Firefox 117 Beta: Built-In Translation and New Features

Rohan Timalsina

August 23, 2023 - TuxCare expert team

After Firefox 116 was made available on the stable channel, Mozilla moved Firefox 117, the following major release, to the beta channel and released the first beta version for testing purposes.

A new feature has been introduced that automatically translates the web content. When you click on the “Translate page” option, a pop-up dialog box will appear where you can select the languages for translation. According to Mozilla, the translation of web pages will be done locally in Firefox in order to safeguard users’ privacy. As of now, this new translation feature is in the beta stage.

Firefox 117: Other Changes

During the beta development stage, the Cookie Banner Reduction (which is not enabled by default) and Quick Actions in the address bar features are resurfacing. We can only hope these features to be included in the final Firefox 117 release because they have been delayed for the previous three editions.

Also, this version will take away the screen-sharing indicator for Linux users on Wayland systems. This decision was made because several well-liked Linux desktop environments already had sharing indicators.

The addition of a new preference called dom.event.contextmenu.shift_suppresses_event enables users to disable forcing the context menu to appear when clicking the Shift+right-click shortcut on a webpage.

Furthermore, it will support inserting photos into content editable and designMode elements for Android users. Earlier, only plain text and HTML content could be pasted into these elements in Firefox for Android.

With a new CSS compatibility tooltip to the Developer Tools Inspector, the upcoming release promises to improve the web compatibility inspection for web developers. An icon next to properties that can cause web compatibility problems makes the functionality evident.

On August 29, 2023, Mozilla will make the stable version of Firefox 117 available. Till then, you can download the binaries from the official website and test the new updates in the latest beta version.

The sources for this article include a story from 9to5Linux.

Summary