Firefox 157 enters beta testing with fixes for dull HDR playback and audio sync glitches

Firefox 157 is now in the beta channel with just a handful of fixes, but they’re important ones.

A few days ago, we reported on a bug that was causing certain 8-bit videos to look dull and washed out on Windows. The issue cropped up because the browser assumed 8-bit files would never carry HDR color profiles, so it treated them as standard video files instead of HDR media. This, in turn, resulted in the videos looking faded since colors were not being properly extracted from the 8-bit files.

The problem got patched in the Firefox 157 Nightly builds, and now that fix is here in the beta channel too as part of Firefox 157 beta. The release notes mention that the update “fixes several cases of dull gray looking videos that should have been more vibrant.”

That said, this isn’t the only media-related bug that has been addressed with this release. The company has also fixed an annoying audio and video sync glitch when switching playback rates while watching podcasts or other videos where you find yourself speeding up or slowing down clips.

This release follows closely behind the Firefox 156 beta, which landed earlier this month. That update focused heavily on faster PDF startup speeds and smarter background resource management.

Desktop users who keep vertical tabs on get a small relief too. The sidebar now reliably slides back out when your mouse hits the screen edge in fullscreen mode instead of getting stuck hidden. As someone who uses vertical tabs on every browser I rotate through, this is a big deal, and I can confirm it works like a charm.

Over on mobile, tapping the Android search bar on the homepage now shows your recent searches so you do not have to type the same queries repeatedly.

Keep in mind this beta is setting the stage for a big stable rollout. We already reported that Firefox 157 will enable JPEG XL by default, making it an interesting release.

You can grab the beta from Mozilla right now to play around with the fixes, or just wait for the finished build to land in a few weeks.

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