Firefox 126 launches with new privacy features, added telemetry, and better compression

Mozilla has launched Firefox 126, the newest version of its popular web browser. The update introduces several new features such as the Copy Without Site Tracking option which can strip parameters from nested URLs. It also supports blocking over 300 tracking parameters from copied links, enhancing user privacy on major shopping websites.

The latest version of Firefox now includes support for zstd (zstandard compression) content-encoding, a substitute for brotli and gzip compression for web content. This feature provides higher compression levels with the same CPU usage, or alternatively, it can lower server CPU usage while keeping the same compression level.

Firefox 126 also adds the Catalan language to its translation options and enables AV1 hardware decode acceleration on macOS for M3 Macs. It includes telemetry to generate an aggregate count of searches by category to aid in search feature development without linking data to specific users. The data collection excludes IP addresses as potentially identifying metadata to prevent profiling or data sharing with third parties.

The update also allows users to disable or enable the developer tools' split console feature for increased flexibility, and brings other enhancements and bug fixes to the desktop and mobile versions of the web brower.