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Posts tagged "Firefox"

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Firefox Relay may not be as useful as you thought
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A major debate has erupted online after Firefox's Relay offering was nearly added to a list of “burner” email services.

There is a list on the GitHub repository, with hundreds of burner email services, used by many service providers to prevent customers from using such tools  (such as, for example, 10minutemail) to register an account, and force them into using legitimate emails.

Companies do this for a number of reasons – to prevent abuse (someone might register hundreds of accounts to take advantage of a free offer), or to ensure that the service provider’s mailing list is useful.

Burner emails

Users, on the other hand, enjoy burner emails as they allow them to register for a service without having to sign up for a mailing list and receive multiple promotional emails every day. 

Recently, a co-maintainer of the list suggested that the “relay.firefox.com” domain be added to the list, prompting a major discussion on the forums, and drawing the attention of the media.

Relay is Firefox’s email privacy service, giving users free email aliases to use whenever they want to sign up for an online account anywhere. According to Mozilla, Relay’s goal is to preserve the privacy of its users’ email addresses, and comes as both a free service, and a paid Premium service.

Turning anti-abuse measures into weapons

Firefox Relay works by sending and forwarding email messages from the alias address to the primary email address. Besides the five free aliases, users are also allowed to get up to 150kb attachments.

Unlike burner emails, these aliases do not disappear unless deleted by the user, and are perceived by the users as “purely a privacy tool”.

“My reasoning on including this is that an email with a mozmail domain is never going to be a primary email and is always going to forward to some other address,” the co-maintainer, Dustin Ingram, explained.

But some people weren’t buying it. A GitHub user going by the alias worldofgeese said the GitHub repo “looks like it’s used, or can potentially be used, as a weapon by providers trying to rob users of one of the few defenses they have to their email address leaking, a scarily common occurrence, which are then weaponized by bad actors to flood those users' inboxes with spam.”

“Can you not do this? You look like extremely bad actors. Please don't contribute to an unsafe internet. I use Private Relay to protect my personal mail address, not as a tool for spam. I'm not even sure how a user would use Private Relay for spam, as users cannot begin email chains with a Relay address, only respond to mails delivered to those addresses.”

Via: BleepingComputer

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Firefox 96 is a boost for anyone doing video calling
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Mozilla has released Firefox 96, an update to one of the most popular web browsers out there.

According to Mozilla's desktop release notes, Firefox 96 is a big win for anyone who uses the browser to make video calls, with improved noise-suppression and auto-gain-control, plus echo-cancellation, to make sure you sound as crisp and clear as possible. 

By building the video improvements right into the browser, Firefox users without the best webcams or best USB microphones should see automatic improvements as we move into year three of working from home.

Firefox for Android boost

Elsewhere, there are a bunch of technical changes, including reducing the main-thread load, which should make Firefox run that much smoother on most machines. Also includes are the usual bug fixes, such as changing how macOS users can command-click on Gmail links. 

But it isn't just desktop that gets some Mozilla love, as the Android version of Firefox 96 is set to get some cool improvements, too. As Mozilla says in the Android release notes, users can now see highlights of recently-visited websites and bookmark images have been improved. There are also the usual range of bug fixes. 

While these are fairly small changes, they make a Firefox for Android that much better and help it compete with Chrome, Brave, Opera, and other Android browser alternatives. 

The news comes shortly after Mozilla was involved in a controversy over accepting crypto donations. The company was forced to step back from its position on accepting donations via cryptocurrency following a massive backlash which included Mozilla co-founder Jamie Zawinski slamming the company.

In response, Mozilla promised it will “take action”, particularly concerning its climate goals.

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The most popular Firefox extensions of 2021 were both adblockers
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Customizing Mozilla's browser with add-ons can give you a whole new experience when browsing the web though only one-third of Firefox users have installed an extension or theme.

Among the 100m+ users that did install an extension this year, adblockers were the most popular with Adblock Plus taking the top spot followed by uBlock Origin. Across the span of 2021, Adblock Plus had an average of over 6.1m daily users while uBlock Origin averaged just over 5m+ daily users over the course of the year.

While Adblock Plus led the charge at the beginning of the year, uBlock Origin was able to close the gap and if current usage trends among Firefox users continue, it may take the top spot in early 2022 according to a new blog post from Mozilla.

One of the reasons users choose Firefox as their preferred browser is to further protect their privacy online. While adblockers can stop ads from following you around the web, other popular extensions this year that protect against invasive tracking include Mozilla's own Facebook Container with 1.7m daily active users and Ghostery with 1.1m daily active users.

