We have had to wait several months to be able to start testing this function in the stable version of the browser, but we already have it here. Mozilla has been testing a tool to translate entire pages and do it as usual, protecting our privacy, and that tool has started to be available with the Firefox 118 whose release it has become official a few moments ago. Translating pages is something that many other browsers have done since we can't remember when, but Mozilla's thing is a bit different.
For example, Vivaldi, which also aims to respect our privacy, translate the pages using Lingvanex, which is supposed to be a good translator that does not collect information about our data. Mozilla has thought of something different: in a similar way to the corrector dictionary, we can download languages to translate web pages locally, and, since it does not depend on any server, it will respect our privacy as much as possible.
Firefox 118 starts translating pages in 8 languages
Initially, Firefox 118 will be able to translate German, Bulgarian, French, English, Italian, Dutch, Polish and Portuguese, a total of 8 languages. By default it is only installed in German, so if you want to translate from English you have to go to Settings, search for translations and, in the window where you see the languages, click on "Install" for the languages you want translate. The tool has been launched in beta phase.
The rest of the list of new features includes the following:
- Web Audio in Firefox now uses the FDLIBM math library on all systems to improve anonymity with Fingerprint Protection.
- Font visibility on websites has been restricted to system fonts and language pack fonts to mitigate font fingerprinting in private browsing windows.
- Video effects and background blur are now available to Firefox users in Google Meet, and this has been backported to Firefox 115.
- Firefox Suggest users (US only at this time) will be able to see suggestions for browser add-ons in the address bar based on their keywords.
- 10 new CSS math functions supported: round, mod, rem, pow, sqrt, hypot, log, exp, abs and sign.
- OpaqueResponseBlocking is now enabled by default.
- Various bug and security fixes.
Firefox 118 can now be downloaded since official website. In the next few hours they will update the snap package, the flatpak and it will begin to reach the repositories of the different Linux distributions in a time that will depend on the philosophy of each one.