Firefox

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A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox

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151
 
 

I just pulled down the latest Firefox Dev Edition AppImage and still getting the same result. I try to login to GitLab and I get an endless loop of checking whether I'm human or not. I tried to turn off tracking protection for GitLab and Cloudflare and added both to accept all cookies. In the network tab it eventually shows 403s. Anyone else have this happen or know if I can disable any more safety/privacy features to get it working?

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Fingerprinting works by collecting bits of information about the browser and device to identify users. Couldn't browsers like Firefox see when a website gets such info with JS and either prevent or ask permission from the user for the website to make HTTP requests to upload such information to the website. Idk if they do something like this already.

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I did the tests on fingerprint.com/demo/ and https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ and they both said I have a unique fingerprint, even when I enabled privacy.resistFingerprinting to True.

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This is part of the Android release for Firefox 127.0.2.

Release notes

Please leave a comment on Bug : Android idle battery drain due to Firefox if you still experience this issue after updating Firefox and restarting your phone:

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I read the descriptions for the Dcentraleyes and LocalCDN addons which cache popular JS frameworks and page assets to enhance privacy and speed up pages that use them (since the assets were downloaded beforehand). Does Firefox have any built-in functionality to cache frequently used assets, or are there any addons that do so?

For instance, If I access Reddit.com a lot, I would want all the resources that all those Reddit pages have in common to be cached automatically to make loading pages from the domain faster.

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https://reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1dofyj1/how_did_mozilla_firefox_go_from_being_the_best/

Post Text

Seriously, every post I read that's upvoted is smack talking Mozilla in every way possible and it just so happens to take place exactly when Google quietly announces Manifest V3. Mozilla is not our enemy, Google is. Don't let all these bot upvoted comments and posts let you forget that. Has Mozilla made some questionable moves lately? Yeah.. the biggest being the purchase of Anonym. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-the-bar-for-privacy-preserving-digital-advertising/

We'll just have to wait and see how that turns out. But I found it amusing when I saw this post and it got so many upvotes immediately after Mozilla announced the purchase. https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1dkujuh/mozilla_anonym_is_a_datahoovering_monster/

Then Mozilla allegedly fired someone because he has cancer. https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/mozilla-is-trying-to-push-me-out-because-i-have-cancer-cpo-says-in-bombshell-lawsuit/ar-BB1oOjOZ

Then I was reading Mozilla android browser is suddenly the worst and least secure android browser.

It's never ending.. Honestly I think I am just going to take some time away from Reddit because it's becoming such a corporate shill and bot upvoted cesspool. I'm sure this will get heavily down-voted but I just wanted to give my two cents. Mozilla will always be my preferred choice for privacy and security and unless I see some actual changes within the browsers no one will ever convince me otherwise.

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Tldr: Theyre adding an opt-in alt text generation for blind people and an opt-in ai chat sidebar where you can choose the model used (includes self-hosted ones)

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  • Fixed an issue where YouTube playback may experience stalling under certain conditions.

  • Fixed an issue where the Private Window icon was displayed in the taskbar on Windows when browser.privateWindowSeparation.enabled was set to false.

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In 2023, a significant portion of Firefox downloads came from unknown sources. We believe many of them came from 3rd party websites that let you download Firefox. While some websites are okay, others can put you at risk of downloading an old version or a build with the wrong locale, leading to security risks, a bad user experience, or even malicious installations.

Help the Firefox team to uncover this mystery by taking part in the Firefox 3rd-party installer campaign!

There will be swag, and you'll be featured in our blog if you manage to report 10 valid reports. So don’t forget to invite your friends too!

Have any questions about this campaign? Join us on Matrix or watch the recording of the SUMO community call with Romain Testard, Principal Product Manager at Mozilla.

Please also help spread the word about this campaign by sharing this on your social media.

Keep on rocking the helpful web, The Mozilla Support team

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Mozilla did their biggest Reddit AMA yet on Thursday, June 13, with eight members of the Firefox leadership team. With 400 total comments on the post, they c...

