And the hits just keep on coming. After buying an ad tech company and working with Facebook to weaken Firefox’ privacy features, Mozilla is now integrating AI chatbots straight into Firefox with the recent release of Firefox 130. People are understandably big mad about this, and as such the calls for switching to alternatives is growing stronger. Considering the only true alternative to Firefox is Chrome and its various skins, those of us looking to send Mozilla a message are kind of relegated to trying out Firefox skins instead.

Switching to what are essentially “Firefox distros” to collectively try and nudge Mozilla back to making more sensible decisions instead of AI hype chasing is an eminently reasonable one. There’s more reasons than just that. Part of the reason I use Firefox-based browsers rather than Chromium browsers is because I want to preserve some choice and diversity in browser engines. The existence of a choice of different Firefox derived browsers may allow space for experimentation in designing better browsers. In Chromium land, Arc has shown that there’s an opportunity for quite radically rethinking how browsers work. Same for Orion in Mac/iOS-land.

This isn’t a detailed review of the different browsers, just a few comments and observations having tried them.

↫ Tom Morris

I have my reservations about using Firefox skins, mostly because no matter what you do, you’re still entirely dependent on the choices Mozilla makes during the development of the venerable browser. If Mozilla keeps deviating from the traditional goals more and more, the amount of work these Firefox skins need to perform to reign the browser back in will start to increase, and who knows if they have the manpower, experience, and skills to do so? More worryingly, will they be able to keep up with Mozilla’s release schedule, including important bugfixes and security patches?

My worries go beyond those basic things, though. Considerably fewer eyes will be going over any code changes these Firefox-based browsers make, and as recent history has shown us, infiltrating a small, understaffed open source project for nefarious purposes is a thing that happens. Another issue to consider is nebulous ownership of such Firefox versions, as are questions around who financially supports such efforts. Your browser is a massively important and crucial piece of software that holds and has access to a lot of your personal data, and you should be particularly careful about who owns your browser.

This is not to say each and every one of them is bad – just that you have to be careful about who you trust. Several Chrome skins, like Brave and Opera, have time and time again shown to be shady, untrustworthy companies pushing crypto bullshit, ripping off websites, have shady owners, and more – don’t use Brave, don’t use Opera – and there’s no guarantees the same won’t happen with Firefox skins riding the wave of unhappiness with Mozilla. Please be mindful.

I don’t have an answer for this issue, either – I just want to caution against throwing the browser out with the bath water and switching to a project you might not know a lot about.

Not too long ago, Mozilla announced it was going to extend its support for Windows 7, and was mulling over extending support for Windows 8.x as well, without providing any time frames or details. Well, we’ve got the details now.

According to the Firefox Release Calendar website, Firefox 115 ESR, the latest Firefox version with support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1, will continue receiving updates until April 1, 2025. Firefox 115.21 ESR is expected on March 4, 2024, which means users with old Windows versions have at least seven more months of support from Firefox.

↫ Taras Buria at Neowin

The same extension to March 2025 for Firefox 115 ESR also covers macOS 10.12-10.14. The reasoning behind the extension is simple: there’s still enough users on these older operating system version for Mozilla to dedicate resources to it, despite how difficult backporting security fixes to 115 ESR has become. Firefox is pretty much the only mainstream browser still supporting Windows 7 and 8, and that’s definitely commendable.

Earlier this year, I reviewed the excellent and unique MNT Reform laptop, an (almost) fully open source, very hackable laptop. MNT has just unveiled the upcoming follow-up to the Reform, called the Reform Next.

Being highly performant, modular, and upgradeable, MNT Reform Next gives you more freedom than any other laptop. Swap modules, print your own case, customize your keyboard. Since we are committed to open hardware, all sources are public.

While Classic MNT Reform is a portable device, we felt like a sleeker, more lightweight design would increase portability and make for a more flexible laptop.

↫ MNT website

The focus seems to have been on both performance and size, and I think the latter is especially important for a lot of people who might not have been too enamored with the original Reform’s chunky, brutalist design. The device has been made thinner by splitting the motherboard up into several connected, separate boards, that also happen to improve the repairability and upgradeability of the device. The battery pack has been redesigned for a smaller physical size, too, and the trackball option is no longer available – it’s trackpad-only.

