13 ms·

Firefox 118

416 points by N19PEDL2 3y ago

drewg123 3y ago
This is the version with local translation of web pages. It looks like they translate between Bulgarian, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish. I tried a French language page, and the translation to English seemed excellent. It was fun to watch the text change on the page as it was translated.
- darkclouds 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
    Are you implying that your stock Edge is feeding you altered text? If so, you should speak to a professional, and I don’t mean a computer professional. EDIT: someone who isn’t me should probably report the literal death threats in your bio.
    - darkclouds 3y ago
      [dead]
      - dang 3y ago
        I'm sorry, but we have to ban this account, as posts like this are simply not what the site is for: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. (I mean no disrespect toward the experiences you're articulating, which have obviously been deep and impactful.)
    - dang 3y ago
      Please don't cross into personal attack. It only makes everything worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dewey 3y ago
  Finally, that extension for Google Translate was really clunky and it was weird that this is coming so late while Chrome had a polished integration for such a long time already.
  - xnorswap 3y ago
    Not wanting to run it via a cloud service was probably a big factor, assuming google translate goes via the cloud. Google has no qualms about sucking up all your data.
    - jqpabc123 3y ago
      Google has no qualms about sucking up all your data. Google also has no qualms about you using Firefox. They pay Mozilla $450 mil a year to insure it stays this way.
      - syncbehind 3y ago
        Google absolutely has qualm about you using Firefox. Yes, they pay Moz money to keep them as the preferred search, but that's because it's the better of two options (no data at all from you, or at least your search data). But if you need evidence that Google has qualms about you using other browsers, look at how poorly supported other browsers are for google services.
      - JohnBooty 3y ago
        I don't claim to read minds or have inside information, but there's no doubt in my mind that this is largely a $450mil annual hedge against getting antitrust'd by the DOJ.
        jqpabc123 3y ago
        Sorry, that argument no longer flies. Goggle payments have done nothing but go up as FireFox market share has done nothing but go down --- to the point of insignificance, now around 3% world wide --- less than Opera. Paying a huge sum of money for a miniscule market share doesn't provide any reasonable hedge --- as evidenced by the fact that Google is in the middle of an anti-trust lawsuit and FireFox has played virtually no role.
- geewee 3y ago
  Extremely happy about this. Now I can finally ditch chrome for the foreign pages I couldn't quite navigate myself.
- AJRF 3y ago
  [flagged]
- miohtama 3y ago
  What engine is Firefox using under the hood for translations?
  - SigmundurM 3y ago
    Seems to be Bergamot: https://browser.mt/ https://browser.mt/
    - coder543 3y ago
      Following the links, it might be using the Marian NMT framework under the hood? I'm wondering where specifically the model weights are coming from, and it would be interesting to read more about the training process[0]. I'm excited to see a more open translation system that seems to perform pretty well and runs locally. It definitely needs to add support for more languages, and based on other models I've seen recently... I have to wonder if building dedicated models for each pair of languages is still the best choice. I believe SeamlessM4T just uses a single model (available in different sizes), and I have definitely seen that Whisper only uses a single model for multiple language pairs as well (although it was only specifically trained to translate into English). Similarly, virtually all of the LLMs are multilingual. It seems like a single model is able to learn shared insights that apply across languages, reducing the amount of training data needed for each additional language (or increasing the accuracy with the same amount of data), but I admit that I could be wrong. This has just been my perception of how things are developing. [0]: Some training info here, it looks like: https://github.com/browsermt/students/tree/master/train-student https://github.com/browsermt/students/tree/master/train-stud...
- ape4 3y ago
  I tried French to English and it worked well. Anyone know how big the translation data is?
  - febed 3y ago
    I think it’s using 4 bit quantized model (32MB - 46MB). See table 5 https://browser.mt/assets/D5.1.pdf https://browser.mt/assets/D5.1.pdf
- alberto_ol 3y ago
  I tried to translate this headline from the Guardian to Italian: "Ursula von der Leyen praises watered-down vehicle emissions compromise" Firefox translation is wrong: "Ursula von der Leyen elogia il compromesso sulle emissioni dei veicoli annacquati" It is the compronise that is "watered-down" not the vehicles. Google translation is better: "Ursula von der Leyen elogia il compromesso annacquato sulle emissioni dei veicoli" Both Deepl and Papageo don't translate "watered-down" and it could make sense, since "watered-down" can be considered redundant.
  - capableweb 3y ago
    > and it could make sense, since "watered-down" can be considered redundant. I don't think that makes sense and isn't correct, a translation should be a translation without subjective copy editing. It may be redundant or not, but it's not the job of the translation tool/service/person to decide.
    - foldr 3y ago
      This is a fairly clear case, but there can be more subtle issues. For example, consider this sentence (that I made up): We got in the car and drove across the island. Google translate renders this in Spanish as follows: Nos subimos al coche y cruzamos la isla. "We got into the car and crossed the island." This preserves the 'across' part but not the 'drove' part, which is left implicit. That is not an accident: in contrast to English, Spanish tends to be 'verb framed' rather than 'satellite framed' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb_framing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb_framing). In this particular case the translation is arguably fine because it is obvious from context that the manner of crossing the island was by driving. I am not a native Spanish speaker, but I think that there would be no way to make the 'driving' part explicit in Spanish without it sounding redundant and odd.
      - capableweb 3y ago
        I'm no Spanish native speaker either (only some years experience), but I'm pretty sure your example would be translated to: > Subimos al coche y condujimos a través de la isla > We got in the car and drove across the island. Making it explicit that you drove across the island :)
