Firefox 45 Brings Tab Sharing, Tab Sync, Click-to-View Images, and More

Mozilla back in January rolled out Firefox 44 for Windows, OS X, Linux, and Android. Now roughly after two months, the company has released Firefox 45 for the same platforms. Like other releases, this version too brings new features, new developer-facing features, and fixes bugs.

On desktop, the Firefox 45 brings instant browser tab sharing through Hello, the company’s own instant messenger that was introduced in version 34 last year. With Hello, Firefox users can chat with and call each other without the need of any other software. While the feature already included screen sharing feature, it now let users share browser tabs as well. All the actions performed in the shared tabs are shown to the other party in real time. Users don’t need to sign up for this service as it is free to use. Simple click on the bubble icon next to the address bar and choosing ‘Start a conversation’ would initiate a chat.

The Firefox 45 now brings the ‘Tab Sync’ section in the dropdown area of Awesome Bar when searching. Synced Tabs button has also been moved in button bar. Furthermore, the version introduces a new preference (network.dns.blockDotOnion) to allow blocking .onion at the DNS level. The Guarani locale also gets its way in to the browser.

Besides various security fixes, the browser fixes an issue where URLs containing a Unicode-format Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) were not properly redirected. Other developer-based and HTML5 changes made in the Firefox 45 can be seen on the company’s release notes.

On Android, the browser version brings Click-to-view images option under the Menu’s advanced settings. This would let users choose which images on the Web they download to conserve data usage. It also delivers system notifications to give an End Of Life message to Android Honeycomb users.

Firefox 45 for Android adds toggle switch to enable or disable sharing of camera and microphone in the admin UI for family friendly browsing. Like in desktop version, the Android version too introduces a new preference (network.dns.blockDotOnion) to allow blocking .onion. The update brings the same fixes as it did for the desktop version. It also disables the inclusion of the URL when users are sharing selected text from a web page. Other user-based changes and HTML5 changes can be seen in the company’s release notes page.