Mozilla Firefox 136 Gets Vertical Tabs, Arm Version, and New Video Features

Mozilla has announced the release of Firefox 136, some of which have long been anticipated by browser fans. The interface now features vertical tabs; the native Arm version for Windows and Linux runs faster and consumes less power on compatible computers; hardware acceleration for video playback is now available on AMD-based Linux machines, as is acceleration for HEVC (H.265) video playback on Mac computers.

Image source: mozilla.org

Previously, vertical tabs in Firefox only appeared when installing an extension; the browser itself received support for them in the Firefox 131 beta, and they only debuted in the stable build now. The native implementation of the vertical tab bar has an important advantage over most extensions: it can be reduced to display only tab icons without their names. It is an addition to the standard Firefox sidebar – there are buttons for accessing such features as tab syncing, history, and bookmarks.

The second major innovation is the introduction of native Firefox Arm64 builds for Linux and Windows, which run faster and consume less power than when running through an x86 emulator. Firefox previously supported Arm64 on Mac, but with the release of version 136, the browser received optimization: it automatically moves background tasks to efficient Apple Silicon cores, which means energy savings.

Mozilla Firefox 136 for Linux now supports hardware acceleration with AMD graphics when playing video; the Mac version now supports hardware acceleration when playing HEVC (H.265) video files. The difference for modern computers will probably be insignificant, but these measures help save CPU resources and energy. LZMA compression helped reduce the size of the .DMG installation file for Mac. The browser itself now tries to connect to a new site via HTTPS by default when opening it, and only if this fails, it tries again via unencrypted HTTP. Finally, there are some innovations for developers.