Here’s what we’re working on in Firefox

[Jon]

At Mozilla, we work hard to make Firefox the best browser for you. That’s why we're always focused on building a browser that empowers you to choose your own path, that gives you the freedom to explore without worry or compromises. We’re excited to share more about the updates and improvements we have in store for you over the next year.

Bringing You the Features You’ve Been Asking For

We've been listening to your feedback, and we're prioritizing the features you want most.

• Productivity boosters like
• Tab Grouping, Vertical Tabs, and our handy Sidebar will help you stay organized no matter how many tabs you have open -- whether it’s 7 or 7,500. 
• Plus, our new Profile Management system will help keep your school, work, and personal browsing separate but easily accessible. 
• Customizable new tab wallpapers that will let you choose from a diverse range of photography, colors, and abstract images that suits you most. 
• Intuitive privacy settings that deliver all the power of our world-class anti-tracking technologies in a simplified, easy-to-understand way.
• More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker.

Continuous work on Speed, Performance, and Compatibility

Speed is everything when you’re online, so we're continuing to work hard to make Firefox as fast and efficient as possible. You can expect even faster, smoother browsing on Firefox, thanks to quicker page loads and startup times – all while saving more of your phone’s battery life. We’ve already improved responsiveness by 20 percent as measured by Speedometer 3, a collaboration we’ve spearheaded with other leading tech companies. And in that collaborative spirit, we’re also working with the Interop project to make it easy for people to build sites that work great across all browsers. We value your support in our efforts to improve cross-browser compatibility which is why we’ve added new features to easily report when websites aren’t working quite right; this feedback is critical as we look to address even small functionality issues that affect your day-to-day online experience.

Making the Most of Your Time Online -- without Sacrifice

Ensuring your privacy is core to everything we do at Firefox. Unlike other companies, who ask you to exchange your data in order to do even basic, everyday things online -- you don’t have to give up your personal information to get a faster, more efficient browser experience with Firefox. Reading a news story in a different language or signing a form for school or work shouldn't require you to give up your privacy. So, we've worked hard to make things like translation and PDF editing in Firefox happen locally on your device, so you don’t have to ship off your personal data to a server farm for a company to use it how they see fit -- to keep tabs on you, sell your information to the highest bidder, or train their AI. With Firefox, you have a lot of choice -- but you don’t have to choose between utility and privacy. Your data is secure, and most importantly, just yours.

We are approaching the use of AI in Firefox -- which many, many of you have been asking about -- in the same way. We’re focused on giving you AI features that solve tangible problems, respect your privacy, and give you real choice.

We’re looking at how we can use local, on-device AI models -- i.e., more private -- to enhance your browsing experience further. One feature we’re starting with next quarter is AI-generated alt-text for images inserted into PDFs, which makes it more accessible to visually impaired users and people with learning disabilities. The alt text is then processed on your device and saved locally instead of cloud services, ensuring that enhancements like these are done with your privacy in mind.

Join Us on This Journey

Our progress is driven by a vibrant community of users and developers like you. We encourage you to contribute to our open-source projects and to engage with us on here on Mozilla Connect or Discourse, and don't miss our upcoming AMA on Reddit, which we’ll announce soon. Your participation is crucial in shaping what Firefox becomes next.

[Jon]

As mentioned above, a lot of the work has been prioritized because of your feedback here on Connect—so keep on sharing those great ideas and insights 🙌

Here are a few of the top ideas related to this post:

Native Tab Grouping / More Customizable Tab bar 

Vertical tabs 

shortcut for different profiles 

Wallpaper in new tab 

[D0m1n1c]

So glad to see that you boost the development of Firefox to make it more useful and modern. I still use Firefox every day, even if Brave is my default browser. My favorite feature on desktop is Multi containers. It's just an essential for work and the main reason why Firefox is always there.