- PurpleRamen 3y ago
  And as so often with Mozilla has the translation-feature an awful user experience. It's not showing itself, unless you are on a site with a supported language. And supported means, the language-pack is installed. How are people supposed to discover this? Additionally, the auto-discovery seems to appear only once per domain? I tested it on Wikipedia, and after the first article, it never shows up again. But I guess this is ok, after all that dialog is Fu*ing huge. Couldn't they choose something more subtle? It's their own browser, they should have all the ability to make proper integrations for something like this. This is overall a really great feature, which could have great use for people, but as it's now, it's more likely to be removed again in a while, because "nobody is using it", like so often in the past.
  - coffeeaddicted 3y ago
    You can disable that the dialog shows up, then it's just a subtle icon. That it often doesn't show up at all is indeed a bit confusing. I can translate german to english or french to german, but english to anything doesn't seem to show up on english websites even thought it's an option when I'm on a non-english website. Well, it's a beta, so I assume this will change.
    - PurpleRamen 3y ago
      > You can disable that the dialog shows up, then it's just a subtle icon. And then? This would make it even worse, people will easily forget some random icon sitting somewhere.
  - tredre3 3y ago
    Thank you for that, I was wondering why the address bar icon wasn't showing up for me. You need to go to the settings, search for Translations, then click install all packs.
- anjel 3y ago
  Russian translation would have been quite useful
- botanical 3y ago
  It also had Russian in the Beta but for some reason removed it. It's the one I actually need from time to time
- seppel 3y ago
  How can I disable this? The popup is super annoying.
- yomlica8 3y ago
  I've been using the browser add-on for this feature. Did they merge it into the main browser then? My only complaint about it really is that it has no Asian languages.
xnorswap 3y ago
> Video Effects and background blur are now available to Firefox users on Google Meet Finally! That was fairly frustrating.
tapoxi 3y ago
Did they ever add actual vertical tab support? When they migrated to webextensions TreeStyleTabs was pretty hamstrung because it couldn't replace the actual tab UI anymore.
- forgotpwd16 3y ago
  TST cannot but can be done via userChrome.css. #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse !important; } Can even be done to auto-hide only when having TST opened rather permanently.
  - syncbehind 3y ago
    How would you do that latter part? I currently have a userchrome.css for something similar but I wasn't aware that you could have conditionals in css.
    - jeroenhd 3y ago
      Using a different size for elements matching a :hover selector is how a lot of CSS gets this done. The first result on Google (https://gist.github.com/olmstadfm/d6b4d37219e957d9cdcdb3ec88952c15 https://gist.github.com/olmstadfm/d6b4d37219e957d9cdcdb3ec88...) also seems to employ the :hover selector to accomplish hiding the tabs. I don't know how effective this particular script is, but it makes sense to use such a system.
      - syncbehind 3y ago
        Haven't had a chance to implement it, but this sounds rad. I never thought to use hover in userchrome.css! Brilliant! Thank you!
    - rmurri 3y ago
      I don't know about TST, but sidebery can alter your window title when it's active, so you can match css rules against it. #main-window[titlepreface*="Sidebery"] #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse !important; }
josefresco 3y ago
> The visibility of fonts to websites has been restricted to system fonts and language pack fonts to mitigate font fingerprinting in Private Browsing windows. Nice, I wonder if this will effect results here: https://www.amiunique.org/fingerprint https://www.amiunique.org/fingerprint Update: Still unique and the results show 215 Fonts which are 0.0% unique so I'm not sure this is working for me.
- mintplant 3y ago
  I dunno about this site. It claims that being on Eastern Time puts me in 5% of users.
  - josefresco 3y ago
    I tried EFF's version* and it also said my Firefox browser was unique: Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 179,689 tested in the past 45 days. However the fonts listed looked to be only system fonts so there's that. *https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
    - ComputerGuru 3y ago
      The EFF version also tells you for each metric how (dis)similar you are from other users/devices. Or at least it’s supposed to - for one of them which was supposed to be a true/false boolean test, it said my browser revealed -1.00 bits of information and shared its value for that test with 1 out of every 1 device they saw.
    - ta1243 3y ago
      I don't really get that "unique" fingerprint Sure I'm unique. I try it in private mode. > Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 180,370 tested in the past 45 days. Close down the window, switch VPN endpoint, and retry, and once again I'm unique. > Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 180,381 tested in the past 45 days. Looking at the values it seems they are identical. How do they know that the two tests are the same user If I try outside of private mode I see differences in DNT (set to true in private mode, false in not private mode) and in Hardware Concurrency (4 in private mode, 2 in non-private mode). The rest of the entries are the same. Nethertheless "Our tests indicate that you have strong protection against Web tracking."
1980phipsi 3y ago
Does this work with archive.today? I've been having issues with using Firefox with it recently. Fails a captcha for some reason
- xnx 3y ago
  Probably not Firefox specific. Problem can happen with cloudflare dns. Try changing your dns to Google 8.8.8.8.
  - 37658915 3y ago
    Believe it's a FF problem because of the default DoH settings they use, unless something changed.
    - ezfe 3y ago
      It's an archive.is issue causing Cloudflare DNS not to work, which Firefox uses by default.
    - ComputerGuru 3y ago
      I disable DoH on Firefox immediately because I am my own sysadmin (and network admin) and believe apps should use the DNS settings I’ve configured my device with. As such, archive.is has worked perfectly for me on all my devices :)
- sccxy 3y ago
  https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/ https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/
  - h2odragon 3y ago
    nice; but thats from 2019, there's a more recent issue i think
    - sccxy 3y ago
xfalcox 3y ago
