Firefox 149 is rolling out to desktop users, and this one feels less like a quiet point release and more like Mozilla flexing what a modern browser can still do without turning into a full-blown operating system.​

The headline feature this time is Split View, and if you live with 20+ tabs open at any given moment, this is the one that will instantly change how you browse. Instead of juggling windows or manually snapping them side by side, Firefox now lets you view two sites in a single window, split down the middle. You pick one or two tabs, hit “Add to Split View” or “Open in Split View,” and suddenly comparing specs, cross-checking sources, or drafting an email while reading a doc feels far less clumsy. It’s one of those small quality-of-life upgrades that will quietly become a default habit for researchers, students, and anyone who writes or compares things all day.

But the most eyebrow-raising addition in Firefox 149 is something you don’t usually expect your browser to ship with: a built‑in VPN. Mozilla is rolling out a free VPN-like feature that routes your traffic through a secure proxy, hides your IP address, and gives you up to 50GB of protected browsing every month. It’s clearly aimed at the everyday scenarios where privacy actually matters in practice—public Wi-Fi at airports or cafés, late-night health searches, or buying something you’d rather not have associated with your home IP. You can toggle it on and off on a per‑site basis, so you don’t have to keep it running for everything, and you sign in with your Firefox account to use it. For now, the feature is being progressively rolled out in the US, UK, Germany and France, and Mozilla is explicitly holding it back from enterprise environments; organizations can even block it via policy if they don’t want users turning it on.​

Performance-wise, Firefox 149 quietly targets something most people rely on more than they realize: PDFs. Many PDF files now load significantly faster thanks to hardware acceleration, which should make in-browser viewing smoother, especially for large docs, reports, manuals, and scanned documents. If you’re the kind of person who never even installs a separate PDF reader anymore, this is the kind of under-the-hood upgrade you’ll notice as “oh, that opened quicker” without thinking about why.​

On the safety front, Mozilla is tightening the screws on shady notification abuse. Firefox 149 now automatically blocks notifications and permanently revokes permissions for any site flagged as malicious by SafeBrowsing. That specifically targets the wave of spammy “allow notifications” traps that then bombard users with ads, scams, or phishing prompts. Once a site is deemed unsafe, it can’t silently keep nagging you in the background, which is a welcome move in an era where notifications are increasingly weaponized.

Sharing also gets a bit more native. You can now add a Share button to your Firefox toolbar via the Customize Toolbar menu, and that hooks right into the system-level sharing sheet on Windows and macOS. Instead of copying links manually, you can fire them off through your usual messaging, mail, or other apps using the OS share interface. It’s a small change, but it nudges Firefox to feel more integrated with the device you’re on, rather than a separate, siloed world inside a window.​

Autofill is expanding its reach, too. Address Autofill is now enabled for users in Australia, India, Italy, Poland and Austria, making shopping and checkout flows faster in more regions. Once you’ve saved your address, you can populate web forms with a couple of clicks instead of repeatedly typing the same details across multiple websites. It’s not flashy, but for users in these countries, it’s one of those features that makes the browser feel finally “complete.”​

Language support gets a meaningful boost on the translation side. Firefox’s on-device translation can now handle Bosnian, Norwegian Bokmål, Serbian and Thai, and Mozilla says translation quality has improved for Croatian as well. Because the translation runs locally, you’re not constantly sending page contents off to a remote server for processing, which is a plus for privacy‑minded users. It also means you can read more of the web comfortably without installing extra extensions or relying entirely on third‑party services.

If you like to live on the experimental edge, Firefox Labs has something new: tab notes. It’s a simple idea—attach a short note directly to a web page—yet it aligns perfectly with the way people really browse. Maybe you opened a documentation page to test something later, found an apartment listing and wanted to note down a concern, or left a tab open as a reminder to compare two products; notes let you capture that context without jumping into a separate app. Mozilla is explicitly asking for feedback on this one, so expect the feature to evolve based on how people actually use it.​

Under the hood, there are some important network and security tweaks that won’t make headlines but matter a lot. HTTP/3 upload performance has been hardened for unreliable networks, which should help keep file uploads more resilient when your connection isn’t perfect. There’s also the usual batch of security fixes, bundled into Mozilla’s MFSA advisory for this release, continuing the ongoing push to patch vulnerabilities as they’re discovered.​

The way Firefox surfaces privacy and security information is also changing with something Mozilla calls the TrustPanel. Instead of juggling separate privacy and security panels from the address bar, Firefox now combines them into a single place where you can see how safe your current page is and what’s happening behind the scenes. It’s a cleaner, more coherent presentation of what used to be scattered info, and it should make it easier for regular users to understand a site’s status without becoming security experts.

Developers and power users on Linux get a couple of nice touches as well. On Linux, Firefox now defaults to the XDG portal file picker when available instead of the older GTK3 one, giving you a file dialog that better matches your desktop environment and often offers more capabilities. On Windows, the browser switches to the modern Windows.Devices.Geolocation API instead of the legacy Windows 7 location API, which is a quiet but important modernization move. Error pages have also been redesigned with visuals that better match the rest of Firefox, making it clearer what went wrong and generally less jarring when the web doesn’t behave.​

For web developers, Firefox 149 continues to fill in standards support and tooling polish. The Storage Inspector now has a one-click button to delete all entries for the currently selected storage type, which makes debugging stateful web apps less tedious. In the DevTools Inspector, each CSS declaration tied to a computed value now has an icon that jumps you to the relevant rule in the Rules view, speeding up the process of tracking down which declaration is actually in control.​

On the web platform side, there’s a long list of spec-aligned upgrades. The showPicker() API now works with text-based input elements that use a datalist, letting sites trigger the autofill dropdown programmatically in a standards-compliant way. The xywh() and rect() basic-shape functions, previously supported for clip-path and offset-path, now also work for shape-outside, giving designers more layout control for floated content. Firefox also adds support for the math value in CSS font-family, which is used by default for MathML’s <math> element so that advanced math fonts can be properly utilized; by default Firefox falls back to its configured serif math font. There’s support for popover="hint" in HTML, new media element pseudo-classes like :playing and :paused, and a spec-compliant implementation of HTMLMediaElement.captureStream(). On Android, Firefox now supports closing popovers and dialogs via the system back button and exposes the CloseWatcher API so sites can handle that gracefully. The new Reporting API is also enabled, giving web apps a unified mechanism to receive reports from platform features such as Content Security Policy, Permissions-Policy, or deprecation notices.

Finally, buried in the release notes is a reminder of how much open-source work truly is a community effort. With Firefox 149, Mozilla is welcoming a fresh wave of contributors, including 25 brand-new volunteers making their first code contributions to the browser. The release notes call them out by name and bug number—a subtle but powerful signal that big, mainstream software can still be shaped by individuals outside the core company.​

Put together, Firefox 149 isn’t trying to chase every trendy AI feature under the sun. Instead, it doubles down on practical privacy with a free built-in VPN, gives you better tools to work across multiple pages with Split View, and keeps iterating on performance, security, and developer friendliness in the background. It’s the kind of release that doesn’t radically reinvent the browser, but does make a strong case for why Firefox is still one of the most thoughtful options on the market.