Mozilla has released the final build of the Firefox 128 open-source web browser, which will be officially announced on July 9th, 2024. Let’s explore the new features and improvements.
Highlights of Mozilla Firefox 128 include a revamped dialog to clear user data, initially planned for Firefox 126. The new dialog allows users to easily clear their browsing history, cookies, site data, site settings, and temporary cached files or pages.
The dialog resembles the one found in the open-source Chromium web browser, enabling users to clean data from a specific period (last hour, last two hours, last four hours, today, or everything) and providing insights into the site data size corresponding to the selected time range.
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Another interesting change in Firefox 128 is a “Show trending search suggestions” option added to the Search Suggestions options in Settings > Search which will show trending topics and search queries from Google Trending Searches when you search in the address bar. This option is enabled by default in Firefox 128, along with another new option called “Show recent searches.”
Another new feature in Firefox 128 is called “Website Advertising Preferences” and it’s implemented in the Privacy & Security settings with an option to allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement. This feature is enabled by default and will help sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about you.
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Also new in Firefox 128 is support for playing protected content from video streaming sites like Netflix in the Private Browsing mode, support for rendering more text/* file types inline, and support for proxying DNS by default when using SOCKS v5 to avoid leaking DNS queries to the network.
It also brings support for the Saraiki (skr) language, the ability to translate selections of text and hyperlinked text to other languages from the context menu, the ability to create and use Passkeys in third-party Passkey management apps on Firefox for Android, and improved audio quality for macOS users.
For web developers, Firefox 128 adds support for @property and the CSS properties-and-values API, as well as support for Resizeable ArrayBuffers and Growable SharedArrayBuffers in SpiderMonkey to allow changing the size of an ArrayBuffer without having to allocate a new buffer and copy data into it.
Moreover, web developers get support for the setCodecPreferences method to allow apps to disable the negotiation of specific codecs, and the ability to display CSS rules specificity in a tooltip when hovering a CSS Rule selector in the Inspector Rules view to help them understand why a given rule is applied before another.
Last but not least, Firefox 128 changes the “Accept” header for images and documents to better align with the “Fetch” standard and other web browsers.
As mentioned before, Firefox 128 will be officially unveiled tomorrow, July 9th, 2024, along with Firefox 115.13 ESR. However, those who use the official binary can download Firefox 128 right now from Mozilla’s FTP server.
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