I wonder what the deal with Google Meet was. Did Firefox fix this? Did Google team fix this? If this is retroactively fixed for the last 3 versions it must be a google-side fix right?
5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
Still crashing like crazy on my system. It started in 114 or 115. I've sent at least 50 crash reports, with detailed descriptions of what I had been doing in the first few. Not sure what else to do. After using Firefox exclusively since around 2006, I had to switch to another browser (which I am surprisingly happy with), because getting 10-20 crashes per day really interferes with the work. I've heard Linux support was down to like one guy who is doing half of the work in his free time out of goodness of his heart. Even if it's not true, sure feels like it.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  No crashes to report on Fedora here and I am using firefox everyday on different computers. I would first try it out again with a new profile. Have you tried the flatpak instead of the distro version to iron out a packaging issue?
- pja 3y ago
  Absolutely rock solid for me. Have you tried running it with a freshly created profile?
- muizelaar 3y ago
  Can you share some links to the crashes from about:crashes? You can use jrmuizel@mozilla.com if you want to share them privately.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
    Thank you, an actually useful reply. I will drop you a note tomorrow — it's late here.
- xethos 3y ago
  > Still crashing like crazy on my system I'm guessing Manjaro (my immediate guess) or nVidia (much less likely). Which actually makes me really curious which distro it is, because the maintainer for the distro presumably should have caught it.
- zaphod420 3y ago
user3939382 3y ago
The Firefox bug tracker is full of thousands of bugs with some sitting there for 10-15 years. I’d like to see way more focus on cleaning these up than new features and UI changes.
- blfr 3y ago
  No. Local translations and blurred video calls background are (unironically) very important.
- riquito 3y ago
  Every big software will end up with open bugs as old as itself
  - 0xcde4c3db 3y ago
    Usually either that, or they have a policy of closing bugs that are "too old" with no attempt to reproduce or otherwise follow up.
    - ilyt 3y ago
      Then inevitable "wait, this still happens" And someone closing new reports of same bug as duplicate of one that is closed, despise it still happening...
  - user3939382 3y ago
    It's not about the age of the oldest bug on its own per se, it's the number of them juxtaposed with their releases where fixing bugs is priority 0.
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
  No. This is the reality of mature software.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jeroenhd 3y ago
darkwater 3y ago
Just discovered this by chance today in my FF/Linux, I'm still on 117 > Video Effects and background blur are now available to Firefox users on Google Meet! (Note: These effects have also been released retroactively to support Firefox versions back to Firefox 115.) Now, does everyone know where the issue actually was? Giving that all of a sudden is retro-compatible, I would say at least a good chunk of the issue was on Google side
- hipsterstal1n 3y ago
  Most people believed it was on Google's side, possibly even on purpose to make people use Chrome vs. Firefox. It is no coincidence that the Firefox / Google Antitrust case kicked off two weeks ago and this magically started working better. https://www.npr.org/2023/09/12/1198558372/doj-google-monopoly-antitrust-trial-search-engine https://www.npr.org/2023/09/12/1198558372/doj-google-monopol...
  - spankalee 3y ago
    Read the issue I linked above. There seemed to be performance issues in Firefox, and the feature was turned off with a UA string test. At some point, spoofing the UA string made the feature work acceptably but broke other things. Then the feature was enabled, back to the versions where it worked on.
    - Dah00n 3y ago
      Doesn't invalidate the above claim that the slowdown could have been made by Google.
    - pantulis 3y ago
      I tried Firefox with Google Meet today and found the performance to be, ehm, not to write mom about. Still, it's nice to have it and my computer is not really the latest and greatest these days (although Chrome works fine).
- spankalee 3y ago
  I didn't read all of the comments on the issue, but it does look like it was a fix on the Google side: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1703668 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1703668
lucasyvas 3y ago
Obligatory "use Firefox" comment: Not related to the release notes, but I've recently discovered Chrome is unusable for my use case. I have two M-processor based MacBooks in the house - one runs mullvad (WireGuard), and the other a company OpenVPN. For some reason, both have major issues with Chromium-based software. I get ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED every couple of minutes and nothing can load. It kills XHR requests as well, so most web software becomes totally unusable. This also applies to Electron-based software like Discord and Bitwarden. Oddly, Slack seems unaffected so far but maybe it hides it / retries better. I don't know what its problem is, but the issue does not affect WebKit or Gecko or any other software on the machine requiring networking. So I've dumped Chrome everywhere. I've spoken with several others that are affected by this but I have not found any bug reports mentioning this so I gave up. I've been on Firefox for ages for personal use, but I can't even use Chrome at work anymore. I'm not sure how they expect people to use this browser in Enterprise with such a glaring issue.
- hapidjus 3y ago
  Been having the same problems, but I'm not using VPN at all.
- harshreality 3y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/mullvadvpn/comments/15v1cz5/err_network_changed_as_well_as_dns_probe_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mullvadvpn/comments/15v1cz5/err_net... Using the official wireguard client allegedly works, but I don't know how they handle ip assignment, which is the complicated part for commercial VPNs like that. Changing locations sometimes helps.
  - lucasyvas 3y ago
    This is a great tip, although I don't think that explains why OpenVPN has the same issue on this laptop I'm typing from right now.
    - harshreality 3y ago
      I'd speculate that the problem isn't related to the VPN connection, but to how the Mullvad client app handles the interface (especially if keepalives frequently fail and the interface keeps getting downed). Even the official clean OpenVPN app has its own sense of up and down tunnels, which could cause similar problems. Wireguard, at least in its official linux implementation, is much lighter weight and if necessary reestablishes an active session on demand (whenever there's traffic) without any interface-level tweaks. That's probably invisible to applications, or at least much less visible even if there are low-level syscalls that can inspect the state of a wg tunnel interface.