What is missing for me and most important to makes Firefox as default:

1. The design on desktop. Have you seen the look of the fork Floorp ?? I think it is what Firefox should looks like on desktop. I created a userChrome.css that mimics the visual of Floorp. No horizontal tabs bar, but a vertical one with Sidebery extension. Added some rounded corners for the content page with a nice dark theme and my Firefox is like I wanted since a long time (like Arc Browser and Floorp).

2. Native vertical tabs on desktop. Discovered this layout with Arc Browser and can't go back to horizontal tabs bar now.

3. Please : makes context menus looks like the left click menus!

4. On mobile : tabs grouping like chromium browser. If you keeps Collections on mobile, can you add them to sync feature to have same collections on desktop? I like tabs grouping, but I also like the Collections on Firefox.

So, it seems Firefox has less than 3% on the browsers market. We don't care, please don't care! We still needs Firefox in our live for our privacy and have a real alternative to chromium.

[Agentvirtuel]

Hello

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@D0m1n1c wrote:

So, it seems Firefox has less than 3% on the browsers market.

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If i change the User-Agent, does it count in the statistics?
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/fully-support-web-usb-and-web-serial/m-p/48928/highlight/...

[Jon]

Thank you! Really appreciate this feedback and all the great ideas.

[BelFox]

Great news! Thanks for sharing, Jon.

To the development team: use the power of the Mozilla community to help you test and iron out bugs in early versions of tab grouping or vertical tabs. I can imagine these are complex features to implement. Don't wait too long to gather feedback!

Updates on the progress through Firefox Nightly News would be welcomed as well. Thanks 🙂

[Nich]

That's great.
But when will it be possible to try tab grouping, at least in nightly?
And will it be possible to set a custom sparrow on a new tab?
Please don't forget to also do
Portable version of the browser
Built-in dark theme for websites
Pwa support
Workspaces
Built-in vpn

[osbyrne]

built-in vpn not necessary, exists at the app level or at the browser extension level
PWA support: pwa's are not official standard yet 😞
built-in dark-theme: dark reader (and other) extensions work very well already

too much built-in makes firefox bloated, less easy to update (users can change/make extensions, but only Firefox devs can update built-in features)

[D0m1n1c]

Official portable app is good idea. For now you have PortableApps that maintains a portable version of Firefox.

[Kuroichi_Neko]

I'll be honest, but addition of AI is not a news I'm happy to hear about personally, even if it privacy focused and runs exclusively on a local machine. As I do have concern about ethics of training material being used to train AI models upon, as well how good it is in general. At this point, i expect to have a setting toggle to completely disable that feature in the browser if user desires not to have that feature enabled

[VonGoofy]

You don't have to used it. You also can use local LLM's for full privacy. If you download larch version of Firefox you can see it for yourself. It is completely configurable if you want to use it and what you want to use. Mozilla did a good job there, better than others.

[Matt1]

My natural intelligence and the speed at which it works is just fine. Or so I thought. I runaway from Copilot in one application, it popsup in another. Not sure we'll be able to avoid it. It is a feature that many people will probably want when selecting a platform, thus the creating an appeal for new users. However, I just hope Firefox considers a true 1/0 switch for those not in need of current and future ai assistance endeavors.

[IngrownMink4]

Thank you for sharing this!

I wish the best to the Firefox developers who work intensively to make this browser a real alternative to products made by large corporations of the surveillance capitalism.

Keep it up! 🫶🦊🔥

[nayz]

Great to hear it's been worked on.

However, why are these not being prioritised this year? Seems a bit odd to announce it a year prior for such simple most-requested features.

[mewtwo]

"Over the next year" means that they are coming over the span of the year following the announcement — that means *this* year.

[Elio]

Great to hear this. Can’t wait to test these new features as soon as they will be available. 

[Earshot0419]

These are really great

Please bring page translation for Android !

