An update on Mozilla's PPA experiment and how it protects user privacy while testing cutting edge technologies to improve the open web.

I look left and right, and I'm the only one who…

TL;DR: Firefox used to have a great extension mechanism based on the XUL and XPCOM. This mechanism served us well for a long time. However, it came at an ever-growing cost in terms of maintenance for both Firefox developers and add-on developers. On one side, this growing cost progressively killed any effort to make Firefox secure, fast or to try new things. On the other side, this growing cost progressively killed the community of add-on developers. Eventually, after spending years trying to protect this old add-on mechanism, Mozilla made the hard choice of removing this extension mechanism and replacing this with the less powerful but much more maintainable WebExtensions API. Thanks to this choice, Firefox developers can once again make the necessary changes to improve security, stability or speed. During the past few days, I’ve been chatting with Firefox users, trying to separate fact from rumor regarding the consequences of the August 2020 Mozilla layoffs. One of the topics that came back a few times was the removal of XUL-based add-ons during the move to Firefox Quantum. I was very surprised to see that, years after it happened, some community members still felt hurt by this choice. And then, as someone pointed out on reddit, I realized that we still haven’t taken the time to explain in-depth why we had no choice but to remove XUL-based add-ons. So, if you’re ready for a dive into some of the internals of add-ons and Gecko, I’d like to take this opportunity to try and give you a bit more detail.

Perhaps one day the internal browser wars will subside, my transit history will persist a single cache, my settings and extensions and preferences will export to a single file...

One can dream... instead there's...

Firefox
LibreWolf
Chromium
Ungoogled-Chromium
Iridium
Otter
Brave (via linuxulator)
Vivaldi (via ^^)

The first four receive an approximate equal share of my attention. Loader scripts for multi-profile non-Singleton-Locked states, alterations to pixel/dpi scale, de-clutterization, dark-plugins, blockers, ooooooh make it stop

#webdev #htmlfuuuuu #browser #firefox #chromium #developer #tech #migraine

#Firefox 129.0.2 is out now to fix an issue with screen readers prompting "Alert" when hovering over tabs and an issue where drag-and-drop operations would not work as expected with extensions that rely on this functionality.

#OpenSource #FreeSoftware #Linux #Mozilla

Google ramps up its campaign against ad blockers on Chrome.

I changed emails on my Mozilla account, and then trying to log in again with it, it prompted me to create a new account. I made a Firefox support post 2 weeks ago but got no responses.

A Mozilla employee recently released a Firefox addon to change the user agent to Chrome on sites the user enables it on.

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/
• https://reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1eic7bj/chroe_mask_makes_firefox_wear_a_mask_to_look_like/

I'm actually pissed. I and many other users on the forum got an email from Chris Hayes on this:

Hello,

This is a friendly email to make you aware that your personal email address is currently visible to the whole internet via Mozilla's Discourse forum. It will show up in Google Search results. The affected email is the one that this email was sent to.

Many users may not be aware that their email address is publicly visible and Mozilla has not done anything about it in the 4 years it has been known, so I've taken this into my own hands to inform you.

What can you do?

You can update your profile name to be something else (actually, profile name is completely optional, so you can leave it blank if you want).

Steps to update profile name:

1. If you search for "Mozilla Discourse forum" it should be one of the first results.
2. Login. (Top-right)
3. Click on your profile picture at the top right.
4. Then, click on your username, at the top of the dropdown menu.
5. Click on the "Preferences" button.
6. Change the "Name" field, and click "Save Changes".

How did this happen?

There's a misconfiguration with Mozilla's Discourse forum that when you sign up with your Firefox account, it will by default use your personal email address as your profile's public name.

This is not a new issue, and has been known since 2020. The Mozilla Discourse forum is not actively maintained by Mozilla, so this has yet to be fixed.

You are one of 4,630 other users impacted by this privacy issue. It impacts 19% of all forum users, and 28% of new users.

More information:

There's a Discourse discussion about this problem here: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/email-is-displayed-by-default-for-the-new-account/92266

If you have connections to Mozilla, please help escalate this issue to the right people. This is a serious and long-standing privacy issue at an organization that should value "Privacy by default".

Sincerely,@chrisA fellow Mozillian

I am not Mozilla: This is not an official Mozilla email, I do not represent or work for Mozilla. This is an email from a fellow community member spreading awareness of this unaddressed privacy issue.

I recently tried to implement push notifications, but it does not seem like fennec is supporting them. The same code works fine on vanilla firefox on mobile, Librewolf and Firefox on desktop.

Does anyone know whether Fennec should support push notifications?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/19635922

Especially ones that you find useful on android Firefox, as they seem to be less popular?

