Firefox Adds Long-Anticipated Feature

With the release of Firefox 103, a few new additions are aimed at greatly improving the experience of some users. One of the biggest additions to the open-source web browser is two-finger horizontal swipe gesture support for navigating back and forward with a trackpad. This feature has been in the works for some time and is now seeing the light of day. However, there is a caveat to the new addition. The goal of the developers was to have the feature fully supported with version 103, however, upon release, the only way to use the two-finger swipe gesture is to first press and hold the Alt key on your keyboard. Hopefully, somewhere in the next few updates, that requirement will be removed and the feature will work exactly as expected.

Other goodies added to Firefox 103 include highlighted required fields on PDFs, significant performance improvements for monitors with 120Hz+ refresh rates, improved Picture-in-Picture subtitles, and buttons in the Tabs toolbar can now be accessed with [Tab], [Tab]+[Shift], and keyboard arrow keys.

Several issues have also been fixed, such as non-breaking spaces perseverance, WebGL performance issues, and start-up time slowdowns due to processing Web content local storage.

To find out more about what’s new with Firefox 103, check out the official release notes. As of now, this new version has yet to hit the official repositories for most distributions, but you can download it from the official Mozilla site.