Tomorrow, August 29, the launch of Firefox 117, and in about 24 hours you can test the stable and official version. As a detail, they have taken a little longer than usual to upload the new version to their servers, since sometimes they upload them on Sunday, but the important thing is that everything is ready for when they make the launch official. Perhaps it is information that is unnecessary (long live the bloatware bloattext?), but the fact is that the new installment of the red panda browser does not include many changes that the end user will be able to enjoy.
Firefox 117 brings many news for developers, like better CSS support or the compatibility inspection tool. The first will be seen by users, although it will be "code" that web designers will have to add, while the second is accessed with the F12 key and is for those who understand these things.
What's new in Firefox 117
- Support for credit card autofill has been extended for Firefox users in the IT, ES, AT, BE, and PL locales.
- macOS users can now control the tabbing of controls and links via about: preferences.
- To avoid unwanted results on sites that specify their own shift+right-click behavior, Firefox now has a preference dom.event.contextmenu.shift_suppresses_event to prevent the context menu from appearing.
- Firefox no longer displays its own screen sharing indicator on Wayland desktop environments. The system default sharing indicator will be used instead.
- Support for improved CSS nesting is now on by default.
- Firefox now supports RTCRtpScriptTransform.
- ReadableStream.from is now supported, allowing the creation of a ReadableStream from an iterable (async).
- Firefox now supports CSS properties math-style y math-depth and value font-size: math.
- Web Compatibility inspection has been improved with the new CSS Compatibility tooltip in the Developer Tools inspector. An icon is now displayed next to properties that could cause web compatibility issues. On hover, the tooltip indicates which browsers are not supported and displays a link to the property's MDN page so the user can learn more about it.
- console.clear() no longer clears console output if the "Enable persistent logs" option is enabled.
- YouTube video listings now scroll correctly when browsing with a screen reader.
- Various security fixes.
Now available
It remains to be definitively confirmed the translations. Until the last beta, Firefox 117 had a section in the settings called Translations, and it allowed downloading dictionaries to translate entire pages locally and privately. The stable version they have uploaded does not have this option, and what they upload the day or the weekend before is usually the final version.
Firefox 117 can be downloaded on the 29th from the developer page. Later they will upload the new packages to most Linux distributions, and their flatpak and snap packages will also be updated.
Many new features that the average user does not give a damn about… This is how Mozilla Firefox goes, on its ass, downhill and without brakes (at this rate, it does not reach 2025).
The translation of pages and the lack of a native ad blocker are two shortcomings that have been crying out to heaven for years. It is true that there are extensions that cover these deficiencies, but damn the fun that makes you need to install extensions to enjoy such basic functions.