A new stable version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser is available to download.
Mozilla Firefox 123 buffs the browser’s privacy-respecting translation feature. Now when you translate a web page the browser also translates text shown in tooltips (i.e. titles) and any placeholder text shown in form controls/fields/search boxes.
Address bar settings are now listed in the Settings > Search section. From here you can choose the kinds of results the address bar ‘suggests’ for queries you enter, e.g., browsing history, bookmarks, open tabs, shortcuts, and search engines.
Talking of access, Firefox 123 adds a search bar to Firefox View (that pinned tab on the far left you probably ignore 🤭). Using the search box you can now search through tabs in the various sections. Handy.
A new Web Compatibility Reporting Tool is included. You can use this to let Mozilla know when a website doesn’t work correctly in Firefox (but does work other browsers). “By filing a web compatibility issue, you’re directly helping us detect, target, and fix the most impacted sites”, they say.
Linux gamer? You’ll be pleased to hear Firefox 123 adopts evdev for gamepads on Linux. This major change improves the kinds of controllers you can use to game in the browser. Testing was done using Playstation 4 (Dualshock 4) and Xbox 360/One controllers.
A couple of rogue theming bugs were resolved when running Firefox in Ubuntu. These include better ‘visual distinction’ in the password list when high-contrast dark mode is enabled, and ensuring the menu bar colour is the correct one under the standard theme in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Users of Firefox on 64-bit ARM Linux distros can (if the hardware supports it) finally enjoy 2K and 4K video on YouTube. Firefox 123 modifies its user-agent string for ARM64 platforms to workaround a YouTube issue capping video resolution @ 1080p.
Firefox 123 also implements VideoEncoder on Linux (only, for now; coming to other platforms soon). This isn’t a feature we (as users) access. It’s part of backend push to implement the WebCodecs standard which gives web apps control over how media is processed.
On the subject of web development Firefox 123 adds:
- linearRGB interpolation for SVG gradients
- SVG feImage elements render if non-percentage dimensions specified
- Early Hints are now ‘fully supported’
- Audio echo cancellation can be applied to microphone inputs
- Declarative ShadowDOM is supported
Finally, Mozilla say computers using older AMD CPUs might see black image thumbnails in file dialogs. To resolve this they suggest updating the underlying graphics driver, if possible. They don’t say whether that issue affects Linux users but figured I’d mention it incase!
See the official change-log for more details.
Get Firefox 123
Getting the Firefox 123 update will, in most cases, be automatic. Windows and macOS versions of the browser update in-app, as do Linux binary builds. The Snap, Flatpak, and Deb versions will roll out through package managers from Feb 20.
If you want/need to download Mozilla Firefox head over to the Mozilla website and grab and install or binary build from there.
