Mozilla, Gecko Archive
Linux distributions running on ARM have had to roll their own Firefox builds for the architecture since forever, and it seems that Mozilla has taken this to heart as the browser maker is now supplying binary ARM builds of Firefox. They come in either a tarball or a .deb package installable through Mozilla’s apt repository. Do note, though, that Mozilla does not give the same kinds of guarantees for the ARM build of Firefox as they do for the x86 builds. We want to be upfront about the current state of our ARM64 builds. Although we are confident in the quality of Firefox on this architecture, we are still incorporating comprehensive ARM64 testing into Firefox’s continuous integration and release pipeline. Our goal is to integrate ARM64 builds into Firefox’s extensive automated test suite, which will enable us to offer this architecture across the beta, release, and ESR channels. ↫ Gabriel Bustamante These new builds won’t mean much for the average ARM Linux user since distributions built Firefox for the architecture already anyway, but it does offer users a direct line to Firefox they didn’t have before.
Proton is Firefox’s new design, starting from Firefox 89. Photon is the old design of Firefox which was used until version 88. Proton’s overall feel is good, but there were a few things I didn’t like and wanted to improve.That’s why this project was born, and Lepton to denote light theme layer. Lepton’s photon styled is preserve Photon’s feeling while keep Original Lepton’s strengths. ↫ Firefox UI Fix GitHub page I do not like the current Firefox user interface, because even with the ‘compact’ layout re-enabled in about:config, I find it just too bulky and wasteful of my screen real estate. I’ve been using the above Firefox user interface mod for ages now, and I can’t imagine using Firefox without it. The GitHub pages and guides are a bit of a mess and difficult to follow due to the project consisting of several overlapping different styles, but I just use the script listed here, selecting the style “2” when running the script. It won’t be for everyone, but for me, it makes Firefox nice and compact, turning it into a mouse-first interface without trying to accommodate touch. This is also by far not the only project with this goal, so if you’re using something else – feel free to list them.
The nonprofit organization that supports the Firefox web browser said today it is winding down its new partnership with Onerep, an identity protection service recently bundled with Firefox that offers to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites. The move comes just days after a report by KrebsOnSecurity forced Onerep’s CEO to admit that he has founded dozens of people-search networks over the years. On March 14, KrebsOnSecurity published a story showing that Onerep’s Belarusian CEO and founder Dimitiri Shelest launched dozens of people-search services since 2010, including a still-active data broker called Nuwber that sells background reports on people. Onerep and Shelest did not respond to requests for comment on that story. ↫ Brian Krebs It’s good that Mozilla has immediately responded properly to this discovery, but it does make one wonder – how did this happen in the first place? It seems like a service provider like this would be thoroughly vetted, especially considering Mozilla’s stated mission and types of users. My worries about Firefox’ future are no secret, and this gaffe certainly doesn’t help reduce my worries. It’s clear something went horribly wrong here, and my hope is that it’s a random fluke, and not a sign of more structural problems in Mozilla’s vetting process for potential partners.
Questions like “Which browser should I use?” regularly come up on the r/browsers subreddit. I sometimes respond to these posts, but my quick replies usually only contain one or two points. To be honest, until recently I wasn’t even sure myself why I use Firefox. Of course it’s a pretty good browser, but that doesn’t explain why I’ve stubbornly stayed loyal to Firefox for more than a decade. After giving it a bit more thought, I came up with the following reasons. ↫ Šime Vidas There’s really no viable alternative to Firefox for me. I wish we had more choice, more competition, and more vibrancy in the browser space, and I’m definitely anxious about the future of Firefox, but with every other browser being either Chrome, possibly with skin, or Safari, there’s really nowhere else to go.
Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber, which launched only a week ago. Mozilla will also shut down Hubs, the 3D virtual world it launched back in 2018, and scale back its investment in its mozilla.social Mastodon instance. The layoffs will affect roughly 60 employees. Bloomberg previously reported the layoffs. Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml. ↫ Frederic Lardinois for TechCrunch I’d like to remind everyone that I’ve been warning the Linux world about the precarious, uncertain future of Firefox for years now. The single most important desktop Linux application is in a death spiral and entirely dependent on free Google money. Not a good base to work from. With today’s news, I only feel strengthened in my conviction that the major desktop projects in the Linux world need to come together in a serious manner to discuss the establishment of a browser project optimised for Linux. Pick an engine, let the GNOME and KDE developers build a native UI on top, and take matters into your own hands. If you can build the two best desktop environments in desktop computing today, you can build a first-class browser together. This is existential.
