update

Mozilla has launched improvements to Firefox's built-in profile management functionality. New profiles can now be created easily and you can switch between them when you start Firefox.

The existing functionality remains at the same time. Launch about:profiles to see a list of all profiles and their folders on the system. Here you may also create new profiles, set a new default profile or launch a profile separately.

Veteran users will be pleased to hear that the parameters that launch different profiles in Firefox remain as is as well.

Tab Group improvements

Mozilla continues its work on Firefox's relatively new tab grouping feature. The two main changes are a) that the active tab of a tab group stays visible when you collapse a group and b) that you can now drag another tab onto a collapsed group without it expanding automatically.

Other changes and fixes

• Firefox users may now see a "Search Image with Google Lens" option when they right-click on images in the browser. It offers a quick shortcut to searching Google for information about that particular image.
• Firefox on the desktop includes Perplexity now as a new AI-driven search engine.
• Firefox Translator adds support for the three languages Azerbaijani, Bangla, and Icelandic.
• More than a dozen languages of Firefox Translator have improved translation quality (Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Czech, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, Spanish, Ukrainian)
• When opening a link on Windows from another app, Firefox will only use its window on the current desktop to open it, or open a new window if needed.

Developer changes

• Support for the deprecated MathML STIXGeneral font has now been removed.
• CSS features for view transitions in single-page applications (SPAs) are now supported.
• The Map.prototype.getOrInsert(), Map.prototype.getOrInsertComputed(), WeakMap.prototype.getOrInsert(), and WeakMap.prototype.getOrInsertComputed() instance methods are now supported.
• The lock() and unlock() methods of the ScreenOrientation interface are now supported for Android and for Windows tablets.
• The View Transition API is now supported for SPAs (single-page applications).
• The CSSStyleProperties interface of the CSS Object Model (CSSOM) is now implemented.
• The moveBefore() method is now supported on the Element, DocumentFragment and Document interfaces.
• Cross-origin <iframe>s now require either user interaction (sticky activation) or explicit permission to redirect the top-level page using window.top.location.
• RTCDataChannel instances are now transferrable objects, and hence can be passed to workers.
• The closing event and the onclosing() event handler are now supported on the RTCDataChannel interface.
• The getUserMedia() and getDisplayMedia() methods of the MediaDevices interface now support the resizeMode constraint.

Enterprise changes

• GenerativeAI policy has been added. This allows administrators to control features that use Generative AI.
• VisualSearchEnabled policy is now available to disable Google Lens.
• Preferences policy supports security.webauthn.always_allow_direct_attestation now.
• Fixed print options showing up in Firefox when printing was disabled.
• Fixed a bug in Windows Kerberos authentication with extended protection that did not work with a SHA384 SSL certificate.