Firefox 118 Available With Performance Improvements, Automated Translations

And the translations are done locally!

"2023 es el año de Linux, como todos los años." < Translate
- That's a good translation
- Okay, time to dust off my spanish skills that are entirely based on watching Anacleto on Netflix that one time five years ago:
  
  2023 is the year of Linux, like all years.
  
  Is that about right?
- I can guess even without translation, The 2023 is the year of linux. bla bla bla
I've been using their translation extension for a while, as far as I can tell it does a good job. It's pretty impressive that it's local.

Nice to see it's getting on with the times, it feels like they do a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes, which is impressive, the web is a monster (math functions in CSS???), but user facing features have been kinda left in the dust for a long time now, like the highly requested vertical tabs, or desktop PWAs for instance.
I hope they'll make it more feature rich in the future, I still swear by it, but it's a pity seeing all these other browsers with shiny new features I can't ever use

Isn't there an addon for vertical tabs? I mean if you are power user enough to need vertical tabs you should be power user enough to install an addon.
- I do use them in fact, but it's a little clunky and not as well integrated as it could be, just like the translations that they're adding in, I've already installed the addon they released before, but nothing beats having essential features built-in following the same UX as the rest of the browser and having centralized, easy to search for settings.
  
  power user enough to need vertical tabs
  
  More like I can't ever manage my own tabs so they keep piling up 😭
TreeStyle tabs is my favorite addon.
- Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/
Other than desktop pwa, what features do the other browsers have that aren't available as a Firefox plugin?
- Profile switching is a big one for me.
  
  Also kind of nitpicky on my end, but I would like to at least have the option for H.265 support. I know they can't include it OOTB, but I can't even buy a license compatible with FF.
- There is a plugin for PWAs too

Firefox 118 Available With Performance Improvements >and< Automated Translations.

I fucking hate this news headline rule of never using the word 'and', it just makes headlines worse and less readable.

I'm assuming that you're not a native speaker, as I've seen many people in a Europe subreddit have difficulty with US headlines having different grammatical rules from non-headline text. They complained about them being not understandable; it's apparently not something that English classes cover.

Said forum also had people complain about title case use in headlines (the norm in American English, though not British English) and use of some words like "slams" that are a common convention in headlines.

EDIT: Here's a British English source listing some of the other grammatical rule differences for headlines.

I'm kind of surprised that nobody's done a Wikipedia page on headline grammar rules (or at least hadn't last time I looked, for people on that Europe forum), or I'd link there. It seems to me to be a common-enough issue that someone would have summarized them there, but apparently not.

EDIT2: It was a grammar difference that I wasn't even aware of until I saw it brought up there. I mean, if you'd asked me, I could have told you prior to that that headlines looked different, could have written text that "looked like a headline", but you learn grammar differently when learning a language as a native speaker -- you use articles and conjunctions and such before you've learned what they are, so you don't think about grammar the same way. As a second language, you already have parts of speech and grammatical rules under your belt, so the mental representation is different.

When I first ran into this, there was some guy, who I think was maybe German, insisting that a headline was incorrectly-written. I took a look and was equally insistent that it was not incorrectly written. He hadn't specified was was wrong about it, because to him it was so obvious that it was wrong, and to me it was so normal that it wasn't wrong and I couldn't even guess what he was talking about, so it took a couple rounds of back-and-forth before we even understood what the other was talking about. My English classes had never covered headline grammar (people in the US had been probably reading headlines for a long time before they were taught grammar in a school), and it sounds like his hadn't either, so neither of us had been consciously aware of the existence of a different set of grammar for headlines. But he was sort of doing the mental grammar diagramming that I would for Spanish, which I know as a second language, but don't do for English. The headline didn't diagram out at all using normal English grammar rules.
- It's just shitty writing
- I'm a native english speaker who understands it perfectly. I still think it's stupid, there is nothing wrong with throwing an "and" in there. If space is a concern just use an ampersand(&), it's literally one more space than using a comma.
- 100% native English speaker here and I also think headline compression has become problematic. ocassionally I will read a headline as diametrically opposite to its supposed intention. :-/
- Thanks for this. As a native speaker, it never occurred to me that headlines had separate rules that would be hard to parse as a non-native speaker.
- I'm not a native speaker no and it was never covered in english class.
  
