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With the Firefox 122 release out the door, Mozilla has promoted the next major release, Firefox 123, to the beta channel for public testing so it’s time to take a look at the new features and improvements.
Firefox 123 doesn’t look like a major update to the popular open-source web browser as it only brings a handful of changes, such as the ability to translate text in tooltips (i.e. titles) and text displayed in form controls (i.e. placeholder) when translating web pages with the built-in translation feature.
As I’ve mentioned in my Firefox 122 article, Mozilla removed the Search Bar settings from Firefox Settings’ Search section, which allowed you to choose to use the address bar for search and navigation or add the search bar in the toolbar.
In Firefox 123, they updated the Search section by moving the Address Bar settings from the Privacy & Security section and also adding the long-awaited “Quick actions” option, which lets you perform various actions directly from the URL bar more quickly, such as clearing cookies or history, taking a screenshot, opening settings, viewing the page source, switching to a tab, etc.
Once again, the Cookie Banner Blocker (previously called Cookie Banner Reduction) is available in the Privacy & Security section when enabled to allow Firefox to automatically refuse cookie banners on supported sites.
For web developers, Firefox 123 promises to implement linearRGB interpolation for SVG gradients, as well as the existing sRGB interpolation (customizable via the color-interpolation property), full support for Early Hints by enabling Preload and Modulepreload support, and support for declarative ShadowDOM to provide devs with greater flexibility and improved ergonomics when working with ShadowDOMs directly within HTML.
Also for web developers, Firefox 123 will fall back to using the default replaced element values of 300px width and 150px height to prevent SVG feImage elements from failing to render when they pointed to SVG content with a root element that had non-percentage width and height values, and support for applying audio echo cancellation to microphone inputs when the audio output is redirected to another device with setSinkId().
Last but not least, Firefox 123 improves the Network Monitor to support saving a response body to disk through the “Save Response As” context menu item, which replaces the previous “Save Image” context menu item that only supported saving images.
Mozilla plans to release Firefox 123 on February 20th, 2024. Until then, you can try out the latest beta release by downloading either the binary or DEB packages from Mozilla.org, but please keep in mind not to use these pre-release versions for production work.
Last updated 3 months ago