The Reform Next is compatible with MNT’s latest processor module, the RK3588, and as such, packs a bigger punch. This SoC has four ARM Cortex-A76 cores up to 2.4 Ghz, and four power-efficient ARM Cortex-A55 cores up to 1.5 Ghz. This SoC is also available as an upgrade for the MNT Reform and the MNT Pocket Reform, and ships with either 16 or 32 GB of RAM and an ARM Mali G610 MP4 GPU.

Of course, the Reform Next will be as open as humanly possible, both software as well as hardware-wise, and it’s looking like a worthy successor to the MNT Reform. I’m incredibly delighted that MNT seems to have found a niche that works for them, and enabling them to keep developing and releasing hardware that goes against every trend in the industry, giving us entirely unique devices nobody else is making.

For certain use cases, it’s advisable to set up a read-only root file system, which ensures better reliability in case of system issues. Think of scenarios like a router (critical for network access) or a caching reverse-proxy, such as the one described in my series “Make your own CDN“.

While FreeBSD natively supports this configuration and some Linux distributions offer custom solutions (e.g., Alpine Linux), NetBSD stands out as an excellent choice for such devices. It supports nearly all embedded devices, is lightweight, and its stability minimizes the need for frequent updates.

↫ Stefano Marinelli

Exactly what it says on the tin. Friend of the website (a new term I just made up and will use from here on out for some people) Stefano Marinelli, fresh from his series about making your own CDN using the various BSDs, explains how to set up a NetBSD system with a read-only root filesystem for the special use cases where this makes sense.

It’s been two years, but we finally have a proper new Redox release: the Redox team released version 0.9.0 today. Since we’ve been covering all the monthly progress reports from this Rust-based operating system for a long time now, we’ve already covered most of the improvements in this new release, so if you’ve been following along there shouldn’t be any major surprises in here, but let’s do a quick summary anyway just so we’re all up to speed.

I think the primary thing anyone moving from the previous release to the new one will be massive performance and stability improvements, as well as the arrival of the first few applications from System76’s new COSMIC Desktop. Redox is led by Jeremy Soller, a System76 engineer, and since COSMIC uses Rust as well, it only makes sense for the two projects to start benefiting from each other’s progress. Porting Linux and BSD programs has also become a lot easier, which is also evidenced by a whole slew of new ports from those operating systems.

Redox works in both virtual machines and on real hardware, but the former is definitely advised over the latter. In the latest monthly progress report, which was published only a few days ago, it’s mentioned that Redox performance in virtual machines has improved greatly. The team discovered that reading the system time was a huge bottleneck in the context switching code, which affects virtual machines particularly hard because it needs to be read from outside oft he VM. Redox now reads the TSC using KVM’s paravirtualized system time API to remove this bottleneck.

Running in a VM, Redox is now becoming slightly faster than Linux at certain synthetic benchmarks, for example the same-core context switch latency when using POSIX pipes (tested with mitigations=off). More exciting optimizations are coming, both to reduce context switch overhead further towards the hardware limit, and to reduce unnecessary context switches overall.

↫ Ribbon and Ron Williams

As time moves on and both Redox and COSMIC improve, my excitement for this operating system grows along with it. It seems the people working on both projects have their priorities quite straight, and while I’m obviously not going to make any idiotic grand statements about how Redox will replace anything, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it become a fairly solid option for those of us willing to deal with the issues that come with running something that isn’t Windows, Linux/BSD, or macOS.

AppSumo is a marketplace where software developers and other entrepreneurs can launch their products, giving special offers to early adopters. Many AppSumo deals offer lifetime licenses, so you can throw in your support for an up-and-coming product and be rewarded with a deal-for-life that will save you up to 95% compared to paying monthly. If you’re a developer, AppSumo is a great way to get attention for your launch, and quickly find a cohort of savvy paying customers.

AppSumo deals are all limited-time offers, but this week they’re doing their “Last Call” event, where crowd favorite deals are brought back for a limited time (but only for members paying for the Plus tier).

