Firefox 155 is out with page loading improvements and visible tracker counts. Thunderbird 155 ships alongside with improved Exchange setup and custom OAuth support.

Tracker counts

Firefox has blocked trackers by default through Enhanced Tracking Protection for years. Most users have no idea how much it is doing, because the work is invisible by design.

Surfacing the count changes that. It is not a new protection, it is the same protection made legible, and that is a reasonable product decision: a privacy feature nobody notices is a privacy feature nobody values, and Firefox’s market position depends heavily on people valuing exactly this.

The number people see when they first look at it tends to be larger than they expect.

Page loading

Performance work in a browser is rarely one change. It is accumulated improvements to the network stack, the parser, resource prioritisation, and rendering, each worth a small percentage.

Firefox’s performance reputation is stuck several years behind its actual state. The Quantum work and the years since closed most of the gap with Chromium, and on many workloads Firefox uses less memory. The perception lags because people formed it in 2016.

Why this matters beyond the release notes

Firefox is the only remaining browser of consequence not built on Chromium. Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, and Arc all share Blink, which means Google’s engineering decisions are effectively web standards.

That concentration has practical effects. When Chromium proposed restricting extension capabilities through Manifest V3, the affected content blockers had one meaningful alternative platform, and it was Gecko.

Firefox’s share is small and has been declining for years. Using it is one of the few individual actions that has any bearing on whether the web has more than one implementation, and a browser that needs users to justify its existence is an unusual thing to be arguing for on technical merit alone.

Mozilla’s own conduct complicates this. The organisation has made choices its users disliked, from advertising experiments to the data privacy notice rewrite, and pretending otherwise does the argument no favours. The case for Firefox is not that Mozilla is admirable; it is that Gecko existing is load-bearing for the web.

Thunderbird 155

Improved Exchange setup and custom OAuth support, which follows 154’s Microsoft Graph work.

This is the thing that determines whether Thunderbird is usable at work. Corporate mail is overwhelmingly Exchange and Microsoft 365, and the historical answer for Linux users was OWA in a browser tab or a fragile IMAP configuration that an administrator could disable at any time.

Native Exchange support with working OAuth makes Thunderbird a realistic option for people whose employer runs Microsoft. That is a larger addressable audience than any amount of interface work would reach.

flatpak update org.mozilla.firefox org.mozilla.Thunderbird