Firefox 118 arrives with local page translation, improvements and more

It was launched a few days ago the new version of the popular web browser “firefox 118”, version of which I did not have the time necessary to be able to share the release note immediately and for it to be fresh for our dear readers. But well, in the end here is the note and in it we share some of the highlights of this launch that is relatively recent, since it was only last week.

In this new version that is presented of Firefox 118 without doubts, its main attraction is the translation of websites locally (browser-based), since cloud services are not required (for example, Google Translate or Bing Translator). In other words, everything happens locally without sending any data to Microsoft, Google or other companies.

The local translation function It is part of the Bergamot project, which is open source and this is basically a wrapper on top of the Marian machine translation framework, which uses a recurrent neural network (RNN) and transformer-based language models

Other changes in Firefox 118 include support for video effects and background blur when using Google Meet in Firefox (these features have actually been supported to work with Firefox 115 and later).

In addition to this Firefox 118 introduces new math CSS functions: abs(), sign(), round(), mod(), rem(), pow(), sqrt(), hypot(), and log().exp().

In the android edition, It is highlighted that the ability to print a page. When you click on a pinned shortcut, its content will now open in an existing tab if the URL of 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.

For the bug fixes part in Firefox 118 16 vulnerabilities were fixed, of which two are high severity flaws are described as out-of-bounds write issues in the browser's FilterNodeD2D1 and PathOps components.

Another high-severity vulnerability was patched in the Ion compiler, described as a use-after-release condition, allowing an attacker to write two NUL bytes, causing a potentially exploitable crash.

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 in Ubuntu and derivatives?

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:

flatpak 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