Recently got to know about bookmarklets due to a thread here in this community itself:
https://lemm.ee/comment/12623456
^An unrelated question: Is there some way to link comments so that they are automatically opened in home instances for eveyone, like how we can link communities and usernames currently?^

Some interesting/useful bookmarklets that I know of:

1. Bullshit.js as mentioned in that link
2. dotepub. It does say that data is sent to their server.
   For some sites it's better than the inbuilt save as pdf option.
3. A bookmarklet that opens the current site in G-translate
4. Saw a bookmarklet which works like reader mode.

The freecodecamp article on bookmarklets maybe useful for those new to it(It helped me). It seems cool.
https://wiki.greasespot.net/User_Script_Hosting links to sources for userscripts. Most of them seem to be desktop-centric.

Which are your favorites? Any cool ones that you have made on your own?

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Discussion

Right. I'm getting tired of seeing people dump on Firefox and Mozilla about this thing in the release notes:

Firefox now supports the experimental Privacy Preserving Attribution API, which provides an alternative to user tracking for ad attribution. This experiment is only enabled via origin trial and can be disabled in the new Website Advertising Preferences section in the Privacy and Security settings.

What is this? And why is it not something to get heated about?

Attribution is how advertisers know how to pay the right site owner when someone clicks on their ad. It's important for ad-supported sites that clicks get attributed.

Right now, attribution is basically incompatible with protecting privacy. Advertisers use every method of tracking you can name, and some you can't, to provide accurate attribution.

The Privacy Preserving Attribution API is an experimental way of informing an advertiser that someone clicked on an ad on a given site without leaking that it was you, specifically, who did that. Specifically, ads using the API ask Firefox to remember that they were seen, on what sites, and to what sites they lead. Then, when the user visits the destination site, the destination site asks Firefox to generate a report and submit it via a separate service that mixes your report with reports from other people and forwards these aggregated reports in large batches. Any traces that might be unique to you are lost in the crowd.

This is still experimental, being enabled by Mozilla on a site-by-site basis as developers request it. It's not a free-for-all yet, and I can only find one entry on Bugzilla of a site who's requested it.

Mozilla's latest changelog confirms that Firefox now has support for an Android 14 feature designed to consolidate passkeys and third-party sign-in tools. As of version 128, when you create a passkey for an account on supported websites, Firefox can pass these credentials along to your password manager — even if you're using a third-party password manager, provided that app also supports Android 14's upgraded Credential Manager.

"In the next few days, we will start the Nightly experiment which provides easy access to AI services from the sidebar. This functionality is entirely optional, and it’s there to see if it’s a helpful addition to Firefox. It is not built into any core functionality and needs to be turned on by you to see it.

If you want to try the experiment, activate it via Nightly Settings > Nightly Experiments (please see full instructions here).

We’d love to hear your feedback once you try out the feature, and we’re open to all your ideas and thoughts, whether it’s small tweaks to the current experience or big, creative suggestions that could boost your productivity and make accessing your favorite tools and services in Firefox even easier."

The most requested Vertical Tabs will make an appearance in the upcoming Firefox. The feature can now be turned on in Nightly itself without the need to rely on third-party extensions or separate Nightly builds.

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...

There used to be an option called browser.privateWindowSeparation.enabled, which ever since Firefox 106 back in October 2022 resulted in separate taskbar icons for normal and private Firefox windows. In version 127, this option has gone away, removed in this code change. Users complained on Mozilla's forums and on Reddit at the time, but it was at least possible to recombine the icons with the option in about:config – but no longer.

As you might imagine, people are not happy, although according to the official response in this complaint, it looks like the change will be reverted in Firefox 128...

cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/9940873

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])

Some Firefox users noticed playback issues on YouTube for several months. These affected high resolution videos only, from 1080p and up. To make matters worse, no clear pattern could be identified.

Some videos played fine, others would stop abruptly when they ran out of buffer.

Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a trailblazer in privacy-preserving digital advertising. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla to help raise the bar for the advertising industry by ensuring user privacy while delivering effective advertising solutions.

About Anonym: Anonym was founded in 2022 by former Meta executives Brad Smallwood and Graham Mudd. The company was backed by Griffin Gaming Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Heracles Capital as well as a number of strategic individual investors.

Below is the next installation in our series of community updates designed to provide clarity and transparency as we continue to deliver Manifest V3 related improvements with each new Firefox release.

In alignment with our commitment to an open and accessible internet, Mozilla will reinstate previously restricted listings in Russia. Our initial decision to temporarily restrict these listings was made while we considered the regulatory environment in Russia and the potential risk to our community and staff.