Firefox 126: Telemetry, privacy feature, and security fixes

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Mozilla plans to release Firefox 126.0 Stable later today. The new version of Firefox is a smaller release, as it makes just a few changes. Noteworthy are improvements to the browser's copy without site tracking feature, support for AV2 hardware decode acceleration on M3 Macs, and new search Telemetry.

Tip: To check the installed Firefox version, select Menu > Help > About Firefox on desktop systems.

Mozilla updates all development editions and Firefox ESR at the same time. Here are the new versions:

• Firefox 115.11 ESR
  
• Firefox 127 Beta and Dev
  
• Firefox 128 Nightly
  
• Firefox 126 for Android
  

Executive Summary

• Firefox 126 addresses security issues in the browser.
  
• Support for zstandard compression content encoding, which should improve performance on sites such as Facebook.
  
• New Telemetry to aggregate searches based on "20 high-level content types" such as sports or business.
  
• Mozilla pulled the URL Paste feature introduced in Firefox 125 because of performance issues.
  

Firefox 126.0 download and updateUpdates are installed automatically by default. The new Firefox 126 update will therefore be installed automatically on most systems. Firefox users may speed up the installation by opening Firefox Menu > Help > Firefox, but only after the official release later today.

Here are the official download locations:

• Firefox Stable download
  
• Firefox Beta download
  
• Nightly download
  
• Firefox ESR download
  
• Firefox for Android on Google Play
  

Firefox 126.0 changes

Copy (Link) Without Site Tracking



Copy Without Site Tracking and Copy Link Without Site Tracking enable users to copy URLs without tracking parameters. This feature has been available for a while. The update introduces support for nested URLs and extends support, so that over 300 additional tracking parameters are now stripped when copying links using this feature in Firefox.

New Search Telemetry

Mozilla Firefox creates aggregate counts of broad category searches to "broadly inform search feature development". The 'categories are based on 20 high-level content types, such as "sports", "business", and "travel"'.

Mozilla notes that the data is not associated with individual users and that it is collected using OHTTP to remove IP addresses. Furthermore, profiling will not be performed and data won't be shared with third-parties.

Tip: Firefox users who do not want this can se browser.search.serpEventTelemetryCategorization.enabled to False on about:config.
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