liminal 3y ago
Just noticed that Google Meet video effects are finally working in FF. That's one less thing I need Chrome for. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/google-meet-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/google-meet-fir...
warpspin 3y ago
The local translation feature would finally be a good new Firefox feature again. A pity though the number of supported languages is so small and does not include at least Chinese still.
- guerrilla 3y ago
  Surely that's a temporary situation. You have to start somewhere.
- yomlica8 3y ago
  The actually had Russian in the beta add-on version. I wonder if there is still a way to add it back. It was the most useful language, but I agree about Chinese.
ComputerGuru 3y ago
I think a huge chunk of web developers might be forced to switch to Firefox soon: Stripe’s API docs have become so big (and their asynchronous loading logic is so terrible) that Chrome regularly crashes for me jumping into section links in their api docs which made me curious to try it under Firefox. Happy report that slow DOM content loaded times aside, Firefox works great there!
- switch007 3y ago
  Those JS doc sites are getting ridiculous. Terrible user experience. Laggy, buggy, slow. Who thinks they’re a good idea? Docs should be docs, not full blown apps
  - palata 3y ago
    > Who thinks they’re a good idea? I'm sure there are many people paid to spend a lot of time in meeting rooms, talking about UX and how users need the latest trend of single-page website with blackjack and hookers. > Docs should be docs, not full blown apps I actually started reading RFCs a few years ago and found that they are pretty easy to follow. And of course man pages are even more approachable. One just needs to get used to the fact that it is text-only, instead of a full sensory experience like modern websites.
- r00fus 3y ago
  I noticed something similar 10 years ago - large XML documents simply don't render in Chrome but Firefox had no issues. Surprised this is still the case that Chrome hasn't bothered to resolve.
- clementmas 3y ago
  The Stripe API docs are also slow on Firefox for me. Even with a good browser, sites shouldn't use that much JS
AugustoCAS 3y ago
Whomever at FF came with the text on that page deserves a raise: hello :teapot: -> bonjour :baguette: HN unfortunately removes the emojis.
- morvita 3y ago
  Interestingly, there appears to be some localization with that page. I'm in Canada and see: hello :maple leaf: -> bonjour :fleur-de-lis:
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
Does anyone understand the Opaque Response Blocking feature? I'm not grokking the explainer for it. https://github.com/annevk/orb https://github.com/annevk/orb
Quentincestino 3y ago
"Unlike cloud-based alternatives, translation is done locally in Firefox, so that the text being translated does not leave your machine." Wait how is it even possible without having to download gigabytes of datas ?
- beagle3 3y ago
  It does download a fraction of a gigabyte per language pair; it does so on demand, so you only “pay” the storage for the languages you use.
- unstuck3958 3y ago
  It has been possible for quite some time. I remember a few years ago, Google Translate offered a offline translation option (for a specific language pair) on my Android that required a couple hundred of MBs of download.
- MaKey 3y ago
  It's possible with Neural Machine Translation models. Before being integrated into Firefox itself local translation was already available through the TranslateLocally add-on, see: https://browser.mt/ https://browser.mt/
nomdep 3y ago
The release notes for developers are more interesting (to me, at least) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Releases/118 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel...
yboris 3y ago
Don't mean to take it off-topic, but I'd love to see JPEG XL (.jxl) image format support (that's now part of Safari).
Night_Thastus 3y ago
The translation is very nice. Hopefully they add more languages soon! Been waiting on a feature like this for some time. There are addons but they've been finicky for me.
redsaber 3y ago
hopefully, Japanese/Korean/Chinese support soon
rado 3y ago
Still no :has() support? Getting ridiculously late now. It’s a major development in the web platform.
- clementmas 3y ago
  I thought :has() was already supported. It's becoming very popular. I'd also like to see FF support Scroll Driven Animations and View Transitions.
  - SushiHippie 3y ago
    https://caniuse.com/css-has https://caniuse.com/css-has Available behind a feature flag
hulitu 3y ago
> Firefox 118 I just upgraded my ESR. Now the dark mode is the default. Worse, the light mode would not work. Sigh... is there any quality manager left at Mozilla ? People, please, don't change the UI without a very good reason. You look like idiots wanting fame.
- cpeterso 3y ago
  Sounds like you were just updated from Firefox ESR 102 to 115. However, Firefox’s default theme hasn’t changed. It should still be “System theme - auto”, which selects a light or dark Firefox theme based on your OS’s dark mode setting.
  - cpeterso 3y ago
    FWIW, I think I just experienced a similar problem when updating Firefox Nightly from 119 to 120 (on macOS): I see light mode instead of my non-default theme, even though about:addons shows it is still selected. Update: I hit bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1855151 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1855151 in Nightly 120. The timing of two theme bugs after updating Firefox is suspicious, but this bug would not affect ESR 115.
  - hulitu 3y ago
    Mine is on Win 7 and selected dark as default.
    - cpeterso 3y ago
      I shared your problem report with a Firefox engineer. (I'm a TPM on the Firefox Android team.) If you email me your Firefox's about:support information (cpeterson at mozilla dot com), I will pass it along to the engineer. Had you already been using ESR 102 or 115 on Win 7? Or were you recently switched from the Firefox Release channel to ESR 115 (when Mozilla EOL'd Win 7 support in Firefox versions > 115)?
garfieldnate 3y ago
Can anyone say how FDLIBM improves protection against fingerprinting? They sort of gloss over this completely but I bet it has a very interesting explanation.
grahamjpark 3y ago
Automatic translation is huge for those of us living abroad! It's the only thing that keeps me going to Chrome from time to time.
ska123 3y ago
Firefox still a thing? Wow

