Firefox 128 allows translating selected text on a web page

Firefox 128 stable is now available for everyone. The release is notable for bringing with it an option to translate selection only, a new dialog to clear browsing data, JPEG-XL image support, and more.

Also, Firefox 128 is now available in ESR, but it doesn't yet replace Firefox 115 in there. In addition, the previous ESR branch is now updated to version 115.13.0 (two more updates are expected in the future - 115.14 and 115.15). Firefox 129 has been moved to the beta testing stage, with the release scheduled for August 6.

What's new in Firefox 128

Translator improvements

Added support for translation of selected text on a page (previously, only translation of the entire page was supported). The translation option is available in the context menu of the selected block. It uses the same offline translator integrated in Firefox, which performs translation on the user's local system without accessing external cloud services.

Clear browsing data dialog

A new simplified and unified dialog for clearing user data has been introduced, which improves the division of data into categories and adds information about the size of data saved over a selected period of time.

URL bar improvements

In addition to recommended links, the drop-down window that appears while typing in the address bar now displays recently performed and increasingly popular search queries. The feature is currently only enabled for users in the US and Canada.

Weather widget

There is now a widget to display the weather forecast on the new tab page. It is disabled by default, but you can enable it manually as described here. To enable the widget, the settings browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showWeather and browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.system.showWeather are provided in about:config.

Other changes

• Private Browsing mode allows you to play protected content from streaming services such as Netflix.
• When connecting via a SOCKS5 proxy, the browser will route DNS requests via the same proxy. For SOCKS4, DNS requests are still sent through the local resolver.
• Firefox 128 is an updated dialog for clearing user data, which was originally planned for Firefox 126 but required more work to reach the stable version. The new dialog makes it easy to clear your browsing history, cookies, site data, site settings, and temporary cached files or pages
• On-the-fly rendering of various types of content with text/* MIME types is provided, without the need to pre-load such files before viewing.
• Added support for image/jxl MIME type. To make Firefox display JPEG-XL images, set image.jxl.enabled to true in about:config.
• The Android version on devices running Android 14 and later allows the creation and use of Passkeys in third-party passwordless authentication management apps using biometric identifiers such as fingerprint or facial recognition.

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In addition to new features and bug fixes, Firefox 128 closes 20 vulnerabilities. 8 vulnerabilities are considered dangerous, of which 6 are caused by memory issues such as buffer overflows and access to memory that has already been freed. These issues could potentially lead to malicious code being executed when opening specially formed pages.

Download Firefox 128

On Windows, you can update to the latest version of Firefox by going to the About Firefox section of the browser's menu.

Alternatively, you can download the installers here: https://releases.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/128.0/.  There, pick the browser that matches your operating system, language and platform. Files in there are organized into subfolders by a platform, UI language, and include full (offline) installers.

Linux users should use the OS' package manager to get the latest version available for the distro. E.g. in Ubuntu/Mint with the official mozillateam PPA connected, you can run the apt update && apt install firefox command in a root terminal.

The official release notes are here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/128.0/releasenotes/.