Now that Firefox 121 has made its arrival in the stable software repositories of various GNU/Linux distributions, those curious to try the upcoming major release, Firefox 122, have the ability to download the most recent beta version.
At first glance, Firefox 122 appears to be a minor update to the well-known open-source web browser, which is used as default on numerous GNU/Linux distributions. It pledges to enhance the effectiveness of the newly introduced built-in translation feature found in Firefox 118, providing more reliable translations that no longer cause interactive widgets on certain websites to malfunction and minimize the possibility of content disappearing upon translation.
Additionally, Firefox 122 commits to augmenting web browser compatibility for line breaking by aligning the line-breaking guidelines with the Unicode Standard. It will also show images and descriptions for search suggestions, given that they’re provided by the search engine. Moreover, for users from East Asia and South East Asia, the update ensures correct support for language-sensitive word selection upon a double-click on the text.
Furthermore, with the onset of Firefox 122, scripts will be permitted to store cacheAPI data in Private Browsing mode. To bolster user privacy, Firefox 122 will tarnish filters that employ currentColor as an input.
“Since color can be set by the :visited pseudo selector, it potentially contains privacy-sensitive information and therefore these primitives must be marked as tainted. This means that if you use such a filter you won’t be able to read the filter output from canvas,” said Mozilla.
I’ve also noticed that Firefox 122 no longer offers the Snippets option in Settings > Home which provided users with tips and news from Mozilla and Firefox, nor the Search Bar settings in Settings > Search that allowed you to choose between using the address bar for search and navigation or add the search bar in toolbar.
Firefox for Android received quite some attention during this release bringing the ability to report the OS version as “Android 10” in Firefox Android’s User-Agent string to reduce user fingerprinting information and improve compatibility with some websites.
Furthermore, Android users of Firefox will have the ability to make the web browser their default PDF reader and activate the Global Privacy Control feature, which requests websites not to distribute or sell their browsing information. This can be turned on through Settings > Enhanced Tracking Protection > Instruct websites not to distribute & sell information.
Web developers are to be provided with support for animating the SVG viewBox attribute through SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) by Firefox 122, in addition to support for the LargestContentfulPaint API, support for the showPicker method on <select> elements, as well as ray() functionality on the offset-path CSS property.
Moreover, Firefox 122 will introduce support for basic-shape and coord-box on the offset-path CSS property, along with rect() and xywh() basic shapes on the clip-path and offset-path CSS properties, the Screen Wake Lock API, <hr>-in-<select>, as well as the capability to identify the “webauthn” autocomplete token.
Lastly, Firefox 122 is set to modify the fallback URL parser for unknown schemes to DefaultURI. This aims to enhance specification adherence and web compatibility. Additionally, it plans to enable the ArrayBuffer.prototype.transfer proposal methods that allow for the transference of ownership of ArrayBuffer data.
The release of Firefox 122 is scheduled by Mozilla on 23rd January 2024. You can try out the latest beta version of Firefox 122 by downloading the binaries from Mozilla’s download server. However, bear in mind not to use this pre-release version for production activities.