Google Says It's No. 1 Search Tool Because Users Prefer It to Rivals (bloomberg.com) 170
Schmidtlein pushed back on claims by US Justice Department antitrust enforcers that Google has used its market power -- and billions of dollars in exclusive deals with web browsers -- to illegally block rivals. Users have choices, and it's easy to switch, he said. For example, Microsoft pre-selects its own search engine, Bing, on Windows PCs, yet most PC users switch to Google because it's a better product, he said. Web browsers offered by Apple and Mozilla, which makes Firefox, have long chosen a default search engine in exchange for a revenue-share that helps pay for innovations, Schmidtlein said.
Internet-Connected Cars Fail Privacy and Security Tests Conducted By Mozilla (gizmodo.com) 26
Other brands didn't fare much better. Volkswagen, for example, collects your driving behaviors such as your seatbelt and braking habits and pairs that with details such as age and gender for targeted advertising. Kia's privacy policy reserves the right to monitor your "sex life," and Mercedes-Benz ships cars with TikTok pre-installed on the infotainment system, an app that has its own thicket of privacy problems. The privacy and security problems extend beyond the nature of the data car companies siphon off about you. Mozilla said it was unable to determine whether the brands encrypt any of the data they collect, and only Mercedes-Benz responded to the organization's questions.
Mozilla also found that many car brands engage in "privacy washing," or presenting consumers with information that suggests they don't have to worry about privacy issues when the exact opposite is true. Many leading manufacturers are signatories to the Alliance for Automotive Innovation's "Consumer Privacy Protection Principles (PDF)." According to Mozilla, these are a non-binding set of vague promises organized by the car manufacturers themselves. Questions around consent are essentially a joke as well. Subaru, for example, says that by being a passenger in the car, you are considered a "user" who has given the company consent to harvest information about you. Mozilla said a number of car brands say it's the drivers responsibility to let passengers know about their car's privacy policies -- as if the privacy policies are comprehensible to drivers in the first place. Toyota, for example, has a constellation of 12 different privacy policies for your reading pleasure.
With Version 117, Firefox Finally Speaks Chrome's Translation Language (theregister.com) 18
The new feature is integrated, privacy-respecting machine translation between multiple languages. This was already possible in older versions, but it needed an extension, and that had two side effects. One is that the extension hooked deep into the core of the browser in ways that Mozilla wasn't comfortable about, and the other is that once your text had been sent out to a third-party website, it could be snooped upon -- but the victims of any snooping would blame the browser, even if it wasn't the browser's fault. To enable it, go to the configuration page (enter about:config in the address bar), and search for a setting called browser.translations.enable.
Terraform By Hashicorp Forked To OpenTF (theregister.com) 24
Firefox Users May Import Chrome Extensions Now (ghacks.net) 41
1. Load about:config in the browser's address bar.
2. Confirm that you will be careful to continue.
3. Search for browser.migrate.chrome.extensions.enabled.
4. Set the feature to True, which enables it.
5. Restart Firefox.
Mozilla has integrated it into the browser's import functionality, which users may use on first run or at any time from the Settings page. To do so, select Menu > Settings > Import Data (button), or load about:preferences#general in the browser's address bar and activate the import data button on the page. Select Chrome from the list, expand the available import options and make sure extensions are checked. Imports are usually limited to some data, such as bookmarks or the browsing history. Firefox is the first major browser, maybe the first browser at all, that adds extensions to the list of supported imports.
The feature is limited at the time to Google Chrome and select extensions. Even though Firefox and Chrome extensions use the same framework, WebExtensions, they are not compatible immediately. Firefox users who attempt to install extensions from Chrome's Web Store may notice that this is not working. Mozilla decided to create a list of extension pairs for extensions that are available on the Chrome Web Store and the Mozilla Add-ons Store. Instead of importing the Chrome extension directly, Firefox is installing the Firefox version of the extension from Mozilla's own extension store.
Mozilla Foundation Warns France's Proposed Web Blocking Law 'Could Threaten the Free Internet' (mozilla.org) 66
The bill in question is France's SREN Bill, which sets a precarious standard for digital freedoms by empowering the government to compile a list of websites to be blocked at the browser level. The Mozilla Foundation warns that this approach "is uncharted territory" and could give oppressive regimes an operational model that could undermine the effectiveness of censorship circumvention tools.
"Rather than mandate browser based blocking, we think the legislation should focus on improving the existing mechanisms already utilized by browsers -- services such as Safe Browsing and Smart Screen," says Mozilla. "The law should instead focus on establishing clear yet reasonable timelines under which major phishing protection systems should handle legitimate website inclusion requests from authorized government agencies. All such requests for inclusion should be based on a robust set of public criteria limited to phishing/scam websites, subject to independent review from experts, and contain judicial appellate mechanisms in case an inclusion request is rejected by a provider."