The KDE project is currently having its yearly conference – Akademy – and at the conference, the project announced its goals for the coming years.

The KDE community has charted its course for the coming years, focusing on three interconnected paths that converge on a single point: community. These paths aim to improve user experience, support developers, and foster community growth.

↫ Farid Abdelnour on the KDE Blogs

First, the project intends to make it easier for developers to build KDE applications. They want to do this in various ways, but most notably they want to improve the developer experience for people writing KDE applications in languages other than C++, such as Rust or Python. This is a very welcome goal, as I feel there’s definitely a bit of a lack of new KDE applications, and as any other open source project, KDE can always use more developers.

Second, KDE is going to focus on improving the input experience, as in the various ways you interact with your computer. Accessibility, and the more complex input methods people with accessibility needs require, are also part of this goal, but it also covers simpler things like mice with tons of buttons, drawing tablets, 2-in-1 laptops, and so on. I’m assuming this also includes controlling the various RGB stuff found in every keyboard and mouse these days, as this is something KDE has already been making inroads into.

The third and final goal is one strongly related to the first goal, as it involves community outreach to attract new contributors. This covers not just individual contributors, but also support from institutions, organisations, and I’m guessing companies, too. With Valve opting for KDE for its Steam Deck, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some more involvement from that direction, too, which meshes well with the input goal mentioned above.

If you all keep becoming Patreons and donating to us, I might be able to actually go to Akademy next year and be a fly on the wall for some more in-depth reporting from such a conference. I can’t guarantee anything – especially since I have two small children, live far away from everything here in the Arctic, and have serious anxiety problems to take into account, but it’s definitely a goal for me for next year.

Paul Weissmann’s OpenPA, the invaluable archive on anything related to the HP’s PA-RISC architecture, devices, and operating systems, has branched off for a bit and started collecting information on RISC laptops.

Technical computing in the 1990s was mostly done on RISC workstations with Unix operating systems and specialized applications. For mobile use cases, some of the popular RISC vendors built RISC Laptops for mobile Unix use in the 1990s.

Often based on contemporary Unix workstations, these RISC laptops were often marketed for government and military uses such as command, technical analysis and surveillance.

↫ Paul Weissmann at OpenPA

OpenPA has always had content beyond just PA-RISC (like HP’s Itanium machines), so this is not entirely surprising, and it also happens to be something that’s sorely needed – there’s remarkably little consolidated information to be found on these RISC laptops, and it’s usually scattered all over the place and difficult to find. They were expensive and rare when they were new, and they’re even rarer and often more expensive today.

What we’re talking about here are laptops with PA-RISC, SPARC, (non-Apple) PowerPC, and Alpha processors, running some variant of UNIX, like HP-UX, SunOS/Solaris, AIX, and even Windows NT. A particularly interesting listing at the moment is the Hitachi 3050RX/100C, a laptop based on the Hitachi PA/50L PA-RISC processor that ran something called HI-UX/WE2, a UNIX from Hitachi I can’t find much information about.

The most desirable laptop listed is the amazing Tadpole Viper, which was the most powerful SPARC laptop Tadpole ever made, and I’m pretty sure it’s the most powerful SPARC laptop, period. It was powered by a 1.2Ghz UltraSPARC IIIi processor, and was also sold as the Sun Ultra 3, in 2005. I would perform some seriously questionable acts to get my hands on one of these, but they’re most likely virtually impossible to find.

Anyone who can help Weissmann find more information – feel free to do so.

So given that, xmem can be useful as a monitoring tool. Fluffy (my main server) runs both squid and apache, and given that fluffy only has 64MB of RAM, things can get a little cramped. If I suddenly see that the whole of xmem turns blue (i.e. the swap file’s thrashing), then I know that something is odd, and I can easily find out which processes are eating up so much RAM.

I said earlier that xmem can brighten up one’s desktop. Indeed, as I use FVWM in a rather archaic fashion, it seems fitting I should like xmem. 🙂 Here’s a full screenshot showing xmem (plus other applications) in action.

