Firefox 156 opens PDFs 45% faster, plus a few annoying bug fixes

Today, Mozilla released Firefox 156 to the Release channel, which is basically all users in the general public. It’s a pretty limp update by all accounts, without any standout new features and just a handful of minor bug fixes spread out across components.

The built-in PDF reader launches about 45 percent faster than before, which is great if Firefox is your PDF reader of choice. (And don’t forget Firefox 150 turned it into a real PDF editor, too.)

For users who have “DNS over HTTPS” enabled—which you should for better browser privacy and security—this update fixes a bug that caused some sites that don’t support HTTPS to fail to load.

It also fixes another networking bug: unexplained loss of all network connectivity when the built-in VPN is enabled. The built-in VPN, which was introduced in Firefox 149, is a good free option for hiding your IP address and location while browsing the web, although it isn’t as secure or feature-rich as some of the best VPN services.

Firefox now has better memory and CPU usage when large JPEG files are shrunk down to fit a page, which should help with web browsing performance on weaker machines and hardware.

The rest of the release notes address other situational bugs, like subtitles sometimes not appearing in Picture-in-Picture mode as well as Firefox sometimes blocking an auto-hiding taskbar on Windows.

In about two weeks, Firefox 157 will be released. That update should add support for JPEG XL (JXL), a modern image format that offers the same quality as JPEG at a significantly smaller size. Although JPEG XL was launched in 2021, Safari is the only browser to support it yet. For a short period, Chrome also supported it, but that ended in 2022.