Firefox 117 Released With Minor (And I Mean Minor) Changes (UPDATED)
But don’t get excited about its arrival, okay?
Given the rapid release cadence this browser uses the days of blockbuster, feature-packed Firefox updates are long gone. We still get ace new features, but we get them in dribs and drabs, spread out over the course of a year, rather than in a single blockbuster update.
Which is why updates like Firefox 117 seem unexciting (though to be clear: I’m not saying unexciting is a bad thing, lest anyone jumps me down in the comments).
Case in point?
UPDATE
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With version 117, Firefox finally speaks Chrome's translation language
The latest version of the flagship FOSS browser is out, and it's picked up one of the main features for which we keep Chrome around.
The Firefox version 117 feature list might not look all that impressive, but it does have a big-ticket feature that may tempt people back: automatic translation. The snag is it's disabled by default in the release version, and you'll have to manually enable it. Although it was enabled in the betas, Mozilla has decided to go for a staged rollout and not enable it for everyone until Firefox 118 in six weeks or so.
The new feature is integrated, privacy-respecting machine translation between multiple languages. This was already possible in older versions, but it needed an extension, and that had two side effects. One is that the extension hooked deep into the core of the browser in ways that Mozilla wasn't comfortable about, and the other is that once your text had been sent out to a third-party website, it could be snooped upon – but the victims of any snooping would blame the browser, even if it wasn't the browser's fault.