[Jon]

Good news, that's being worked on right now! Feel free to follow this thread for updates: Page Translator for Firefox Android 

[zerkshop]

I'm looking forward to switching over from Vivaldi, which I'm using to manage vertical tabs despite the bugs and wayland/chromium limitations (especially lack of gpu acceleration). I've been using firefox on the side and polishing my user.js so I'm ready to go

[Yuniac]

Thank you for the good news. We will await those new features.

[DavidRegev]

Is there somewhere one could track the tab-grouping work? I couldn’t find anything recent in Bugzilla.

I’d very much like to help with this project. I have concrete designs for making Firefox tab-management significantly better than any other browser.

My qualifications:

• The posts I wrote for Mozilla Labs in 2011 about how to solve tab proliferation.
• My 2018 redesign of Firefox’s original Tab Groups, for both desktop and mobile. It bears a remarkable similarity to Chrome’s tab-grouping design from a couple of years later.
• My master’s thesis in UX: Flow, a Web browser that automatically organizes all your pages.

The world needs Firefox, and Firefox needs to solve tab management, which no other browser has done properly. I’d love to help make that happen!

[ikpjr]

"tab-management significantly better than any other browser" ... "which no other browser has done properly".

Surely there are close enough, partial solutions, features from other browsers or addons that can be an inspiration for what tab management can be or is already.

One of your suggested designs is based on Firefox's Panorama ( earlier retired Firefox tab grouping native feature) .

Have you looked at Vivaldi's tab stacks and workspaces and Arc's spaces and folders ( and "profiles" ) ?

UI doesn't necessarily have to be similar on different devices or form factors, as a significantly smaller set of features on smaller form factors and different useful workflows exist - there's so much features and UI that can be packed into tiny devices apps/browsers before they become excessively UI bloated and underperforming. In my opinion, workflow usability, ease of reach and speed and intuitive coherence enabled by careful/smart placement of UI elements; space and information compactness, ease of reach ( and visibility ) are the key factors that count most.

Tab groups don't need to have nesting or thumbnails.

Tab stacks and workspaces and their equivalents on other browsers or addons provide that kind of two dimensional task and project workflow, and these dimensions are sufficient, no more needed.

Workspaces exist to organize same topic/context tasks via tab stacks within. Then one could have tags for easier selection, sorting and organization of workspaces. I have detailed this elsewhere here on Connect, including its usefulness and features.

On mobile Firefox there are collections, a feature for which sync, if it was an existing feature on Desktop, could enable sharing of "tasks" between devices.

Maybe a careful analysis of existing features, including those present on other browsers can lead to insights on UX workflows and reduced introduction of new features, that could be already be served or complemented with existing features or addons.

[DavidRegev]

The ideal solution involves two behaviors:

• Automatic grouping of pages based on whether a page was opened from scratch or opened from another page.
• Using one interface to show all your pages instead of two interfaces (Back/Forward history + tab bar).

At the moment, no browser does either of these things, except for Horse. Firefox can be turned into something similar using Tree Style Tab and Open Link in New Tab.

My Panorama-based design was meant as more of an transitional interface on the way to the ideal one. I think I was initially inspired by Opera’s tab-grouping interface, though I had forgotten about it by the time I made those mockups.

I have several other designs that I would love to try in Firefox!

[Jon]

Thanks y'all - this is a really good discussion within a discussion!

[Maverick74]

Groups within groups!!! ❤️

That would be gold to keep me organized!!! ❤️

[KERR]

Excellent! Personally I could use integrated AI as it could replace having to open a new tab and perform a web search, or having to open a chatGPT tab and ask it a question - which I use a lot. But that could easily be done in a sidebar or popout.

[kauhat]

Are there any plans for reimplementing PWA support on desktop? Since it was removed I used two browsers, Firefox for general browsing, and something Chromium based to launch my apps. It was a great feature that I miss every day.

[onequest]

Definitely this, and improved PWA support for Android cuz it's there but missing some of the best features Chrome has. Like how it packages them up on the fly as this article mentions. This removes the small browser icon in the bottom corner of the installed PWA and is more native for Android.

