Firefox 59: Firefox Screenshots gets image editing functionality

Mozilla plans to improve the built-in screenshot tool of the Firefox web browser in Firefox 59 Stable by adding image editing functionality to the server uploaded images are hosted on.

Update: The feature is available for all versions of Firefox as it was enabled server-side.

Screenshot functionality is not entirely new. Mozilla added screen capturing options to Firefox back in 2012 when it added the functionality to the browser's Developer Toolbar.

The Screenshot tool, however, improved the visibility of the functionality. First launched as the Test Pilot experiment Page Shot and integrated natively in Firefox Nightly in mid 2017, Screenshots was launched officially in Firefox 56 Stable.

Firefox users may use Screenshots to capture the entire visible area of a web page or a rectangle area of it. Users can save captured screenshots to the local system directly, copy screenshots to the Clipboard of the operating system, or use the integrated upload functionality to store them temporarily on Mozilla servers.

The new screenshot editing functionality is available already. Firefox users who upload screenshots to Mozilla's server may notice that Mozilla added image editing functionality to the online part of Screenshots.

You activate the functionality with a click on the edit icon on the page the screenshot is displayed on. This enables the editing functionality; all available image editing tools are displayed in the top right corner of the page:

• Crop the image.
• Pen to draw on the screenshot.
• Highlighter to highlight specific areas of the screenshot.
• Color Picker to select one of nine different colors.
• Clear to undo changes.

The functionality is useful to make quick edits but it misses important editing options such as blur, select, or changing the pen's size. You may zoom in and out using Ctrl-mousewheel.

A click on the save icon saves the edited image, a click on cancel ignores all changes that you made using the image editing tools.

Firefox's Screenshot tool is not a unique feature. Opera Software integrated screenshot editing in Opera 49 Stable released in November 2017, and Vivaldi Technologies screenshot functionality in Vivaldi 1.7 released in later 2016.

Firefox users had access to extensions like NativeShot to integrate screen capture functionality in the browser. NativeShot is not compatible with Firefox 57 Quantum.

Closing Words

Firefox's Screenshot tool is popular according to Mozilla. John Gruen, Product Manager of Firefox Test Pilot, revealed that Firefox users took more than 64 million screenshots since the integration in Firefox 56.

While it is too limiting for professional use in many cases, it works fine in other cases. Users may use it to quickly share what they see on the screen with others online, or save it to the local system for safekeeping. (via Sören Hentzschel)