Mozilla Corp., which manages the open-source Firefox browser, announced today that Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI and internet safety as chair of the nonprofit foundation. Laura Chambers, a Mozilla board member and entrepreneur with experience at Airbnb, PayPal, and eBay, will step in as interim CEO to run operations until a permanent replacement is found. Baker, a Silicon Valley pioneer who co-founded the Mozilla Project, says it was her decision to step down as CEO, adding that the move is motivated by a sense of urgency over the current state of the internet and public trust. “We want to offer an alternative for people to have better products,” says Baker, who wants to draw more attention to policies, products and processes to challenge business models built on fueling outrage. “What are the connections between this global malaise and how humans are engaging with each other and technology?” ↫ Diane Brady for Fortune Mozilla is in such a tough spot. They basically have zero consumer appeal, have no recognisable products other than Firefox, and effectively exist by the grace of Google, of all companies. If Mozilla gets in even more trouble, a lot of OSNews readers are going to feel it – and the internet as whole will feel the repercussions even if they don’t realise it. Hearing so much talk about “AI” from Mozilla doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.
In order to be able to choose their own browser, people must be free to download it, easily set it to default and to continue using it – all without interference from the operating system. Windows users do not currently enjoy this freedom of choice. To investigate Microsoft’s tactics and the impact on consumers, Mozilla commissioned Harry Brignull and Cennydd Bowles, independent researchers and experts in harmful design. Today, the researchers have published a report detailing how Microsoft prevents effective browser choice on Windows. In the report, they document how Microsoft places its own browser — Edge — at the center of its operating system and weaponizes Windows’ user interface design to undermine people selecting rival browsers. ↫ Mozilla Research We all already know Microsoft does these things, and of course, a study paid for by Mozilla agreeing with Mozilla is not exactly earth-shattering, but stuff like this is important for aiding in convincing regulators to do something about this stuff. It simply shouldn’t be legal to employ all kinds of nasty tricks and dark patterns to force people to use a certain browser.
Great news for Linux users, after months of testing, Mozilla released today a new package for Firefox on Linux (specifically on Ubuntu, Debian, and any Debian-based distribution). If you’ve heard about Linux, which is known for its open-source software and an alternative to traditional operating systems (OS), and are curious to learn more, here are four reasons why you should give our new Firefox on Linux package a try. ↫ Gabriel Bustamente and Johan Lorenzo It’s a ppa and .deb package straight from Mozilla itself, so you don’t have to to rely on your distribution’s maintainers (as long as you use a Debian-based distribution, that is). Do note, however, that some distributions actually make changes to the default Firefox code, such as Fedora enabling things like Wayland-by-default and hardware-accelerated video decoding long before those became default in Firefox-proper. By using Mozilla’s package, you’ll lose all of these changes. As a sidenote, Mozilla’s instructions for enabling the ppa and installing the .deb are a bit… Dubious, though.
This tilt manifests in a variety of ways. For example: making it harder for a user to download and use a different browser, ignoring or resetting a user’s default browser preference, restricting capabilities to the first-party browser, or requiring the use of the first-party browser engine for third-party browsers. For years, Mozilla has engaged in dialog with platform vendors in an effort to address these issues. With renewed public attention and an evolving regulatory environment, we think it’s time to publish these concerns using the same transparent process and tools we use to develop positions on emerging technical standards. So today we’re publishing a new issue tracker where we intend to document the ways in which platforms put Firefox at a disadvantage and engage with the vendors of those platforms to resolve them. ↫ The official Mozilla blog Excellent initative.
This December, if there’s one tech New Year’s resolution I’d encourage you to have, it’s switching to the only remaining ethical web browser, Firefox. According to recent posts on social media, Firefox’s market share is slipping. We should not let that happen. ↫ Roy Tanck I mean, yes, obviously, but how depressing is it that the only choice we have is between a browser made by Google, and a browser kept afloat by Google money? Where’s the real sustainable alternative?
A somewhat obscure guideline for developers of U.S. government websites may be about to accelerate the long, sad decline of Mozilla’s Firefox browser. There already are plenty of large entities, both public and private, whose websites lack proper support for Firefox; and that will get only worse in the near future, because the ’fox’s auburn paws are perilously close to the lip of the proverbial slippery slope. ↫ Bryce Wray US government guidelines say that US government websites only need to be tested on browsers with more than 2% market share – and Firefox is getting perilously close to that threshold. While it won’t kill Firefox overnight, it would definitely make Firefox progressively more cumbersome to use for American users, and could have ripple effects elsewhere.
This week, Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker rose as a key figure in Google’s defense against the Justice Department’s monopoly claims. Providing a video deposition for the landmark trial, Baker testified that Mozilla’s popular browser Firefox tried to switch from using Google as a default search engine but reverted back after a “failed” bet on Yahoo made it clear that Google was Firefox users’ preferred search engine. That fits in a long string of similar claims – namely, that defaulting to anything but Google is impossible, because nothing else is even remotely as good as Google Search, because none of the others are the default, meaning they don’t get the amount of queries needed to improve search quality, and on the spiral goes. What’s spicy here is that this trial could potentially turn out to be Mozilla’s downfall, since Google’s search deals with, among others, Mozilla, are up for debate. Desktop Linux’ Firefox problem could explode sooner than we might think.
