Firefox Updated to Version 12.8: Check Out What’s New

Mozilla has released the new Version 12.8 update for the Firefox browser, introducing several new features that I will discuss below.

Version 12.8

The first feature is the ability to translate any highlighted text to any other language of your choice. To do this, select the text from the webpage and right-click. A new menu will open up; from there, select “Translate to English.” A new pop-up window will appear, and you can select the language in which you would like the results to be displayed. This feature was already available in Google Chrome and is now coming to Firefox.

If you are in the US or Canada, you will also be able to see your recent searches along with trending topics when you type something in the address bar.

With this update, Firefox will now have a unified box for clearing user data, such as browsing history. Additionally, it will show how much data will be cleared.

You can also playback from several streaming websites even when you are in private browsing mode. Moreover, a new Saraiki (skr) language has been added to the database.

Lastly, on macOS, microphone capture through getUserMedia will now use system-provided voice processing when applicable, improving audio quality.

If you are a website owner, you also get the experimental Privacy Preserving Attribution API, which provides an alternative to user tracking for ad attribution. This experiment is only enabled via origin trial and can be disabled in the new Website Advertising Preferences section in the Privacy and Security settings.

Rest of the changelog

Firefox now proxies DNS by default when using SOCKS v5, avoiding leaking DNS queries to the network when using SOCKS v5 proxies.

Firefox now supports rendering more text/* file types inline, rather than requiring them to be downloaded to be viewed.

The root certificate used to verify add-ons and signed content has been renewed to avoid upcoming expiration.

You can find information about policy updates and enterprise specific bug fixes in the Firefox for Enterprise 128 Release Notes.

CSS rules specificity is now displayed in a tooltip when hovering a CSS rule selector in the Inspector Rules view. This can help web developers understand why a given rule is applied before another.

The Inspector panel now flags a custom property declaration as invalid when the value does not match the registered custom property definition. As shown in the screenshot below, the declaration of a custom property, --b, expecting a <length> value syntax (e.g., 10px), is instead used with a color specified. An exclamation icon appears next to it with a tooltip explaining the error.

Improvements have been made to Inactive CSS. A warning is now displayed when column-span is used on elements outside of multi-column containers and when properties only applying to replaced elements are used on non-replaced elements.

Web Platform

• Resizeable ArrayBuffers and Growable SharedArrayBuffers are now supported in SpiderMonkey. This allows the size of an ArrayBuffer to be changed without having to allocate a new buffer and copy data into it.

• The setCodecPreferences method allows applications to disable the negotiation of specific codecs (including RTX/RED/FEC). It also allows an application to cause a remote peer to prefer the codec that appears first in the list for sending.

• The Accept header for images and documents was changed to better align with the Fetch standard and other browsers.

• Support was added for @property and the CSS properties-and-values API.

• A new bytes() method is provided on many objects like Request/Response and Blob that provides a convenient way of getting an Uint8Array typed array.