In addition to putting out a list of the most popular extensions each year, the Firefox Recommended Extensions program is a curated list of third party extensions that meet Mozilla's highest standards of security, utility and user experience.

For those who often find themselves drowning in a sea of open browser tabs, Tab Stash may be the perfect extension as it adds a toolbar button that when clicked, saves all of your open tabs as temporary bookmarks. If you're using Firefox Sync, the service will automatically show your Tab Stash bookmarks synced to other devices.

Another interesting extension highlighted by Mozilla is Stylebot. This extension gives you the power to dramatically alter the way any website looks from font sizes to color schemes to content layout. Perhaps you're intrigued by vertical tabs in Microsoft Edge? Then the Sideberry extension can be used to organize your open tabs in a cascading “tree” tucked away to the side of your browser.

While web browsers have certainly come a long way, extensions allow you to further customize their look and fell as well as their functionality which can help you be more productive or just have a better browsing experience overall.

We've also rounded up the best browser, best VPN and best proxy services

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Firefox 95 wants to keep itself safe from code security flaws
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The latest version of Mozilla Firefox is including a welcome security upgrade that the company hopes can keep its browser safe from code-based attacks.

Available now, the desktop and mobile editions of Firefox 95 will come with RLBox technology, which looks to prevent and limit any damage caused by code security flaws or bugs.

The “novel sandboxing tool” will look to make Firefox the most secure browser option around, the company claims.

Firefox security

RLBox was developed by Mozilla alongside researchers at the University of California San Diego and the University of Texas.

The tool uses WebAssembly to isolate potentially buggy code, ensuring no possible infections or flaws are able to launch or execute without the user knowing.

Mozilla notes that although all major browsers, including Firefox, run web content in their own sandboxed process, hackers often chain together two vulnerabilities to break through -one to compromise the sandboxed process containing the malicious site, and another to escape the sandbox.

This has previously meant having to hoist subcomponents of a browser into a separate process, but this has some limitations – which is where RLBox comes in.

“Rather than hoisting the code into a separate process, we instead compile it into WebAssembly and then compile that WebAssembly into native code,” Mozilla says.

Although not suitable for every component, Mozilla says it is working on expanding the reach of RLBox as much as it can – including to other browsers. The company shipped a prototype to its Mac and Linux users to test in 2020, showing it can operate effectively across different operating systems.

“RLBox is a big win for us on several fronts: it protects our users from accidental defects as well as supply-chain attacks, and it reduces the need for us to scramble when such issues are disclosed upstream,” Mozilla's Bobby Holley wrote in a blog post announcing the news.

“This technology opens up new opportunities beyond what’s been possible with traditional process-based sandboxing, and we look forward to expanding its usage and (hopefully) seeing it adopted in other browsers and software projects.”

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You can finally download Firefox in the Windows Store
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Mozilla has announced that Firefox is the first major browser to become available for download directly in the Windows Store on both Windows 10 and Windows 11.

Previously, Windows users that wanted to use Firefox instead of Microsoft Edge had to download the browser from the internet and go through a clunky process from Microsoft according to a new blog post from Mozilla. Now though, as Microsoft has changed its Windows Store policies, choosing Firefox as your default browser is a more seamless experience. 

Downloading Mozilla's browser from the Windows Store is not only easier but it also gives you access to all of the latest Firefox features including Total Cookie Protection, Enhanced Tracking Protection, DNS over HTTPS, fast site loading using WebRender and Quantum CSS, Firefox Suggest, Multi Picture-in-Picture and personalization with seasonal Colorways.

Gecko engine

At the core of Firefox and all other browsers is a browser engine that is responsible for loading web pages from sites and displaying them on your screen. While Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome use Chromium as their browser engine, Firefox uses Mozilla's proprietary Gecko engine.

Until recently, Microsoft's store policies required that all browsers use the engine that Microsoft had built into its platform which prevented Mozilla from shipping Firefox to users through the Windows Store. In addition to giving users less choice, these policies also hurt the web as Windows users would only have access to the features Microsoft was willing to provide.

Thankfully though, now that Microsoft has changed its policies, Mozilla and other browser makers will be able to ship their products through the Windows Store regardless of which browser engine their software uses.

Firefox can now be downloaded through the Windows Store by clicking on this link though Mozilla's browser is also available for macOS and Linux.

Looking for a better browsing experience? Check out our roundups of the best browser and the best anonymous browser

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