Firefox Finally Outperforming Google Chrome In SunSpider (phoronix.com) 40
Does Desktop Linux Have a Firefox Problem? (osnews.com) 164
But "I'm genuinely worried about the state of browsers on Linux, and the future of Firefox on Linux in particular..." While both GNOME and KDE nominally invest in their own two browsers, GNOME Web and Falkon, their uptake is limited and releases few and far between. For instance, none of the major Linux distributions ship GNOME Web as their default browser, and it lacks many of the features users come to expect from a browser. Falkon, meanwhile, is updated only sporadically, often going years between releases. Worse yet, Falkon uses Chromium through QtWebEngine, and GNOME Web uses WebKit (which are updated separately from the browser, so browser releases are not always a solid metric!), so both are dependent on the goodwill of two of the most ruthless corporations in the world, Google and Apple respectively.
Even Firefox itself, even though it's clearly the browser of choice of distributions and Linux users alike, does not consider Linux a first-tier platform. Firefox is first and foremost a Windows browser, followed by macOS second, and Linux third. The love the Linux world has for Firefox is not reciprocated by Mozilla in the same way, and this shows in various places where issues fixed and addressed on the Windows side are ignored on the Linux side for years or longer. The best and most visible example of that is hardware video acceleration. This feature has been a default part of the Windows version since forever, but it wasn't enabled by default for Linux until Firefox 115, released only in early July 2023. Even then, the feature is only enabled by default for users of Intel graphics — AMD and Nvidia users need not apply. This lack of video acceleration was — and for AMD and Nvidia users, still is — a major contributing factor to Linux battery life on laptops taking a serious hit compared to their Windows counterparts... It's not just hardware accelerated video decoding. Gesture support has taken much longer to arrive on the Linux version than it did on the Windows version — things like using swipes to go back and forward, or pinch to zoom on images...
I don't see anyone talking about this problem, or planning for the eventual possible demise of Firefox, what that would mean for the Linux desktop, and how it can be avoided or mitigated. In an ideal world, the major stakeholders of the Linux desktop — KDE, GNOME, the various major distributions — would get together and seriously consider a plan of action. The best possible solution, in my view, would be to fork one of the major browser engines (or pick one and significantly invest in it), and modify this engine and tailor it specifically for the Linux desktop. Stop living off the scraps and leftovers thrown across the fence from Windows and macOS browser makers, and focus entirely on making a browser engine that is optimised fully for Linux, its graphics stack, and its desktops. Have the major stakeholders work together on a Linux-first — or even Linux-only — browser engine, leaving the graphical front-end to the various toolkits and desktop environments....
I think it's highly irresponsible of the various prominent players in the desktop Linux community, from GNOME to KDE, from Ubuntu to Fedora, to seemingly have absolutely zero contingency plans for when Firefox enshittifies or dies...
Mozilla To Bring Firefox Desktop Extension To Android Browser (mozilla.org) 30
For the past few years Firefox for Android officially supported a small subset of extensions while we focused our efforts on strengthening core Firefox for Android functionality and understanding the unique needs of mobile browser users. Today, Mozilla has built the infrastructure necessary to support an open extension ecosystem on Firefox for Android. We anticipate considerable user demand for more extensions on Firefox for Android, so why not start optimizing your desktop extension for mobile-use right away?
Firefox 115 Released (mozilla.org) 61
* Hardware video decoding is now enabled for Intel GPUs on Linux..
* Migrating from another browser? Now you can bring over payment methods you've saved in Chrome-based browsers to Firefox.
* The Tab Manager dropdown now features close buttons, so you can close tabs more quickly.
* The Firefox for Android address bar's new search button allows you to easily switch between search engines and search your bookmarks and browsing history.
* We've refreshed and streamlined the user interface for importing data in from other browsers.
* Users without platform support for H264 video decoding can now fallback to Cisco's OpenH264 plugin for playback.
But the most important feature is that this release is the new ESR. Why this is important? y'all ask, well:
* Many a "downstream" project depends on Firefox ESR, for example the famous email client Thunderbird, or KaiOS (a mobile OS very popular in India, SE Asia, Africa and LatAm), so, for better or worse, whatever made it to (or is lacking from) this version of the browser, those projects have to use for the next year.
* Firefox ESR is the default browser of many distros, like Debian and Kali Linux, so, whatever made it to this version will be there for next year, ditto to whatever is lacking.
* If you are on old -- unsupported OSs, like Windows 7, 8-8.1 or MacOS 10.14 (Mojave, the last MacOS with support for 32 Bit Apps), 10.13 or 10.12 you will automatically be migrated to Firefox ESR, so this will be your browser until Sept. 2024.