  I know it's a news grammar thing and probably comes from wanting to save space in papers, I still find it very silly and much less readable.
  I also find title case pretty annoying but I think I've become more used to it since youtube videos are titled that way too and I spend way too much time on youtube.
Larabel has been writing headlines like that for a long time.

I've used the translations extension for awhile now, it definitely needed to be built-in! The fact it's done locally as well is really, really awesome. It would have been way easier for them to not do that, but I'm glad they did for privacy sake. Last few releases were boring but this is a really good one. I wonder if it'll come to Firefox for Android?

Though really hope they add more languages for Firefox translation, it's still pretty limited. Mainly I need Chinese/Japanese translations which seems really common so I'm not sure why it's not on the planned languages.

Built-in translations feature is awesome, I was already using the add-on version of the feature for a while.

Does someone know what service do they use to translate pages?

The translations are done on your device, so it works offline while respecting your privacy
- That's refreshing.
- We have offline translation tools?
- Not really an answer though. Is it an in house engine? Or a tool made by another company?
- I don't understand this comment
The Bergamot Project, made by a consortium of a few universities
- Thank you, I'll have a look at this. I'm very impressed!

Still waiting for something as basic as group tabs.
The current implementation in Chromium-based browsers is miles ahead of what any add-on can do in Firefox.
They need to get their shit together.

My brother in christ, you can customize the add-ons.

Tree style tab > tab groups.
- Can you make it look and work like both of these pictures?
  
  If yes: How?
  If no: That's my point.
  
  https://pasteboard.co/reOJFsgnv352.png
  https://pasteboard.co/LBO8gsk0I4PD.png
- Interesting but should be baked in.
I've been using tree-style tabs since I've switched back to Firefox. It works really well and I've even disabled the tab-bar and am only using the side panel.
imo the tab grouping extension in Firefox is way better than Chrome's built-in solution. I can't remember the name though since I'm on mobile.
I thought firefox containters would dp that?
Is there a proposal, are they working on it? Open a proposal if its not the case
- There is https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/native-tab-grouping-more-customizable-tab-bar/idi-p/303

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Ahead of the formal announcement on Tuesday, Mozilla today uploaded the Firefox 118.0 release binaries as the latest monthly update for this cross-platform web browser.

At least under Linux, Firefox 118 is showing some nice improvements over prior releases.

The Firefox automated translation support is done locally on user systems compared to cloud-based alternatives like Google Chrome relying on Google translation infrastructure.

The new CSS math functions supported in Firefox 118 include round, mod, rem, pow, sqrt, hypot, log, exp, abs, and sign.

The developer documentation also notes the HTML "search" element is now supported and outlines some of the other API changes.

Those interested in downloading Firefox 118.0 today can find it on the Mozilla.org server.

The original article contains 203 words, the summary contains 117 words. Saved 42%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I know I should be happy and grateful for this, but unfortunately I'm going to be the grumpy one on duty to say a resounding and exasperating: It's about time.

I've been waiting for this for over a decade full of ups and downs with few and bad options, for a while they even deliberately broke all the web translation addons without offering any alternatives.

In fact, it is only recently that there are two very good addons: TWP and linguist (which also has local translation). I hope mozilla will do more than just integrate the addon they released a year ago, because that one is inferior in everything and very pitiful.

I am sceptical that breakage was deliberate. An unfortunate side-effect of something else in a trade-off that Mozilla deemed worth it, maybe.
- At that time there were some addons that worked to translate web (not just selected text), and at least one of them was even recommended by mozilla.
  
  The problem is that to translate from google they used a remote code execution method, I'm not sure but I seem to remember that mozilla changed their policy to not allow that and didn't warn the devs (if mozilla simply didn't notice for years it would be even more worrying).
  In any case someone reported them all and they were immediately banned, some of the devs tried to reason with mozilla and look for workarounds but to no avail.
  
  Until alternatives appeared (after a couple of years?) it was necessary to install blacklisted or unsigned addons, which is a bit tedious.

Performance improvements are like music to my ears. : )

Automated translate! Finally!

Once translation supports Vietnamese, I'm 100% on board. It's the only thing keeping me on chrome, or in Google's ecosystem in general.

You can use Google Translate on Firefox.
- It doesn't integrate the same way, unfortunately.

Also fixed a weird bug I had where YouTube wouldn't load on my laptop but it worked fine on my PC.

Now give me voice control and let it talk back from Bing AI(don't send my voice anywhere)

Imagine being excited about a 2 year old version of a browser.

What?