Mozilla's Firefox 145 is heeeeeere: Buffs up privacy, bloats AI
- Reference: 1762948509
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/11/12/firefox_145_arrives/
- Source link:
Mozilla has released [1]Firefox 145 . The release notes in that link make an interesting contrast with the snazzy [2]What's new page which users see on installing the update.
Setting aside Mozilla's branding exercises for one moment, we thought we'd start with the modest new features in the release notes. The top feature here is the ability to add and read [3]comments in PDF files . In a previous life, the Reg FOSS desk was a technical writer, and this feature will be very welcome for people collaboratively writing and editing.
[4]
Firefox 145 has better privacy, profiles and PDF proofing – but also Perplexity
A more familiar example might be the Track Changes feature in Microsoft Word: as well as showing when someone else has added or removed text, this also [5]lets co-workers add comments , which appear down one side of the document. PDF files can do this too, but you could be forgiven for not noticing, as it's an extra feature that many basic PDF viewers don't support. In his late 20-teens, this vulture spent hours a month on PDF comments, and at that time, KDE's Okular was the only Linux PDF viewer we could find that could handle them.
The release notes also highlight [6]better protection against fingerprinting and pop-up summaries of tab groups' contents. The built-in password manager is now accessible from the sidebar, you can share links to just part of the text on web pages, and the automatic translation feature can mirror web content when translating between left-to-right scripts (like anything in the Roman, Cyrillic or Greek alphabets) and right-to-left languages (such as Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese). Readers of digital manga translated into Western scripts may be familiar with this.
[7]
On Windows, a new [8]Firefox desktop launcher will automatically install the app if the launch icon is synched on to a machine which doesn't yet have Firefox. Meanwhile, as we [9]warned last time , there's [10]no 32-bit Linux version of Firefox 144 .
[11]
[12]
Meanwhile the What's New page has some more marketing-oriented news. Firefox has a [13]new mascot , new merch, and it's easier to set new-tab wallpaper. [14]Tab groups handling has been refined.
[15]Who's watching the watchers? This Mozilla fellow, and her Surveillance Watch map
[16]Amazon complains that Perplexity's agentic shopping bot is a terrible customer
[17]This security hole can crash billions of Chromium browsers, and Google hasn't patched it yet
[18]AI browsers face a security flaw as inevitable as death and taxes
[19]Mozilla is recruiting beta testers for a free, baked-in Firefox VPN
Firefox has supported user profiles for many years, but [20]profile management is getting improved . You can still get at the old system via the magic about:profiles URL, if you haven't got this yet. Google users can [21]search inside images with Google Lens. This vulture does still use Google, but via the magic [22]&udm=14 URL that we [23]told you about in May . That means no Google Lens for us.
And, finally, the irrepressible rise of automated plagiarism bots continues to spread its slop everwhere, including the brains of Mozilla management. Firefox now integrates what [24]Mozilla's blurb calls Perplexity's "AI-powered answer engine" into the address bar. Some Reg contributors like it, but most of [25]our coverage thus far leans toward the negative. We went straight to Preferences | Search , found "Perplexity" in the list of search engines, and removed it. No restart needed. We concur with a paper from the journal Ethics and Information Technology last year: [26]ChatGPT is Bullshit . ®
Updated to add at 1700 UTC, November 12
When [27]Firefox 144 appeared in October , Mozilla announced that there would be no more 32-bit Linux builds (the ESR version, meanwhile, [28]received another life extension ). We speculated that some Linux distros would compile their own: "Perhaps an analogous unofficial 32-bit Firefox will appear for Linux users too." It took less than 24 hours – today, [29]T2/SDE project lead René Rebe sent us screenshots of that project's 32-bit Firefox 145.
[30]
The day after the 64-bit only Firefox 145, T2/SDE revealed its own 32-bit version
Get our [31]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/145.0/releasenotes/
[2] https://www.firefox.com/en-GB/whatsnew/145/
[3] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/view-pdf-files-firefox-or-choose-another-viewer#w_comment-in-pdf-files
[4] https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/11/11/ffox-145.jpg
[5] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/track-changes-and-view-add-or-edit-comments-56343a35-b64c-4aeb-ac5b-d1bdb979490a
[6] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/fingerprinting-protections/
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aRS9JankjdKtgQOODnSxEAAAAUI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[8] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-desktop-launcher
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/16/firefox_and_tbird_144/
[10] https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2025/09/05/firefox-32-bit-linux-support-to-end-in-2026/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aRS9JankjdKtgQOODnSxEAAAAUI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aRS9JankjdKtgQOODnSxEAAAAUI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://www.firefox.com/en-GB/kit/
[14] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/08/mozilla_fellow_al_shafei/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/05/amazon_perplexity_comet_legal_threat/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/29/brash_dos_attack_crashes_chromium/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/28/ai_browsers_prompt_injection/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/14/mozilla_firefox_vpn_beta/
[20] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/profile-management/
[21] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-web-images-firefox-google-lens
[22] https://udm14.com/
[23] https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/14/openwebsearch_eu/
[24] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-144/
[25] https://search.theregister.com/?q=perplexity
[26] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
[27] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/16/firefox_and_tbird_144/
[28] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/05/firefox_esr_115/
[29] https://t2linux.com/
[30] https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/11/12/t2-32b-ffox-145.jpg
[31] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Mozilla's sole mission these days is to shield Google from antitrust cases, the rest dies not matter. Too bad, it was fun while it lasted. On to a WebKit browser, then, I guess?
¿Why go to WebKit? Apple has it severely behind standards wise, and relaying on a bunch of propiertary TAGs.
Hold on for dear life to FireFox, and jump to Ladybird when is more mature.
