Firefox 66 comes with Block Autoplay and scroll anchoring to reduce online annoyances

Yesterday, Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 66. In this release, the Firefox team aimed to reduce the online annoyances users face by introducing features like Block Autoplay, scroll anchoring, and more.

Key features Firefox 66 is packed with:

Block Autoplay

Often, when we visit a website for some research or reading an article, it all of a sudden starts playing a video or audio, which is quite distracting. In this release, Firefox prevents websites from playing audio and video automatically by default with a newly-added feature, Block Autoplay.

If you have already visited a website and clicked on the play button of a video, Firefox will remember your preference and automatically play videos in the subsequent visits. You can also enable autoplay on your favorite website by adding them to your permission list. For this, you just need to visit the control center by clicking the “i” with a circle on the address bar. Then go to Permissions and select the “allow” option in the drop-down menu.

Source: Mozilla

Scroll anchoring

The text part of a web page loads faster as compared to the images and ads. So, as you are reading the article, these slow-loading ads and images move the text around. Scroll anchoring solves this problem, by remembering where you are so that you are not interrupted by these slow-loading images or ads.

Improved search experience

If you are someone who opens everything in a new tab and ends up with 20 open tabs, like me, this new feature in Firefox 66 is a savior for you. This version allows you to search tabs from the tab overflow menu, which appears when you have a large number of tabs open in a window.

Additionally, Firefox 66 comes with a redesigned new tab for private browsing. Now, when you open a new tab in private browsing, it will show a search bar with your default search engine. To set your default search engine, go to Preferences, Search, then select Default Search Engine.

Read the official announcement, to know about other exciting features Firefox 66 comes with.

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