Firefox is a popular web browser
The launch of the new version of the popular web browser «Firefox 118» in which the long-awaited automatic translation functiona locally, as well as security improvements, for developers and more.
On Firefox 118 16 vulnerabilities have been fixed, Of these, 13 vulnerabilities (8 combined under CVE-2023-5176) that are marked as dangerous are caused by memory problems, such as buffer overflows and access to already freed memory areas. These issues can potentially lead to an attacker's code execution when opening specially crafted pages.
Main new features of Firefox 118
In this new version of Firefox 118, one of its main novelties is the system for automatic translation from one language to another, which is enabled by default and performs the translation on the user's local system without resorting to external cloud services. The translation system uses the Bergamot engine open source, which is a wrapper on top of the Marian machine translation framework, which uses a recurrent neural network and transformer-based language models.
Another of the changes that stands out in this new version are the Additional protection improvements against indirect user identification In private browsing mode, the fonts available for use on the sites are limited to system fonts and standard language set fonts.
In addition to this, it is also highlighted that the implementation of the Web Audio API has been moved to use the FDLIBM math library, which has improved protection against the use of indirect user identification methods.
In Firefox 118 when Google Meet is opened, visual effects work and support for background blurring is added, in the address bar, a display of browser add-ons recommended for the user, selected based on the entered keywords, has been added . The feature is currently only available for US users.
In the version of Android, the possibility of printing a page is offered, Additionally, when a pinned shortcut is clicked, the content will now open in an existing tab if the URL in the already opened tab matches the URL of the shortcut. The button to clear local data related to the site has been moved from the “Browsing history and site data” section to the “Cookies and site data” menu.
On the part of the developer improvements, They highlight that in the CSS property font-size-adjust a "from-font" parameter is implemented, which specifies the use of font metrics taken from the first available font, support for the HTML element was also added » «, which defines a group of elements used to organize a search or filter content (for example, within You can place elements with a form to send a search request and display search results).
By default, the ORB (Opaque Response Blocking) mechanism is enabled, positioned as a replacement for the CORB (Cross Origin Read Blocking) mechanism to block loading resources when requested from a third-party domain.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- 10 new math functions added to CSS
- Added support for the publickey-credentials-get value in the Permissions-Policy HTTP header, which allows you to use the Web Authentication API to obtain public key-based credentials (navigator.credentials.get({publicKey})).
- MathML has deprecated all non-normal mathematical variant attribute values.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it of this new version of the browser, you can check the details In the following link.
How to install or update the new version of Firefox on Linux?
As always, for those who already use firefox, they can simply access the menu to update to the latest version, that is, Firefox users who have not disabled automatic updates will receive the update automatically.
While for those who do not want to wait for that to happen they can select Menu> Help> About Firefox after the official launch to initiate a manual update of the web browser.
The screen that opens displays the currently installed version of the web browser and runs a check for updates, provided the functionality is enabled.
Another option to update, is if you are a user of Ubuntu, Linux Mint or some other derivative of Ubuntu, you can install or update to this new version with the help of the browser's PPA.
This can be added to the system by opening a terminal and executing the following command in it:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-security/ppa -y sudo apt-get update sudo apt install firefox
The last installation method that was added “Flatpak”. To do this, they must have support for this type of packages and the browser installation is done by typing the following command in the terminal:
flatpak install flathub org.mozilla.firefox
As for those who already have the browser installed, it is enough to execute the following command to not only update Firefox, but also all its applications that are in Flatpak format:
flatpack update
In the case of those who prefer the use of Snap, the installation of the browser can be done by typing the following command:
sudo snap install firefox
And to update the applications that we have installed in Snap format, just type the following in the terminal:
sudo snap refresh