It has a really new renderer. A really new security foundation. And license diversity*, as it is BSD, instead of the Majority GPL that is the WebKit/Blink ecosystem.
* Diversity is good, monocultures are bad, this is true for biological entities, OS, Userland software, and FOSS licenses as well. As well as is FOSS compatible... I'm OK. In fact, I tend to gravitate towards (and recomend) BSD/MIT/APACHE licenses whenever possible.
Perplexity removed from the search engine list, and my aren't there a lot of browser.ml.chat... options to be disabled?
browser.ml.enable and browser.ml.chat.enabled. i think that's all that's necessary to turn it off.
I use Librewolf and checked it's about:config - on mine at least, browser.ml.enable was true and browser.ml.chat.enabled was false .
Surprised at it being enabled really.
Firefox Profiles
That's good to see that Mozilla haven't forgotten about Profiles ( firefox --new-instance -P FTW!), I had thought that their scatterbrained attention had seemed to be much more on "container tabs" of late as a (different) way to keep your different web activities separate? (I still prefer the more definite certainty of different instances of Firefox running different profiles, to be absolutely sure that nothing inadvertently leaks between tabs in just one instance.)
They do seem to have a rather jumbled up approach to things sometimes, with it almost seeming that different development teams work on separate approaches without much or any internal communication at all: see also Bookmarks, with (as long-time users will surely have noticed) the Bookmarks toolbar falling out of and back into favour at different times, a Bookmarks menu, a completely bizarre "Other Bookmarks" section, a Bookmarks menu/toolbar-icon-thing coming and going, etc, etc…)
Re: Firefox Profiles
Most non-reg-reading normies use one profile only. Most users of userland software (firefox included) are non-reg-reading normies. Even some Reg-reader-non-normies
(me included) use a single profile.
Container tabs are a good fit for people using one profile only.
Also, using multiple profiles on mobile browser is harder than in desktop UX wise... (yes, I also use FireFox on android. ¡uBlock Origin + m.youtube.com + m.facebook.com for the win! "¡Look ma' , no ads on mobile!")
So, good to have both available.
Re: Firefox Profiles
I've just started using profiles: different ones for me and clients, this is especially useful with different password managers in use. However, them all sharing the same icon and unpredictable behaviour when links are clicked is a major annoyance. The new controls via the account symbol also don't seem to be available on MacOS yet.
AI
So the most important question - what do I have to do to completely disable (pref remove but I know that’s asking too much) all the AI shite. I’m not convinced that removing a search engine from the search engine list will stop your data being hoovered up
Re: AI
> what do I have to do to completely disable all the AI shite
I tried to cover that in this one:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/13/firefox_ai_scoffing_power/
One thing about Firefox
There's one thing in Firefox that I really would like to be implemented.
On an Ubuntu desktop (or any Gnome-made I guess), you're supposed to be able to move any app window to another workspace by right-clicking on its titlebar and chose "move to the left | right workspace". For some reason, this is impossible with FF : right-click would pop a FF context menu, *not* the system one.
Which I find rather boring.
Re: One thing about Firefox
I think that depends on your window manager. I can certainly do that with mine (Fluxbox - also works, I think, with Xfce). Perhaps an Ubuntu/Gnome issue?
Re: One thing about Firefox
I get the proper right click menu if I click in the (fairly tiny) space around min/max/close buttons. It's less that the Gnome context menu is disabled and more that most of the whitespace belongs to the tab-bar for some reason.
Re: One thing about Firefox
Sounds like an instance of one of the basic problems with headerbars: https://pointieststick.com/2019/03/06/more-on-headerbars-rebuttals/
Re: One thing about Firefox
Mint Cinnamon gives me the expected context menu including 'move to another workspace >'.
Re: One thing about Firefox
running waterfox (derived from firefox) on cinnamon desktop, the first right-click brings up the application's menu, a second right click replaces it with the system's menu, so I can move it to another workspace.
Re: One thing about Firefox
> right-clicking on its titlebar
Is your copy configured to have a title bar at all?
Right click the main toolbar, click _Customise_ and look right at the bottom. There should be a ticky box for "Title bar".
F[poop]k Perplexity
Bloody thing spammed my website something terrible. I blocked it by user agent and it came back with a slightly changed one. Blocked that, and now I'm getting spammed by a user agent that looks like a regular user only following the same behaviour. I don't want their shit in my browser, I want their heads mounted on poles along the Seine.
Icon, because why, of all the automated bullshit spewers, did they chose to align themselves with that one?
PDF comments
> PDF files can do this too, but you could be forgiven for not noticing, as it's an extra feature that many basic PDF viewers don't support. In his late 20-teens, this vulture spent hours a month on PDF comments, and at that time, KDE's Okular was the only Linux PDF viewer we could find that could handle them.
That used to (and to some extent still does) drive me nuts. I'm not sure, but I think that, at least in the past, there was no official standard for PDF comments, so different PDF applications/viewers implemented their own commenting mechanisms and formats - which would likely not work well (or at all) with a different viewer. The situation does seem to have approved somewhat over the years, but I still find myself regularly seeing black blobs, unclickable doodahs, glitchy formatting or... nothing at all, until I find a viewer that works (for that particular document).
[Buffs up privacy, bloats AI]
That's like saying "Put a padlock in the door but left the window open."
Choirboy gets new haircut, but
...caught fucking sheep.
I'd have hoped by now that the idea of marketing something as "AI Free" would be seen as a positive. But not yet it seems.
It's a big attraction point for Vivaldi, at least for me.
Provided they don't renable things like about:config browser.ml.chat.enabled [false] then my only problem with the AI infestation of my browser is they could have been spending more time on things users actually want.
I wonder if being bank-rolled by TheBigEvil(tm) is what drives their obsession with LLMs.