416 points by N19PEDL2 3y ago

This is the version with local translation of web pages. It looks like they translate between Bulgarian, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish. I tried a French language page, and the translation to English seemed excellent. It was fun to watch the text change on the page as it was translated.

darkclouds 3y ago
[flagged]
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
  Are you implying that your stock Edge is feeding you altered text? If so, you should speak to a professional, and I don’t mean a computer professional. EDIT: someone who isn’t me should probably report the literal death threats in your bio.
  - darkclouds 3y ago
    [dead]
    - dang 3y ago
      I'm sorry, but we have to ban this account, as posts like this are simply not what the site is for: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. (I mean no disrespect toward the experiences you're articulating, which have obviously been deep and impactful.)
  - dang 3y ago
    Please don't cross into personal attack. It only makes everything worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dewey 3y ago
Finally, that extension for Google Translate was really clunky and it was weird that this is coming so late while Chrome had a polished integration for such a long time already.
- xnorswap 3y ago
  Not wanting to run it via a cloud service was probably a big factor, assuming google translate goes via the cloud. Google has no qualms about sucking up all your data.
  - jqpabc123 3y ago
    Google has no qualms about sucking up all your data. Google also has no qualms about you using Firefox. They pay Mozilla $450 mil a year to insure it stays this way.
    - syncbehind 3y ago
      Google absolutely has qualm about you using Firefox. Yes, they pay Moz money to keep them as the preferred search, but that's because it's the better of two options (no data at all from you, or at least your search data). But if you need evidence that Google has qualms about you using other browsers, look at how poorly supported other browsers are for google services.
    - JohnBooty 3y ago
      I don't claim to read minds or have inside information, but there's no doubt in my mind that this is largely a $450mil annual hedge against getting antitrust'd by the DOJ.
      - jqpabc123 3y ago
        Sorry, that argument no longer flies. Goggle payments have done nothing but go up as FireFox market share has done nothing but go down --- to the point of insignificance, now around 3% world wide --- less than Opera. Paying a huge sum of money for a miniscule market share doesn't provide any reasonable hedge --- as evidenced by the fact that Google is in the middle of an anti-trust lawsuit and FireFox has played virtually no role.
geewee 3y ago
Extremely happy about this. Now I can finally ditch chrome for the foreign pages I couldn't quite navigate myself.
AJRF 3y ago
[flagged]
miohtama 3y ago
What engine is Firefox using under the hood for translations?
- SigmundurM 3y ago
  Seems to be Bergamot: https://browser.mt/ https://browser.mt/
  - coder543 3y ago
    Following the links, it might be using the Marian NMT framework under the hood? I'm wondering where specifically the model weights are coming from, and it would be interesting to read more about the training process[0]. I'm excited to see a more open translation system that seems to perform pretty well and runs locally. It definitely needs to add support for more languages, and based on other models I've seen recently... I have to wonder if building dedicated models for each pair of languages is still the best choice. I believe SeamlessM4T just uses a single model (available in different sizes), and I have definitely seen that Whisper only uses a single model for multiple language pairs as well (although it was only specifically trained to translate into English). Similarly, virtually all of the LLMs are multilingual. It seems like a single model is able to learn shared insights that apply across languages, reducing the amount of training data needed for each additional language (or increasing the accuracy with the same amount of data), but I admit that I could be wrong. This has just been my perception of how things are developing. [0]: Some training info here, it looks like: https://github.com/browsermt/students/tree/master/train-student https://github.com/browsermt/students/tree/master/train-stud...
ape4 3y ago
I tried French to English and it worked well. Anyone know how big the translation data is?
- febed 3y ago
  I think it’s using 4 bit quantized model (32MB - 46MB). See table 5 https://browser.mt/assets/D5.1.pdf https://browser.mt/assets/D5.1.pdf
alberto_ol 3y ago
I tried to translate this headline from the Guardian to Italian: "Ursula von der Leyen praises watered-down vehicle emissions compromise" Firefox translation is wrong: "Ursula von der Leyen elogia il compromesso sulle emissioni dei veicoli annacquati" It is the compronise that is "watered-down" not the vehicles. Google translation is better: "Ursula von der Leyen elogia il compromesso annacquato sulle emissioni dei veicoli" Both Deepl and Papageo don't translate "watered-down" and it could make sense, since "watered-down" can be considered redundant.
- capableweb 3y ago
  > and it could make sense, since "watered-down" can be considered redundant. I don't think that makes sense and isn't correct, a translation should be a translation without subjective copy editing. It may be redundant or not, but it's not the job of the translation tool/service/person to decide.
  - foldr 3y ago
    This is a fairly clear case, but there can be more subtle issues. For example, consider this sentence (that I made up): We got in the car and drove across the island. Google translate renders this in Spanish as follows: Nos subimos al coche y cruzamos la isla. "We got into the car and crossed the island." This preserves the 'across' part but not the 'drove' part, which is left implicit. That is not an accident: in contrast to English, Spanish tends to be 'verb framed' rather than 'satellite framed' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb_framing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb_framing). In this particular case the translation is arguably fine because it is obvious from context that the manner of crossing the island was by driving. I am not a native Spanish speaker, but I think that there would be no way to make the 'driving' part explicit in Spanish without it sounding redundant and odd.
    - capableweb 3y ago
      I'm no Spanish native speaker either (only some years experience), but I'm pretty sure your example would be translated to: > Subimos al coche y condujimos a través de la isla > We got in the car and drove across the island. Making it explicit that you drove across the island :)
PurpleRamen 3y ago
And as so often with Mozilla has the translation-feature an awful user experience. It's not showing itself, unless you are on a site with a supported language. And supported means, the language-pack is installed. How are people supposed to discover this? Additionally, the auto-discovery seems to appear only once per domain? I tested it on Wikipedia, and after the first article, it never shows up again. But I guess this is ok, after all that dialog is Fu*ing huge. Couldn't they choose something more subtle? It's their own browser, they should have all the ability to make proper integrations for something like this. This is overall a really great feature, which could have great use for people, but as it's now, it's more likely to be removed again in a while, because "nobody is using it", like so often in the past.
- coffeeaddicted 3y ago
  You can disable that the dialog shows up, then it's just a subtle icon. That it often doesn't show up at all is indeed a bit confusing. I can translate german to english or french to german, but english to anything doesn't seem to show up on english websites even thought it's an option when I'm on a non-english website. Well, it's a beta, so I assume this will change.
  - PurpleRamen 3y ago
    > You can disable that the dialog shows up, then it's just a subtle icon. And then? This would make it even worse, people will easily forget some random icon sitting somewhere.
- tredre3 3y ago
  Thank you for that, I was wondering why the address bar icon wasn't showing up for me. You need to go to the settings, search for Translations, then click install all packs.
anjel 3y ago
Russian translation would have been quite useful
botanical 3y ago
It also had Russian in the Beta but for some reason removed it. It's the one I actually need from time to time
seppel 3y ago
How can I disable this? The popup is super annoying.
yomlica8 3y ago
I've been using the browser add-on for this feature. Did they merge it into the main browser then? My only complaint about it really is that it has no Asian languages.

