Mozilla Firefox 142.0 is now available in the official release channel and will be officially announced on Tuesday. Firefox 142 doesn't bring many notable changes, but one of them may spark some controversy surrounding Firefox extensions.
Firefox 142, August's major web browser update, doesn't have particularly exciting new features, but it does improve drag-and-drop support for blob images, increase scrolling speed in bookmarks dialogs, and make a few other improvements. For web developers, Firefox 142 introduces the Prioritized Task Scheduling API to provide greater control over task prioritization. Additionally, it introduces the URLPattern API for matching and parsing URLs in a standardized pattern syntax.
Some users may be offended by the term "AI" because the Firefox extension allows the use of Local Large Language Models (LLMS). Firefox 142 opens the door to extended use of LLM:
"Firefox now supports the wllama API extension, enabling developers to integrate local language model (LLM) functionality directly into their add-ons."
The wllama project provides WebAssembly bindings for Llama.cpp for browser-side LLM inference.
If you're confused about Firefox extensions/plugins using the wllama API, you can learn more about "Enable wllama for extensions" in the bug tracker.
Installation files for Firefox 142.0 are available from ftp.mozilla.org. For more details on developer changes for Firefox 142.0, visit development.mozilla.org.