Firefox 149 adds a free VPN and finally plays nice with Linux dialogs

Summary

Firefox 149 is here, and although we've already talked about one of the big new features on the way, the release version has some others that will be very welcome. We looked at the new split view function a few weeks ago, along with the info on how to enable it in versions of Firefox back to 146 from last December. That's probably the most visible new feature, but we don't want to repeat ourselves, so if you missed it, go read that. However, we did miss one handy little UI feature. When you're in split view, one pane is the active one: if you type into a box, that's where your text will go. In our testing on macOS and Linux, it's got a thin blue outline around the active pane. The other, inactive pane gets a tiny tab in its bottom right corner, which shows the page's base domain and its favicon, followed by an ellipsis (the "…" symbol). Those three dots are a hamburger menu, and they have three handy and fairly self-explanatory functions for managing the split view: Separate Tabs, Reverse Tabs, and then after a separator, Close Both Tabs. The same options also appear in the address bar, where they're represented by a half-shaded rectangle. Firefox 149 in split view – note that subtle little tab control at bottom right Split view isn't the only visible new feature, though. Firefox now contains a free built-in VPN. Mozilla is doing a progressive rollout of this feature, so it won't be available to everyone in all regions – notably, the Irish Sea wing of Vulture Towers doesn't have it yet. The Firefox VPN is not the same as Mozilla's paid VPN, and the integrated one only affects web content that you're viewing in that instance of Firefox, so it's no use for internet-connected gaming and so on. Apparently the free VPN will offer 50 GB of traffic per month, which will be enough for occasional use but not for daily streaming. An in-browser VPN can be a useful extra. To the recurring surprise of some commenters, this vulture tends to side with XKCD 538 – and indeed XKCD 12...