xnorswap 3y ago

> Video Effects and background blur are now available to Firefox users on Google Meet Finally! That was fairly frustrating.

tapoxi 3y ago

Did they ever add actual vertical tab support? When they migrated to webextensions TreeStyleTabs was pretty hamstrung because it couldn't replace the actual tab UI anymore.

forgotpwd16 3y ago
TST cannot but can be done via userChrome.css. #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse !important; } Can even be done to auto-hide only when having TST opened rather permanently.
- syncbehind 3y ago
  How would you do that latter part? I currently have a userchrome.css for something similar but I wasn't aware that you could have conditionals in css.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    Using a different size for elements matching a :hover selector is how a lot of CSS gets this done. The first result on Google (https://gist.github.com/olmstadfm/d6b4d37219e957d9cdcdb3ec88952c15 https://gist.github.com/olmstadfm/d6b4d37219e957d9cdcdb3ec88...) also seems to employ the :hover selector to accomplish hiding the tabs. I don't know how effective this particular script is, but it makes sense to use such a system.
    - syncbehind 3y ago
      Haven't had a chance to implement it, but this sounds rad. I never thought to use hover in userchrome.css! Brilliant! Thank you!
  - rmurri 3y ago
    I don't know about TST, but sidebery can alter your window title when it's active, so you can match css rules against it. #main-window[titlepreface*="Sidebery"] #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse !important; }

josefresco 3y ago

> The visibility of fonts to websites has been restricted to system fonts and language pack fonts to mitigate font fingerprinting in Private Browsing windows. Nice, I wonder if this will effect results here: https://www.amiunique.org/fingerprint https://www.amiunique.org/fingerprint Update: Still unique and the results show 215 Fonts which are 0.0% unique so I'm not sure this is working for me.

mintplant 3y ago
I dunno about this site. It claims that being on Eastern Time puts me in 5% of users.
- josefresco 3y ago
  I tried EFF's version* and it also said my Firefox browser was unique: Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 179,689 tested in the past 45 days. However the fonts listed looked to be only system fonts so there's that. *https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
  - ComputerGuru 3y ago
    The EFF version also tells you for each metric how (dis)similar you are from other users/devices. Or at least it’s supposed to - for one of them which was supposed to be a true/false boolean test, it said my browser revealed -1.00 bits of information and shared its value for that test with 1 out of every 1 device they saw.
  - ta1243 3y ago
    I don't really get that "unique" fingerprint Sure I'm unique. I try it in private mode. > Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 180,370 tested in the past 45 days. Close down the window, switch VPN endpoint, and retry, and once again I'm unique. > Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 180,381 tested in the past 45 days. Looking at the values it seems they are identical. How do they know that the two tests are the same user If I try outside of private mode I see differences in DNT (set to true in private mode, false in not private mode) and in Hardware Concurrency (4 in private mode, 2 in non-private mode). The rest of the entries are the same. Nethertheless "Our tests indicate that you have strong protection against Web tracking."

1980phipsi 3y ago

Does this work with archive.today? I've been having issues with using Firefox with it recently. Fails a captcha for some reason

xnx 3y ago
Probably not Firefox specific. Problem can happen with cloudflare dns. Try changing your dns to Google 8.8.8.8.
- 37658915 3y ago
  Believe it's a FF problem because of the default DoH settings they use, unless something changed.
  - ezfe 3y ago
    It's an archive.is issue causing Cloudflare DNS not to work, which Firefox uses by default.
  - ComputerGuru 3y ago
    I disable DoH on Firefox immediately because I am my own sysadmin (and network admin) and believe apps should use the DNS settings I’ve configured my device with. As such, archive.is has worked perfectly for me on all my devices :)
sccxy 3y ago
https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/ https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/
- h2odragon 3y ago
  nice; but thats from 2019, there's a more recent issue i think
  - sccxy 3y ago

xfalcox 3y ago

I wonder what the deal with Google Meet was. Did Firefox fix this? Did Google team fix this? If this is retroactively fixed for the last 3 versions it must be a google-side fix right?