Firefox Users on Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 Moving To Extended Support Release (mozilla.org) 50
Mozilla Stops Firefox Fullscreen VPN Ads After User Outrage (bleepingcomputer.com) 68
Microsoft Wants Firefox To Make Bing Its Default Search Engine (androidpolice.com) 52
The report also notes that there's also a potentially more juicy opportunity coming up for Microsoft if it really wants to get serious about pushing Bing. Apple's Safari browser, which is the main web browser on Apple devices, will have its Google contract expire next year. Despite throwing shade constantly, Google really benefits from the deal it currently has with Apple, and Microsoft could sweep in and try to get Bing to become the main browser on iPhones.
Mozilla Buys Fakespot, a Startup That Identifies Fake Reviews (techcrunch.com) 27
Windows Defender Finally Squashes Firefox Bug That Ate CPUs For 5 Years (pcworld.com) 85
The bug was causing Firefox to call on the service much more frequently than comparable browsers like Chrome or Edge, resulting in notable CPU spikes. Said CPU spikes could reduce performance in other applications or affect a laptop's battery life. The issue was first reported on Mozilla's bug tracker system way back in 2018 and quickly assigned to the MsMpEng service, but some more recent and diligent documentation on the part of Juglaret resulted in more swift action from Microsoft's developers.
Mozilla Launches a New Startup Focused on 'Trustworthy' AI (techcrunch.com) 61
Surman was referring to the rash of AI models in recent months that, while impressive in their capabilities, have worrisome real-world implications. At release, OpenAI's text-generating ChatGPT could be prompted to write malware, identify exploits in open source code and create phishing websites that looked similar to well-trafficked sites. Text-to-image AI like Stable Diffusion, meanwhile, has been co-opted to create pornographic, nonconsensual deepfakes and ultra-graphic depictions of violence. The creators of these models say that they're taking steps to curb abuse. But Mozilla felt that not enough was being done. "We've been working on trustworthy AI on the public interest research side for about five years, hoping other industry players with more AI expertise would step up to build more trustworthy tech," Surman said. "They haven't. So we decided mid-last year we needed to do it ourselves -- and to find like-minded partners to do it alongside us. We then set out to find someone with the right mix of academic and industry AI experience to lead it." Funded by a $30 million seed investment from the Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla's parent organization, Mozilla.ai is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation -- much like the Mozilla Corporation (the org responsible for developing Firefox) and Mozilla Ventures (the Mozilla Foundation's VC fund). Its managing director is Moez Draief, who previously was the chief scientist at Huawei's Noah's Ark AI lab and the global chief scientist at consulting company Capgemini.
Mozilla Launches 'Responsible AI' Challenge 35
New 'Ubuntu Flatpak Remix' Has (Unofficial) Flatpak Support Preinstalled (9to5linux.com) 37
Meet Ubuntu Flatpak Remix, an unofficial Ubuntu derivative that doesn't feature support for Snap apps and comes with support for Flatpak apps working out of the box. Several key apps are preinstalled in the Flatpak format rather than as a Snap app, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser, Mozilla Thunderbird email client, and LibreOffice office suite.... Support for the Flathub portal is installed as well, so you'll be able to install more apps with just a few clicks.
Rust Project Reveals New 'Constitution' in Wake of Crisis (thenewstack.io) 81
The Rust project interacts with, but is separate from, the Rust Foundation, which primarily handles the financial assets of Rust. Two years ago, the project had a very public blowup after its entire mod team resigned and publicly posted a scathing account of the core team, which the mod team called "unaccountable to anyone but themselves." It even suggested the core team was not to be trusted, although the team later recanted and apologized for that.
[Rust core team developer] Josh Triplett understandably didn't want to dwell on the kerfuffle that lead to this action. He focused instead on the underlying structural issues that lead to the leadership crisis. "As a result of that, there was widespread agreement within the project that we needed to create a better formal governance structure that removed some of those ambiguities and conflicts, and had mechanisms for dealing with this without ever having a similar crisis," Triplett told The New Stack. "We don't want to ever to have things get to that point again...."
The original Rust project governance structure evolved out of Mozilla, where Rust began and was nurtured for years. Around 2016 or 2017, a request for comment came out that established the Rust project's governance, Triplett said. It created approximately six teams, including the core, language, mod, library and cargo teams. Among the problems with the old model was that the core team became responsible for not just overseeing problems that arose, but solving them as well, Triplett said. That led to burnout and problems, said JT Turner, one of the co-authors on the new model and a member of the Rust core team.... Ultimately, the old governance model was "not a very precise document," Triplett added.
"It was just, 'Hey, here's the rough divisions of power,' and because that document was very rough and informal, it didn't scale to today," he said. "That's one of the things that led to the governance crisis."