↫ Thomas Adam

This is basically just an excuse to show off this awesome FVWM desktop shown off in this short little article about xmem, written by one of FVWM’s core developers. It just looks neat.

We are proud to announce that version 1.6 of the Windows App SDK is now available! Whether you’re looking for the incredible performance boost and footprint reduction of Native AOT support, enhancements for deploying your package, or quality of life improvements for controls like PipsPager and RatingControl, WinAppSDK 1.6 offers a raft of new features, performance boosts and structural changes that enable you to make your native Windows apps better than ever before. 

The Windows App SDK provides a rich set of APIs and tools to help you build beautiful and fast Windows desktop apps, including any C++ Win32 or C# .NET app. You can harness the modern controls and polish of WinUI 3, which ships as part of the WinAppSDK, or if you have an existing app that uses Win32 such as WPF, you can take advantage of only the parts of the SDK that you need. The WinAppSDK also stays up to date with frequent and OS-independent releases so your app can always access the latest innovations.

↫ Duncan MacMichael at the Windows Blogs

There’s actually quite a few nice and welcome updates in version 1.6, most prominently the aforementioned Native AOT. This stands for native Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) compilation, and, as the name suggests, compiles your application ahead of time for the architecture it’s going to run on. This reduces the size of the application package and greatly improves the startup time. Another welcome improvement is that the embedded Edge WebView2 SDK is no longer hard-coded, but a NuGet reference, so developers can choose to use any version of the webview they want, preferably the newest version.

There’s a lot more in here, so if you’re a Windows developer trying to use the latest set of tools from Microsoft – this one’s for you.

The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in a fight to lend out scanned ebooks without the approval of publishers. In a decision on Wednesday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that permitting the Internet Archive’s digital library would “allow for widescale copying that deprives creators of compensation and diminishes the incentive to produce new works.”

The decision is another blow to the nonprofit in the Hachette v. Internet Archive case. In 2020, four major publishers — Hachette, Penguin Random House, Wiley, and HarperCollins — sued the Internet Archive over claims its digital library constitutes “willful digital piracy on an industrial scale.”

↫ Emma Roth

If you’re a library and scan books and offer a lending service, you’re committing “willful digital piracy on an industrial scale”. If you scan the entire goddamn internet without any regard for licensing or copyright and regurgitate chunks of it on command, you’re a visionary, a revolutionary, a genius.

Make it make sense.

A. Wilcox, the original creator of Adélie Linux, has ported systemd to musl, the glibc alternative.

I have completed an initial new port of systemd to musl. This patch set does not share much in common with the existing OpenEmbedded patchset. I wanted to make a fully updated patch series targeting more current releases of systemd and musl, taking advantage of the latest features and updates in both. I also took a focus on writing patches that could be sent for consideration of inclusion upstream.

The final result is a system that appears to be surprisingly reliable considering the newness of the port, and very fast to boot.

↫ A. Wilcox

I absolutely adore Adélie Linux as a project, even if I don’t run it myself, since they have a very practical approach to software. Systemd is popular for a reason – it’s fast and capable – and it only makes sense for Adélie to offer it as a potential option, even when using musl. Choice is a core value of the open source and Linux world, and that includes the choice to use systemd, even for a distribution that has traditionally used something else.

The port is already quite capable, and Wilcox managed to replace OpenRC on her system with systemd in-place, and it booted up just fine, and it also happened to boot in about a third of the time OpenRC did. It’s not ready for prime time yet, though, and most services are not yet packaged for systemd, an effort for which Adélie Linux intends to rely on upstream and cooperation with systemd experts from Gentoo and Fedora. They’re also working together with systemd, musl, and others to make any switching a user might want to do as easy as possible.

A beta or anything like that is still a ways off, but it’s an impressive amount of progress already.

That’s the 1983 Convergent WorkSlate, a one-of-a-kind handheld system from some misty alternate history where VisiCalc ruled the earth. Indeed, even the “software” packages Convergent shipped for it — on microcassette, which could store voice memos and data — were nothing more than cells and formulas in a worksheet. The built-in modem let you exchange data with other Workslates (or even speak over the phone to their users), and it came with a calculator desk accessory and a rudimentary terminal program, but apart from those creature comforts its built-in spreadsheet was the sole centre of your universe. And, unlike IAI and the Canon Cat, I’ve yet to find any backdoor (secret or otherwise) to enable anything else.

