Firefox 118 Release Overview

The web browser Firefox 118 has been officially released, along with an update to the long-term support branch, version 115.3.0. The beta version of Firefox 119 is now available for testing, with its release scheduled for October 24.

Main New Features in Firefox 118

• Built-in Machine Translation: Firefox 118 now includes a self-contained automated machine translation system enabled by default. This system translates text between languages directly on the user’s device, without relying on external cloud services. The translation engine is based on the open-source Bergamot project, which wraps around the Marian machine translation framework using recurrent neural networks (RNN) and transformer-based language models. Models are available for English, Bulgarian, Danish, German, French, Spanish, Polish, Italian, and Portuguese (Russian is not included, but an older model can be downloaded from GitHub).
• Web Audio API Security: The Web Audio API now uses the FDLIBM math library, enhancing protection against indirect user identification methods.
• Font Restrictions in Private Browsing: To further protect user privacy in private browsing mode, websites can now only access system fonts and fonts from standard language packs.
• Google Meet Enhancements: When using Google Meet in Firefox, visual effects are now supported, including background blur.
• Address Bar Add-on Recommendations: The address bar now displays recommended browser add-ons based on the keywords you enter. This feature is currently available only to users in the United States.
• New CSS Math Functions: Ten new mathematical functions have been added to CSS: abs(), sign(), round(), mod(), rem(), pow(), sqrt(), hypot(), log(), and exp().
• CSS font-size-adjust Update: The “from-font” parameter is now supported, allowing the use of metrics from the first available font.
• Permissions-Policy Header Update: The HTTP header Permissions-Policy now supports the publickey-credentials-get value, enabling the use of the Web Authentication API for obtaining public key credentials (navigator.credentials.get({publicKey})).
• ORB (Opaque Response Blocking): ORB is now enabled by default, replacing CORB (Cross-Origin Read Blocking) to block resource loading from third-party domains.
• HTML <search> Element Support: Firefox now supports the <search> HTML element, which groups elements used for search or content filtering (for example, search forms and displayed results can be placed inside <search>).
• MathML Update: All mathvariant attribute values in MathML, except “normal,” are now deprecated.
• Android Version Improvements: The Android version now allows printing web pages. When tapping a pinned shortcut, its content opens in an existing tab if the URL matches. The button for clearing site-related local data has been moved from “Browsing history and site data” to the “Cookies and site data” menu.

Security Fixes

In addition to new features and bug fixes, Firefox 118 addresses 16 security vulnerabilities. Thirteen of these (eight grouped under CVE-2023-5176) are marked as critical and are related to memory management issues, such as buffer overflows and use-after-free errors. These vulnerabilities could potentially allow attackers to execute malicious code when a specially crafted page is opened.