Firefox 147 brings Apple Silicon WebGPU support, improved video playback & PiP, and more

Mozilla has released Firefox 147, rolling out several major improvements to its popular open source web browser. With this version, WebGPU is now enabled for devices with Apple Silicon processors across supported macOS versions, expanding advanced graphics capabilities for these users. Additionally, Firefox 147 upgrades video playback performance on AMD graphics hardware by enabling zero-copy playback for hardware-decoded video, bringing these systems on par with Intel and NVIDIA GPUs.

Following these enhancements, Firefox now supports the Safe Browsing V5 protocol and is transitioning from the previous V4 approach to the local list mode in V5. Users who have enhanced tracking protection set to strict will see local network access restrictions enabled by default, requiring explicit permission for public websites to access local resources. On Linux platforms, Firefox has adopted the Freedesktop.org XDG Base Directory Specification, improving compatibility with widely used directory structures.

Turning to user-facing changes, Picture-in-Picture windows can now be set to open automatically when a backgrounded tab plays a video. For web developers, Firefox 147 adds support for the Navigation API and enables ES modules within service workers, increasing compatibility for modern web applications. The update also includes Unicode ICU 78 with support for Unicode 17 and new locales, alongside various additional enhancements and bug fixes.