Mozilla Firefox 117 is now rolling out to users across Windows, macOS, and Linux.
But don’t get too excited about its arrival, okay?
Given the rapid release cadence this browser uses, the days of blockbuster, feature-packed Firefox updates are long gone. We still get ace new features, but we get them in dribs and drabs over the course of a year, rather than in a a single, jaw-dropping release.
Which is why updates like Firefox 117 may seem unexciting (though I’m not saying this is a bad thing, before anyone jumps me in the comments).
Case in point?
The headline feature in Firefox 117 is a new hidden preference that allows users to “disable Firefox forcing the context menu to appear when pressing shift+right-click on a webpage as it can sometimes cause undesirable outcomes on certain sites.”
A local, privacy-friendly translation feature was expected to ship in Firefox 117 but, for reasons unknown, got held back for a future release — hopefully it’ll turn up in Firefox 118, out next month.
On Linux, Firefox 117 no longer shows a screen sharing indicator under Wayland. Mozilla say this “never worked as well as on other platforms”, and reason that since most desktop environments (such as GNOME) display their own screen sharing indicators, no-one will miss it.
On the fixes front, YouTube video lists (I presume they mean playlists) now ‘scroll correctly when navigating with a screen reader’ – which is good to hear.
And that, web development buffs and security fixes, is that.
Want to download Firefox 117?
You can get it (as always) from the official Mozilla website, or fetch it direct from the Mozilla FTP.
However, most Linux users should wait for their distro to deliver it as a software update. On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS or above this happens automatically, in the background, via Snap (though you can remove the Firefox Snap and install Firefox as a Deb on Ubuntu instead).
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