If you're stuck without access to tech support – say, half way to the Moon – then you're better off with a single install of Thunderbird than any number of Outlooks.

Firefox 150 is out, along with its messaging client sibling Thunderbird 150. Both have multiple small but welcome improvements and refinements, as well as a pleasingly round version number. The Register first reported on Mozilla's new cut-down browser in 2004, and the first story on its shrinking market share that this vulture can find followed the very next year. And yet, despite 21 years of such concerns, Firefox is still here, still relevant, and still worth using.

Your borderline geriatric correspondent just barely remembers Apollo 11's first moon landing, and would have been more excited about the recent Artemis mission if it hadn't been accompanied by massive NASA cuts. As it was, for us, the single most memorable line from NASA's recent Moon-orbital mission was the sublime "I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working."

That is why you should have a FOSS browser and a FOSS messaging client that keeps your stuff locally. Since even the default Windows browser is now just a skin around Google Chrome, Mozilla is your best option.

Aside from the pleasingly round version numbers, neither of these are massive releases.

Firefox 150 improves its new split view. Now you can right-click on a link and open it in a new pane, which is very convenient and makes the split view more immediately useful. The option to switch the two panes around, previously confined to the split-view control in the corner that we described when Firefox 149 shipped, can now also be found on the tab button context menu, which is also handy.

You can share the names and addresses of multiple tabs at once, which we doubt we'll use often, but will save umpteen round-trips between source and destination windows when we do. Firefox's built-in local translation function – the only one of its LLM-based tools we leave enabled – can now open in its own tab, looking and working very much like the Google Translate homepage. If you start typing tran… then it appears as a suggestion.

The built-in PDF viewer and editor was already very handy, but it just got a handy new ability. Now, it can manipulate pages in PDFs: you can remove or re-order pages, copy and paste them, and export individual pages or sets of pages from multipage PDFs. The PDF viewer is getting so capable that there's little reason for a standalone viewer any more. That's no bad thing: for instance, at the time of writing, the macOS version of the latest Adobe Reader is a hefty 762 MB download.

Security permissions have been further tightened, and now Firefox applies network access restrictions to devices on your local network as well. With this release, Linux users get a native Gtk emoji picker, and emojis should display correctly on Macs even in Apple's "lockdown mode." As we covered back in January, Mozilla now offers official RPM packages of Firefox, and although they were not yet available at the time of writing, these should soon include this version.

Calling International Interplanetary Rescue

Thunderbird 150 is a go, as well. Good to know if you're on your way to the Moon – or to Mars. This release inherits Firefox's improved PDF handling, and also supports the new Unobtrusive Email Signatures standard to make encrypted mails more readable on clients that don't support encryption.

Thunderbird can now search even encrypted message bodies. On the first run of a new install, the new Account Hub simplified account-configuration tool opens automatically, and the tool now includes more options for configuring account authentication. Address book entries can be copied to the clipboard in vCard format, you can override the OS and choose your own accent color, and more.

• Mozilla throws Thunderbolt at enterprise AI providers
• RSS dulls the pain of the modern web
• Firefox 148 adds master switch for browser bot bother
• 'The EU runs on Microsoft' – and Uncle Sam could turn it off, claims MEP

We've said it before and we'll say it again: even if you are perfectly happy using webmail, you should install and configure Thunderbird, so you have a full local backup of all your mail, contacts, and your calendar, just in case you lose access to your account. ®

Bootnote

If the hectic release schedule is a bit too much for you, then there are long-lived Extended Support Releases of both products. Currently, the ESR version of both is version 140: specifically, Firefox 140.10, and Thunderbird 140.9.1.