Mozilla has conducted one of the first – maybe even the first – studies into the effectiveness of browser choice screens, and they conclude: This research showed that browser choice screens have the potential to be effective. Well designed browser choice screens can improve competition, giving people meaningful choice and improving people’s satisfaction and feelings of control. And they can do all of this without overburdening people or taking too much of their time. What’s more, people have strong preferences: it turns out they want the ability to choose their default browser (rather than being assigned one by the operating system/device manufacturer); they also want to pick from a wider range of browsers. You can download the full report from Mozilla.
Created by Mozilla Research in 2012, the Servo project was the first major Rust codebase other than the compiler itself, and has since been a hallmark for experimental web engine design. Major components of Servo have been incorporated into the Firefox web browser, and several of its parsers and other lower-level libraries have become foundational to the Rust ecosystem. As a promising, modern, and open web engine for building applications and immersive experiences using web technologies, stewardship of Servo moved from Mozilla Research to the Linux Foundation in 2020. In 2023, Servo experienced renewed activity led by Igalia, a Linux Foundation Europe member that now has a team of engineers working on the project. Today we are pleased to announce that the Servo project has officially joined Linux Foundation Europe. I’m very curious to see where Servo goes in the future.
Mozilla has announced that the Android version of Firefox will soon support any and all extensions, and has informed extension developers about this change. 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? This almost instantly makes Firefox the most capable and versatile browser on Android. It’s taken them a long time, but the ability to load whatever extension we want will be a great asset.
On behalf of the Thunderbird team, Thunderbird Council, our global community of contributors, and our extended Mozilla family, I am incredibly excited to announce the initial launch of Thunderbird 115 “Supernova” for Linux, macOS, and Windows! With this year’s version, we’re delivering much more than just another yearly release. Supernova represents a modernized overhaul of the software – both visually and technically – while retaining the familiarity and flexibility you expect from Thunderbird. This is a massive release, and modernises this venerable e-mail client considerably. I can’t wait to test it out once it hits the Fedora repositories – I never liked Thunderbird all that much, but Supernova seems like something that suits me a little better, so I’m curious to see if it can pull me away from Geary. If you want to quickly gauge the changes to the user interface, the Thunderbird team made a very handy page for that.
The rumour, by way of The Information, claims senior Microsoft execs hope to seal a deal with Mozilla to make Bing the default search engine as soon as this year, as the browser’s existing big-bucks deal with Google is coming up for renewal. Now, Firefox making a search engine switch isn’t new. Mozilla tested Microsoft’s Bing as Firefox’s default search engine back back in 2021; and those with longer memories may just remember a time when Yahoo! was the default search engine in select countries. It’s a tough pill to swallow: Firefox, effectively the only serious browser not controlled by Google or Apple, exists by the grace of Google. Google pays Mozilla for being the default search engine in Firefox, and said deal makes up about 85% of Mozilla’s revenue. Replacing Google with Microsoft int his equation seems like a lateral move, at best.
So we weren’t surprised to hear that Chrome users were concerned after learning that several of the internet’s most popular ad blockers, like uBlock Origin, would lose some of their privacy-preserving functionality on Google’s web browser, resulting from the changes Manifest V3 brings to Chrome’s extensions platform – changes that strengthen other facets of security, while unfortunately limiting the capabilities of certain types of privacy extensions. But rest assured that in spite of these changes to Chrome’s new extensions architecture, Firefox’s implementation of Manifest V3 ensures users can access the most effective privacy tools available like uBlock Origin and other content-blocking and privacy-preserving extensions. I’m so glad Firefox exists. There simply isn’t any viable alternative to it, and that’s why I’m continuously worried about the continued existence of Mozilla. The story around Manifest V3 is just another example of why Firefox is superior.
The first computer I owned shipped with 128 KiB of RAM and to this day I’m still jarred by the idea that applications can run out of memory given that even 15-year-old machines often shipped with 4 GiB of memory. And yet it’s one of the most common causes of instability experienced by users and in the case of Firefox the biggest source of crashes on Windows. A detailed technical explanation of why Windows’s memory management – and only Windows’s – is causing so many crashes for Firefox, as well as a solution they found to address the problem.
Today, amid a sea of internet companies and products that routinely put profits ahead of people, Mozilla is unveiling an ambitious new venture capital fund to transform technology investment — and the internet more broadly. Yes, this is exactly what the only browser standing between us and complete Chrome dominance needs. Can you taste the sarcasm?