That means anything you want to program has to be somehow encoded in a spreadsheet too. Unfortunately, when it comes to actually programming the device it turns out the worst thing a spreadsheet on an 8-bit CPU can be is Turing-complete (so it’s not), and it has several obnoxious bugs to boot. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make it do more than balance an expense account. Along the way we’ll examine the hardware, wire into its peripheral bus, figure out how to exchange data with today’s future, create a simple game, draw rudimentary graphics and (with some help) even put it on the Internet with its very own Gopher client — after we tell of the WorkSlate’s brief and sorrowful commercial existence, as this blog always must.

↫ Cameron Kaiser

The amount of knowledge, skill, and sheer passion Cameron Kaiser displays in every one of these articles he writes is astonishing, and I’m incredibly grateful websites like OSNews can benefit from the work of people far, far smarter and more skillful than I’ll ever be. The code for the projects detailed in the article is available on GitHub, and more technical information can be found on Kaiser’s website.

Kim Carver, a legislator in the US state of Louisiana, added a provision to a child safety bill forcing Apple and Google to enforce age restrictions on downloads in their application stores. In other words, it would force Apple to make sure minors could not download gambling and casino applications – i.e., 99% of mobile games – that make up the vast majority of Apple’s services revenue. It would also make application stores play a role in enforcing age restrictions on social media applications, which makes sense because Apple and Google know the age of every one of their users.

Well, it turns out Apple was not happy. They sent out an absolute army of lobbyists – including a guy known for lobbying on behalf of truck-stop casinos, in case you were wondering about the type of people Apple uses for lobbying – to kill this specific provision. Carver’s provision would have breezed through the Louisiana senate, but it needed a key committee approval before being put up for a vote. And it’s this committee that Apple started heavily influencing and pressuring.

Carver began hearing rumblings that Apple was making inroads with the committee—his amended bill might be in trouble. Uncertain on how to proceed, he approached the chairwoman of the committee, Sen. Beth Mizell, for advice.

He declined to describe the substance of the conversation to The Wall Street Journal, but in the end, he promised not to object if she removed the app store provisions or support restoring them on the Senate floor.

“I made the choice to take the win that we could get,” Carver said.

↫ Jeff Horwitz and Aaron Tilley at The Wall Street Journal

This is not the first time Apple has pressured legislatures to drop bills it didn’t like. A famous case is the state if Georgia, which intended to pass a number of application store bills to open up the App Store in much the same way the European Union did with the DMA. Apple went absolutely mental in Georgia, including threatening to cancel “a $25 million investment in a historically Black college in Atlanta”. Apple won.

The way these sleazebag companies get away with such blatant corruption is by using third-party lobbyists, which technically are not employed by the companies in question, so no matter how low and sleazy these lobbyists go, the companies they lobby for can wash their hands in innocence and absolve themselves from any responsibility for the various financial and legal threats levied at underfunded, understaffed local legislatures. Spending a few millions on a local development project or whatever is peanuts for Apple, but a massive boon for a small community somewhere, so Apple pulling out means nothing to Apple, but would massively affect such a community. It’s not surprising local legislatures fold.

Circling back to the age restriction provision itself – telling stores what they can and cannot sell is an entirely normal thing to do, and happens all the time all over the world. It’s why in, say, The Netherlands, supermarkets are only allowed to sell “light” alcohol like beer and wine, with hard alcohol moved to separate liquor stores that have to be separate from the supermarket, so age restrictions are easier to enforce. There’s also just an infinite number of things you’re just not allowed to sell, period.

As always, Silicon Valley believes it’s a very special snowflake to whom regular, normal, widely accepted rules do not apply. Why shouldn’t a store selling gambling applications and similarly addictive and damaging applications have to do the absolute bare minimum to protect minors? Imagine the massive outcry if a Costco or Walmart was found to sell massive amounts of hard liquor to children – why should Silicon Valley companies be treated any differently?