Those looking to escape the hold of Chromium-based browsers often look towards the Gecko-based Firefox, which acts as a privacy-preserving alternative to such options.
And, it has been a while since Firefox received some meaningful feature additions.
In a recent announcement, the developers have introduced the new Firefox 128 release that promises some useful improvements, and has a feature that isn't really as restricted as the developers claim to be.
🆕 Firefox 128: What's New?
Some key highlights of the release include:
- Refined Searches
- Better Translation Tool
- Intuitive Data Cleanup
Refined Searches
While this was already a thing for users in the US and some countries, the ability to see recent searches or trending searches from the address bar was added for users in the US and Canada.
As you can see below, on a Windows VM, I can also see recent searches along with the trending ones, in India.
This feature can be helpful if you are interested in seeing what the people of your country are searching about at any given time and get back to your recent searches quickly.
You can always disable this functionality through the search settings:
Better Translation Tool
In a bid to improve accessibility, Firefox's translation tool now allows you to translate selected text or hyperlinks directly from a context menu, making the translation experience more user-friendly.
Intuitive Data Cleanup
And, finally, we have the improved browsing data cleaner dialog which has been streamlined with the addition of data categories, data sizes and a time range selector at the top.
🛠️ Other Changes and Improvements
To complement the above-mentioned changes, there are a few minor refinements you should know about:
- Vulnerability fixes.
- Support for the Saraiki language.
- When using SOCKS v5, Firefox now proxies DNS by default.
- Inclusion of experimental Privacy-Preserving Attribution API.
- You can now play protected content from streaming sites (like Netflix) on Private Browsing mode.
- The root certificate used for verifying add-ons and signed content has been renewed, before the upcoming expiry date.
For more details on this Firefox version, you can give the release notes a read.
Suggested Read 📖
Abhishek Prakash
📥 Get Mozilla Firefox 128
This release is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS on the official website. If that doesn't work for you, then the FTP portal also has the relevant packages for all the platforms.
💬 Excited to try out this release? Let me know in the comments below!
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