Firefox 156 Arrives with a Faster PDF Viewer and a Lighter Memory Footprint
The update brings a notable speed boost to the browser's built-in PDF viewer along with memory and CPU savings when viewing large images.
Mozilla rolled out Firefox 156 to the stable channel, bringing a notable speed boost to the browser's built-in PDF viewer along with memory and CPU savings when viewing large images.
What's New
The headline change in this release is a built-in PDF viewer that starts up to 45% faster, making it quicker to open PDF attachments and documents directly in the browser without reaching for a separate reader. Firefox 156 also improves memory and CPU usage when displaying large JPEG images that get scaled down to fit a page — good news for anyone who keeps a lot of tabs open on image-heavy sites.
On Windows, ARM64 devices can now use hardware H264 decoding for WebRTC video calls instead of falling back to software decoding, which should mean smoother video calls on ARM-based laptops. Mozilla also fixed a bug where Firefox could block an auto-hiding Windows taskbar from showing, and patched an issue where the browser's built-in VPN could knock out network connectivity entirely for some users.
Other fixes in this release: dragging an image in the rich-text editor no longer replaces it with a stray line of text, high-sample-rate FLAC audio inside MP4 files now plays correctly on sites like Bilibili, subtitles show up properly in Picture-in-Picture mode even when turned on after the window opens, and bookmarks no longer jump out of their folder when dragged together in the sidebar. Firefox 156 also ships several security fixes, detailed in Mozilla's official security advisory.
As of this release, Firefox no longer supports Windows 8.1 and earlier, or macOS 10.14 and earlier, those users are pointed to the Extended Support Release (ESR) build instead.
Official release notes | Download Firefox for Windows | Firefox on UpdateStar | Download via UpdateStar
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