I have to admit that I don’t really like the native translation tool of Vivaldi, the web browser I use the most. The problem isn’t how it works, but the company that provides the translations. And it’s not that it’s so bad, it’s that if you compare it to DeepL, which understands context and much more, it falls short. But I also have to admit that I like selecting text and being able to translate it instantly. For those who prefer Mozilla’s browser, Firefox 128 arrives today with a similar feature.
The option will appear in the context menu that pops up when you right-click. To see it, you just need to select some text beforehand, then choose the “Translate Selection” option. What we will see looks like the following screenshot: a floating window that detects the source language, the target language, and the translation. There is a button to copy the translated text and another to translate the entire page if we wish.
Translate Selection
Among other new features, Firefox 128 now has a simpler and more unified dialog box for clearing user data, supports playing protected content from streaming sites like Netflix in private browsing mode, and is now compatible with the experimental Privacy Preserving Attribution API, which offers an alternative to user tracking for ad attribution. This experiment is only enabled via Origin Testing and can be disabled in the new Advertising Preferences section on the Website Privacy & Security settings page.
Additionally, it now allows inline viewing of more types of text/* files instead of requiring them to be downloaded for viewing, the root certificate used to verify plugins and signed content has been renewed to avoid imminent expiration,
Furthermore, support for @property and the CSS Properties and Values API has been added, a new bytes() method is provided on many objects such as Request/Response and Blob which offers a convenient way to get a Uint8Array typed array, and the specificity of CSS rules is now displayed in a tooltip when hovering over a CSS rule selector in the Inspector’s Rules view, which can help web developers understand why a given rule is applied over another.
On macOS, microphone capture via getUserMedia will now use system-provided voice processing where available, improving audio quality. In terms of languages, it is now also available in Saraiki (skr), and in the security section, it now uses the DNS proxy by default when using SOCKS v5, thereby preventing DNS request leaks to the network when using SOCKS v5 proxies.
Firefox 128 will arrive later today and will soon start appearing in the official repositories of most Linux distributions. Flatpak and snap packages will also be updated.