5e92cb50239222b 3y ago

Still crashing like crazy on my system. It started in 114 or 115. I've sent at least 50 crash reports, with detailed descriptions of what I had been doing in the first few. Not sure what else to do. After using Firefox exclusively since around 2006, I had to switch to another browser (which I am surprisingly happy with), because getting 10-20 crashes per day really interferes with the work. I've heard Linux support was down to like one guy who is doing half of the work in his free time out of goodness of his heart. Even if it's not true, sure feels like it.

prmoustache 3y ago
No crashes to report on Fedora here and I am using firefox everyday on different computers. I would first try it out again with a new profile. Have you tried the flatpak instead of the distro version to iron out a packaging issue?
pja 3y ago
Absolutely rock solid for me. Have you tried running it with a freshly created profile?
muizelaar 3y ago
Can you share some links to the crashes from about:crashes? You can use jrmuizel@mozilla.com if you want to share them privately.
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
  Thank you, an actually useful reply. I will drop you a note tomorrow — it's late here.
xethos 3y ago
> Still crashing like crazy on my system I'm guessing Manjaro (my immediate guess) or nVidia (much less likely). Which actually makes me really curious which distro it is, because the maintainer for the distro presumably should have caught it.
zaphod420 3y ago

user3939382 3y ago

The Firefox bug tracker is full of thousands of bugs with some sitting there for 10-15 years. I’d like to see way more focus on cleaning these up than new features and UI changes.

blfr 3y ago
No. Local translations and blurred video calls background are (unironically) very important.
riquito 3y ago
Every big software will end up with open bugs as old as itself
- 0xcde4c3db 3y ago
  Usually either that, or they have a policy of closing bugs that are "too old" with no attempt to reproduce or otherwise follow up.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    Then inevitable "wait, this still happens" And someone closing new reports of same bug as duplicate of one that is closed, despise it still happening...
- user3939382 3y ago
  It's not about the age of the oldest bug on its own per se, it's the number of them juxtaposed with their releases where fixing bugs is priority 0.
tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
No. This is the reality of mature software.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jeroenhd 3y ago

darkwater 3y ago

Just discovered this by chance today in my FF/Linux, I'm still on 117 > Video Effects and background blur are now available to Firefox users on Google Meet! (Note: These effects have also been released retroactively to support Firefox versions back to Firefox 115.) Now, does everyone know where the issue actually was? Giving that all of a sudden is retro-compatible, I would say at least a good chunk of the issue was on Google side

hipsterstal1n 3y ago
Most people believed it was on Google's side, possibly even on purpose to make people use Chrome vs. Firefox. It is no coincidence that the Firefox / Google Antitrust case kicked off two weeks ago and this magically started working better. https://www.npr.org/2023/09/12/1198558372/doj-google-monopoly-antitrust-trial-search-engine https://www.npr.org/2023/09/12/1198558372/doj-google-monopol...
- spankalee 3y ago
  Read the issue I linked above. There seemed to be performance issues in Firefox, and the feature was turned off with a UA string test. At some point, spoofing the UA string made the feature work acceptably but broke other things. Then the feature was enabled, back to the versions where it worked on.
  - Dah00n 3y ago
    Doesn't invalidate the above claim that the slowdown could have been made by Google.
  - pantulis 3y ago
    I tried Firefox with Google Meet today and found the performance to be, ehm, not to write mom about. Still, it's nice to have it and my computer is not really the latest and greatest these days (although Chrome works fine).
spankalee 3y ago
I didn't read all of the comments on the issue, but it does look like it was a fix on the Google side: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1703668 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1703668

lucasyvas 3y ago

Obligatory "use Firefox" comment: Not related to the release notes, but I've recently discovered Chrome is unusable for my use case. I have two M-processor based MacBooks in the house - one runs mullvad (WireGuard), and the other a company OpenVPN. For some reason, both have major issues with Chromium-based software. I get ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED every couple of minutes and nothing can load. It kills XHR requests as well, so most web software becomes totally unusable. This also applies to Electron-based software like Discord and Bitwarden. Oddly, Slack seems unaffected so far but maybe it hides it / retries better. I don't know what its problem is, but the issue does not affect WebKit or Gecko or any other software on the machine requiring networking. So I've dumped Chrome everywhere. I've spoken with several others that are affected by this but I have not found any bug reports mentioning this so I gave up. I've been on Firefox for ages for personal use, but I can't even use Chrome at work anymore. I'm not sure how they expect people to use this browser in Enterprise with such a glaring issue.

hapidjus 3y ago
Been having the same problems, but I'm not using VPN at all.
harshreality 3y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/mullvadvpn/comments/15v1cz5/err_network_changed_as_well_as_dns_probe_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mullvadvpn/comments/15v1cz5/err_net... Using the official wireguard client allegedly works, but I don't know how they handle ip assignment, which is the complicated part for commercial VPNs like that. Changing locations sometimes helps.
- lucasyvas 3y ago
  This is a great tip, although I don't think that explains why OpenVPN has the same issue on this laptop I'm typing from right now.
  - harshreality 3y ago
    I'd speculate that the problem isn't related to the VPN connection, but to how the Mullvad client app handles the interface (especially if keepalives frequently fail and the interface keeps getting downed). Even the official clean OpenVPN app has its own sense of up and down tunnels, which could cause similar problems. Wireguard, at least in its official linux implementation, is much lighter weight and if necessary reestablishes an active session on demand (whenever there's traffic) without any interface-level tweaks. That's probably invisible to applications, or at least much less visible even if there are low-level syscalls that can inspect the state of a wg tunnel interface.

liminal 3y ago

Just noticed that Google Meet video effects are finally working in FF. That's one less thing I need Chrome for. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/google-meet-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/google-meet-fir...

warpspin 3y ago

The local translation feature would finally be a good new Firefox feature again. A pity though the number of supported languages is so small and does not include at least Chinese still.

guerrilla 3y ago
Surely that's a temporary situation. You have to start somewhere.
yomlica8 3y ago
The actually had Russian in the beta add-on version. I wonder if there is still a way to add it back. It was the most useful language, but I agree about Chinese.

