Firefox 106 Promises PDF Annotation Features, Wayland Screen Sharing Improvements

Firefox 106

With the Firefox 105 release out the door, Mozilla has promoted the upcoming major release, Firefox 106, to the beta channel for public testing to allow us to get an early taste of the new features and improvements.

Firefox 106 won’t be a massive update to the open-source and cross-platform web browser, but it will bring a few interesting changes for those who deal a lot with PDF documents, such as annotation capabilities in the built-in PDF viewer to let you write text, draw, or add signatures to PDF files.

This feature was implemented in previous Firefox releases, but it wasn’t enabled by default, which means that you had to manually enable it from the about:config settings by setting the pdfjs.annotationEditorMode variable from -1 to 0. With the Firefox 106 release, the PDF annotation capabilities will be enabled by default.

On top of that, the upcoming Firefox 106 release promises major improvements to the WebRTC capabilities, which will be based on the libwebrtc v103 library. This improves Windows and Wayland screen sharing, improves RTP performance and reliability, offers richer statistics, and lowers CPU usage and increases frame rates on macOS during WebRTC screen capture.

Another thing I noticed is a brand-new welcome screen for those trying Firefox for the first time, helping them set up the open-source web browser how they like by setting it as the default browser, importing items from an old installation or another browser, choosing a default color scheme, and installing Firefox on a mobile device.

During the alpha (nightly) stage of development, the Firefox 106 release offered the ability to cache all accessibility information from all documents in the Firefox main process in an attempt to improve the performance of screen readers and other applications that use accessibility APIs.

Mozilla plans to launch the Firefox 106 web browser on October 18th, 2022. Until then, if you want to test drive the new features and improvements, you can download the latest beta release from the official website. However, keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, so don’t use it for any production work.

Last updated 2 years ago

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