Firefox 159 Beta Fixes Wayland Tab Detachment and Adds Chrome Bookmark Import

by Geth Author

Firefox 159 is now in beta, arriving roughly two weeks before its planned stable release on October 27, 2026. The update is modest in scope but addresses a genuinely irritating issue for Linux users and adds several features that smooth the daily browsing experience.

The Wayland fix that's been a long time coming

The headline Linux improvement is a fix for tab detachment on Wayland. In affected versions, clicking a tab in certain conditions caused it to tear off into a new window — an interaction ghost that broke workflow and left users managing unintended windows they didn't ask for. The behavior has been a standing complaint in Firefox's bug tracker; 159 resolves it.

Wayland is now the default display server for most major Linux distributions, including Fedora and Ubuntu. With KDE Plasma 6.8 shipping a Wayland-only default desktop just yesterday, the pressure to get Firefox behavior right on Wayland is only increasing. The fix arrives at exactly the right moment.

New features across platforms

Beyond the Wayland fix, Firefox 159 adds several quality-of-life improvements:

  • Chrome bookmark import from Google profiles — users signed into Google can pull bookmarks directly into Firefox without exporting files manually. This removes the main friction point for users switching from Chrome.
  • Keyboard shortcut for searching open tabs — a faster way to locate a tab when you have many open at once.
  • Improved menu and panel visuals — cosmetic updates on Linux and Windows that make the interface feel more consistent.
  • Sidebar password access — saved passwords are now reachable from the sidebar by default, cutting down the menu-diving required to autofill on non-standard sites.

Stable release: October 27

The developer release notes on MDN are still marked as a work in progress for this version, so additional features may be disclosed closer to the stable ship date.

Mozilla has been shipping steady, incremental improvements through each Firefox release this year — no single version since the major 157 visual overhaul has carried a transformative change, but the cumulative polish is noticeable. The Wayland tab fix in 159 is representative of that philosophy: unglamorous work that matters to the people affected by it.