Firefox 128.0 Adds Translation support for Selected Text

Firefox web browser announced new 128.0 release one day ago on Tuesday.

This is a new monthly release that introduces some handy new features. They include context menu option to translate a selection of text. Rather than translate full web page, user can now highlight single or a selection of text, then use right-click and select to translate the text.

This feature can be useful for learning purpose. You can read a foreign language, but there are always some words or texts you don’t understand.

And, after clicking the context menu option, there will be a pop-over dialog, showing the translated text, along with options to choose other languages, copy text, and translate full page.

This feature so far is in Beta stage, and supports translating from Bulgarian, Catalan, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian.

For US and Canada users, the release of Firefox now shows the recent searches or currently trending searches when you click focus the URL bar. For choice, it provides toggle options under Settings -> Search page to disable the feature.

Firefox 128.0 also re-designed the “Clear recent history” dialog. It kinda looks like the one in Google Chrome, which provides short description for each clear option as well as the corresponding data size.

Other changes in the new Firefox release include:

• Support playback of protected content from streaming sites like Netflix while in Private Browsing mode.
• Saraiki (skr) language support.
• Proxy DNS by default when using SOCKS v5.
• Improve microphone capture quality in macOS.
• New Privacy Preserving Attribution API (experimental), a solution to know how site ads perform without collecting data about users.

Get Firefox 128.0

For the official release note, as well as the download link, just go to Firefox website via the link below:

For Ubuntu 22.04 / 24.04 with default Firefox Snap package, you should now have the new release automatically installed. Just go check the about page to verify. If you would like to switch to the classic Deb package, then here’s a step by step guide show you how.

For Ubuntu 20.04, simply launch Software Updater, wait “Checking for Updates” process done, and finally install the package updates.