162
 
 

In the latest Mozilla Firefox 127 release simply do the following:

  • Go to about:config in a new tab
  • ‘Accept Risk and Continue’
  • Search for browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.system.showWeather
  • Double-click the result to enable the feature
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Also from Jamie Zawinski yesterday: Mozilla's Original Sin

Some will tell you that Mozilla's worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web.

Those are different things and are very much in conflict. They picked one. They picked the wrong one.

165
 
 

I switched to Floorp two months ago since it has native vertical tabs (which I greatly prefer over Tree Style Tabs since its a little buggy) and it has been running fine, though earlier this week I got a bug where I set a hotkey and removing it didn't clear it (it still triggered), even after restarts. I tried switching to the tab to the left with CMD OPT Left arrow, and accidentally set a hotkey for toggle the synced tabs sidebar.

I use that hotkey all the time and it basically ruined my workflow, it takes much longer to switch tabs with the mouse. I just found a workaround where I run my Floorp profile in Floorp Daylight (the beta version of Floorp, equivalent to Firefox Beta) remove the hotkey there, then run regular Floorp again.

While I'm happy with Floorp's exclusive featrues, I really wish they were in upstream Firefox because this is a big downside of using a fork, it has its own bugs. And I have to wait for changes from newer Firefox versions to get merged.

166
 
 

This discussion on Mozilla Connect was updated today to include a demo video of the current progress of the addition of tabs in the sidebar.

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From the post:

In 2023, a significant portion of Firefox downloads came from unknown sources. We believe many of them came from 3rd party websites that let you download Firefox. While some websites are okay, others can put you at risk of downloading an old version or a build with the wrong locale, leading to security risks, a bad user experience, or even malicious installations.

Help the Firefox team to uncover this mystery by taking part in the Firefox 3rd-party installer campaign 3!

There will be swag, and you’ll be featured in our blog if you manage to report 10 valid reports. So don’t forget to invite your friends too!

Have any questions about this campaign? Join us on Matrix or watch the recording of our community call with Romain Testard, Principal Product Manager at Mozilla.

Please also help spread the word about this campaign by sharing this on your social media.

Keep on rocking the helpful web,

Kiki & Konstantina

168
 
 

I know I can spoof my useragent, it's just ridiculous that such a massive app doesn't support an equally massive browser.

169
 
 

There seems to be minimal information about this online, so I'm leaving this here so cooler heads can prevail in discussion.

Link to filing: https://archive.org/details/jyjfub

Notable portions:

Teixeira was hired as Chief Product Officer and was in line to become CEO.

Mr. Teixeira became Chief Product Officer (“CPO”) of Mozilla in August, 2022. During the hiring process, Mr. Teixeira had conversations with executive recruiting firm, Russell Reynolds Associates, that one of Mozilla Corporation’s hiring criteria for the CPO role was an executive that could succeed Mitchell Baker as CEO.

Also, shortly after being hired, Mr. Teixeira had conversations with Ms. Baker about being positioned as her successor.

After taking medical leave to deal with cancer, Mozilla swiftly moved to replace CEO Mitchell Baker with someone else.

Shortly before Mr. Teixeira returned from leave, Mozilla board member Laura Chambers was appointed Interim CEO of Mozilla and Ms. Baker was removed as CEO and became Executive Chair of the Board of Directors.

After returning, Teixeira was ordered to lay off 50 preselected employees, and he objected due to Mozilla not needing to cut them and their disproportionate minority status.

In a meeting with Human Resources Business Partner Joni Cassidy, Mr. Teixeira discussed his concern that people from groups underrepresented in technology, like female leaders and persons of color, were disproportionately impacted by the layoff.

... Ms. Chehak verbally reprimanded Mr. Teixeira, accusing him of violating [a] non-existent “onboarding plan” and threatening to place Mr. Teixeira back on medical leave if he did not execute the layoffs as instructed.

