Firefox gains boosted privacy and productivity tools

Firefox artwork
(Image credit: Mozilla)

Mozilla has today announced an updated version of the popular Firefox web browser, with four notable additions coming via an update to the free app.

Now available for download, the updated Firefox brings with it improvements to privacy and productivity as well as new Colorways options.

All the shortcuts

Two of the big new additions are shortcuts. The first, a new private browsing shortcut button, allows people to put it right on their desktop for quicker access to Firefox's Private Browsing mode. Mozilla has also reworked the mode itself, making it feel more modern and adding a new logo and dark theme along the way.

The next shortcut is actually two — Mozilla has announced that a new PDF editor and text recognition feature have been added, making it easier for people to sign documents and pull text out of content than ever before. They'll need to be running macOS 10.15 or later, though.

Next up is something called Firefox View, which is a productivity feature that puts up to 25 of someone's most recently closed tabs in a single place. The same feature will also show the last three active tabs that were open across any other devices signed into the same account, too.

Wrapping things up, we have new Colorways, with a limited edition creation by Keely Alexis, inspired by Independent Voices. “‘Independent Voices’ are the voices of the past and present that create a better future,” said Keely Alexis in an email shared with iMore. “I chose this [analogy] as my inspiration for the collaboration because it feels authentic to me but it also aligns with Firefox and the vision that we can make the world better, on the internet and beyond.”

All of that's available as part of the updated Firefox, available for download today. There are plenty of web browsers available, but Firefox has long been one of the best Mac and iPhone options — now it's even better.

You can learn more about what's new in the latest Firefox on the Mozilla blog now.

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.