ComputerGuru 3y ago

I think a huge chunk of web developers might be forced to switch to Firefox soon: Stripe’s API docs have become so big (and their asynchronous loading logic is so terrible) that Chrome regularly crashes for me jumping into section links in their api docs which made me curious to try it under Firefox. Happy report that slow DOM content loaded times aside, Firefox works great there!

switch007 3y ago
Those JS doc sites are getting ridiculous. Terrible user experience. Laggy, buggy, slow. Who thinks they’re a good idea? Docs should be docs, not full blown apps
- palata 3y ago
  > Who thinks they’re a good idea? I'm sure there are many people paid to spend a lot of time in meeting rooms, talking about UX and how users need the latest trend of single-page website with blackjack and hookers. > Docs should be docs, not full blown apps I actually started reading RFCs a few years ago and found that they are pretty easy to follow. And of course man pages are even more approachable. One just needs to get used to the fact that it is text-only, instead of a full sensory experience like modern websites.
r00fus 3y ago
I noticed something similar 10 years ago - large XML documents simply don't render in Chrome but Firefox had no issues. Surprised this is still the case that Chrome hasn't bothered to resolve.
clementmas 3y ago
The Stripe API docs are also slow on Firefox for me. Even with a good browser, sites shouldn't use that much JS

AugustoCAS 3y ago

Whomever at FF came with the text on that page deserves a raise: hello :teapot: -> bonjour :baguette: HN unfortunately removes the emojis.

morvita 3y ago
Interestingly, there appears to be some localization with that page. I'm in Canada and see: hello :maple leaf: -> bonjour :fleur-de-lis:

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

Does anyone understand the Opaque Response Blocking feature? I'm not grokking the explainer for it. https://github.com/annevk/orb https://github.com/annevk/orb

Quentincestino 3y ago

"Unlike cloud-based alternatives, translation is done locally in Firefox, so that the text being translated does not leave your machine." Wait how is it even possible without having to download gigabytes of datas ?

beagle3 3y ago
It does download a fraction of a gigabyte per language pair; it does so on demand, so you only “pay” the storage for the languages you use.
unstuck3958 3y ago
It has been possible for quite some time. I remember a few years ago, Google Translate offered a offline translation option (for a specific language pair) on my Android that required a couple hundred of MBs of download.
MaKey 3y ago
It's possible with Neural Machine Translation models. Before being integrated into Firefox itself local translation was already available through the TranslateLocally add-on, see: https://browser.mt/ https://browser.mt/

nomdep 3y ago

The release notes for developers are more interesting (to me, at least) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Releases/118 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel...

yboris 3y ago

Don't mean to take it off-topic, but I'd love to see JPEG XL (.jxl) image format support (that's now part of Safari).

Night_Thastus 3y ago

The translation is very nice. Hopefully they add more languages soon! Been waiting on a feature like this for some time. There are addons but they've been finicky for me.

redsaber 3y ago

hopefully, Japanese/Korean/Chinese support soon

rado 3y ago

Still no :has() support? Getting ridiculously late now. It’s a major development in the web platform.

clementmas 3y ago
I thought :has() was already supported. It's becoming very popular. I'd also like to see FF support Scroll Driven Animations and View Transitions.
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  https://caniuse.com/css-has https://caniuse.com/css-has Available behind a feature flag

hulitu 3y ago

> Firefox 118 I just upgraded my ESR. Now the dark mode is the default. Worse, the light mode would not work. Sigh... is there any quality manager left at Mozilla ? People, please, don't change the UI without a very good reason. You look like idiots wanting fame.

cpeterso 3y ago
Sounds like you were just updated from Firefox ESR 102 to 115. However, Firefox’s default theme hasn’t changed. It should still be “System theme - auto”, which selects a light or dark Firefox theme based on your OS’s dark mode setting.
- cpeterso 3y ago
  FWIW, I think I just experienced a similar problem when updating Firefox Nightly from 119 to 120 (on macOS): I see light mode instead of my non-default theme, even though about:addons shows it is still selected. Update: I hit bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1855151 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1855151 in Nightly 120. The timing of two theme bugs after updating Firefox is suspicious, but this bug would not affect ESR 115.
- hulitu 3y ago
  Mine is on Win 7 and selected dark as default.
  - cpeterso 3y ago
    I shared your problem report with a Firefox engineer. (I'm a TPM on the Firefox Android team.) If you email me your Firefox's about:support information (cpeterson at mozilla dot com), I will pass it along to the engineer. Had you already been using ESR 102 or 115 on Win 7? Or were you recently switched from the Firefox Release channel to ESR 115 (when Mozilla EOL'd Win 7 support in Firefox versions > 115)?

garfieldnate 3y ago

Can anyone say how FDLIBM improves protection against fingerprinting? They sort of gloss over this completely but I bet it has a very interesting explanation.

grahamjpark 3y ago

Automatic translation is huge for those of us living abroad! It's the only thing that keeps me going to Chrome from time to time.

ska123 3y ago

Firefox still a thing? Wow