Mozilla's lack of inclusivity was a known problem

In February 2022, Mozilla commissioned the firm of Tiangay Kemokai Law, P.C. to assess its performance in providing a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace culture.

The report delivered in 2023 from Tiangay Kemokai Law, P.C. states in part: “MoCo falls into the Cultural Incapacity category based on leadership’s inadequate response to the needs of a diverse culture or else the need to create a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture, which is reflected in current systems, processes and procedures, policies and practices, or the lack thereof, and are incongruent with MoCo’s stated values and goals.”

Steve Teixeira has been put on leave.

On May 23, 2024, Mozilla placed Mr. Teixeira on administrative leave.

Mr. Teixeira requested a reason for being placed on administrative leave.

Mozilla did not provide Mr. Teixeira with a reason why he was placed on administrative leave.

Mozilla cut off Mr. Teixeira’s access to email, Slack messaging, and other Mozilla systems.

Mozilla instructed employees not to communicate with Mr. Teixeira about work-related matters.

Upon information and belief, an investigation into Mr. Teixeira’s allegations was finally conducted in late May 2024, but Mozilla did not do so under its internal policies and procedures regarding managing complaints of discrimination. Mr. Teixeira was not contacted to participate in the investigation into his complaint of unlawful treatment.

Coverage online so far

~~I say "alleged" because there appears to be no consensus on the veracity of this document.~~

Update: this appears to be confirmed.

This has received no "news" coverage besides one angry loudmouth (Bryan Lunduke) whose entire commentary career has been shaped by his political beliefs, regardless of truth.

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And this is 100% Youtube's fault, not Firefox's fault, they created this issue:

This problem is triggered by bad muxed VP9 bytestream served by Youtube, so it's not a regression on our side, this issue can also be reproduced on old versions Firefox. Usually when muxing a video bytestream, the video samples' timestamp should be monotonizally increasing and no overlap between samples. But there are some bad video samples in YT's bytesteam, they overlapped with the previous sample. Eg. [124416000, 125126000] and [125125000, 131382000]. The next one should start from 12516000 instead of starting from 125125000 causing an overlapping.

That overlapped sample triggers this and our WebM demuxer fails to calculate the next timestamp in that situation. The end time of video sample was set to the same as the sample's start time, and that causes a gap being detected for the next sample, resulting in resetting append state. When doing so, mNeedRandomAccessPoint would be set to true and that triggers the sample skipping mechanism per the spec.

Therefore, there would be many sample being incorrectly skipped and won't be added into the buffered range. When entering the buffering state, Firefox would be waiting those sample which has been skipped but Youtube thought that those samples were already appended. That makes the endless buffering happened.

Source: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1878510#c113 (Alastor Wu [:alwu])

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Straight to the point: Is there some way to add a button or shortcut to quickly enable/disable WebGL without having to find it in settings every time?

The only issues I'm having using FF are all related to having WebGL disabled, so I find myself reactivating it relatively often. I wish there was some kind of quick way to enable it for this session only, or for this tab only. If you have any ideas, please let me know.

174
 
 

I heard around the internet that Firefox on Android does not have Site Isolation built-in yet. After a little bit of research, I learned that Site Isolation on Android was added in Firefox Nightly, appearing to have been added sometime in June 2023. What I can't find, though, is whether this has ever been added to any stable versions of Firefox yet. Does anyone know anything about this?

Update: After further research, it appears that Site Isolation is not currently a feature in stable version of Firefox on Android. I don't know with certainty if their information is up-to-date, but GrapheneOS (A well-known privacy/security-focused fork of Android) does not recommend using Firefox-based browsers on Android due to it's (apparently) lack of a Site Isolation feature. A snippet of what Graphene currently have to say about Firefox on Android/GrapheneOS from their usage guide page, is: "Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they're currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface."

On a side-note, they also say about Firefox's current Site Isolation on desktop being weaker, which I wasn't aware of. "Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole."

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YouTube has worked fine for me using Firefox with Ublock Origin, with no lag, notifications telling me to turn off ad blocking, or any of the other issues users have reported here.

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