[filipefreire]

Thank you for all the work! I noticed some performance issues compared to other browsers, so am glad performance is being tackled! It doesn't happen on all websites, but on some it is definitely noticeable.

An example would be https://tailwindcss.com

[driveseedsi]

Thank you for sharing the updates. We're looking forward to seeing the new features in Firefox!

[dunxen]

Brilliant! Thank you. I might have time to start contributing to Firefox again and would love to pitch in on Tab Grouping. I've been using Simple Tab Groups and it's core to my workflow. I've always been hoping that Firefox would bring (back) tab grouping with seamless synchronisation. It's the number one thing I've wanted!

Super excited for this!

[LazyBoy]

Could really do with a casting feature

[Jon]

Thanks for the feedback! If you're interested, there's another specific idea thread for casting support — feel free to check it out and add any more insights. Here's a link to the thread: Support Casting 

[mcswell]

You could let me get rid of icons on the toolbar that I don't like.  Some can be removed by customizing the toolbar, but some cannot: the extensions icon (the one that looks inexplicably like a puzzle piece), the hamburger menu (I use and prefer the real menu).  And the icons I can't get rid of in the URL field: the trackers icon (looks like a shield), the reader view icon (I think it's supposed to look like a page), and the bookmark icon (looks like a star).  If I want to use any of these capabilities, I'll get to them from the real menu.

[Agentvirtuel]

Hello

Manage your extensions using the extensions button in the toolbar
Can I remove the extensions button from the toolbar or customize its location?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/extensions-button#w_can-i-remove-the-extensions-button-from-the...

If you'd like to try https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/hide-the-unified-extensions-button-when-empty/idc-p/52417/highl... userChrome.css

About bookmark icon (looks like a star).
https://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=3114663
Try

#star-button-box {display:none!important;}

You can add a code to another code

https://www.userchrome.org

About the reader view icon .
Configuration Editor for Firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-config-editor-firefox
Search reader.parse-on-load.enabled

[mcswell]

Thank you for your help!

Some comments: the first link says "It is not possible to remove the extensions button from the toolbar. This is by design.  The extensions button is now the primary user interface..."  But what if I prefer the *secondary* user interface, namely Tools | Add-ons and Themes | Extensions?  (And besides, I don't currently have any extensions.)

So following your second link, I changed toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets in about:config to 'true', then created a 'chrome' folder in my default profile, and then created a file 'userChrome.css' there, giving it the two lines

    #unified-extensions-button {display:none!important;}
    #star-button-box {display:none!important;}

All that to do what to me seems like it should be the default, or at least settable from the Customize-toolbar tool.  (As afirefoxuser remarks at https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/hide-the-unified-extensions-button-when-empty/idc-p/52417/highl....)

[mcswell]

Also in that userChrome.css file:

    #PanelUI-menu-button {display: none;}

to get rid of the hamburger menu icon.

[Agentvirtuel]

Hello

I remember, a long time ago, userChrome.css wasn't useful
Illustration https://www.youtube.com/embed/gJfigr-uKO8

Firefox advanced customization and configuration options
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-advanced-customization-and-configuration

https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS
Open source is cool https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1447480

Other https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/lost-toolbar-data/m-p/57484#M20182 in case, if one day

[dcaravana]

@JonWith every new Firefox release, one thing that constantly bugs me is how poor the release notes are (sorry!) compared to the sheer number of tickets closed with that release, usually thousand of them.

I have complained some time ago to no avail https://twitter.com/dcaravana/status/1511356454145507328 .

I understand you have to keep it simple, but understating the amount of hard work that goes into each Firefox release does not seems too smart either, unfair to say the least.

You need to find a balance.

Consider it a "feature" of the new Firefox maybe?

[matthiew]

Please, please, please do tab grouping in an automatic tree structure a la Tree Style Tabs or Sidebery 🙏

Every other browser makes tab grouping a manual process. It would be a huge win if you have automatic tab grouping!