In 2023, a significant portion of Firefox downloads came from unknown sources. We believe many of them came from 3rd party websites that let you download Firefox. While some websites are okay, others can put you at risk of downloading an old version or a build with the wrong locale, leading to security risks, a bad user experience, or even malicious installations. Help the Firefox team to uncover this mystery by taking part in the Firefox 3rd-party installer campaign!

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...

"Working at Mozilla has taken my shopping habits to new heights. I feel armed with information and shortcuts and have a world of add ons at my fingertips. Keep reading for more on Fakespot and other hacks to shop smarter on Firefox."

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])

Google Earth is almost not usable in Firefox. I’d like to ask for suggestions from the community because I really don’t want to use Google Chrome where it works great. I’m on Linux Mint, an Ubuntu derivative.

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 Firefox finally allows you to further protect local access to stored credentials in the browser's password manager using your device's login, including a password, fingerprint, pin, or other biometrics

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.

Streamline your creative workflow with Firefox's picture-in-picture, eyedropper tool, PDF editor, dark mode and more.

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.

My favourites:

Augmented Steam - Augmented Steam is a browser extension by IsThereAnyDeal that improves your experience on the Steam platform by providing helpful information and tons of customization options.

Bitwarden Password Manager - At home, at work, or on the go, Bitwarden easily secures all your passwords, passkeys, and sensitive information.

ClearURLs - Removes tracking elements from URLs

Dictionary Anywhere - View definitions easily as you browse the web. Double-click any word to view its definition in a small pop-up bubble. It also supports Spanish, German, French language alongside English. Enjoy Reading Uninterrupted!!!

Don't track me Google - Removes the annoying link-conversion at Google Search / maps / ...

Facebook Container - Prevent Facebook from tracking you around the web. The Facebook Container extension for Firefox helps you take control and isolate your web activity from Facebook.

Google Container - Prevent Google from tracking you around the web. The Google Container extension helps you take control and isolate your web activity from Google.

LibRedirect - Redirects YouTube, Twitter, TikTok... requests to alternative privacy friendly frontends.

Sidebery - Vertical tabs tree and bookmarks in sidebar with advanced containers configuration, grouping and many other features.

Startpage - This search engine extension protects users from being tracked while allowing them to search the web in complete privacy. Startpage is a private search engine with no tracking, storing, or selling users’ search history.

Undo Close Tab - Allows you to restore the tab you just closed with a single click—plus it can offer a list of recently closed tabs within a convenient context menu.

uBlock Origin - Finally, an efficient wide-spectrum content blocker. Easy on CPU and memory.

Firefox 130 will feature an on-device AI model that automatically generates alt-text for images, integrated into its built-in PDF editor.

Last week we shared a number of updates with our community of users, and now we want to share them here: At Mozilla, we work hard to make Firefox the best

Firefox update

Over the past few months, we’ve been accelerating our ability to execute outstandingly, make faster decisions, and realize our multi-product ambitions. To help facilitate this, I’m excited to announce an organizational change within the product team. This change will enable us to better develop and scale products at different stages of development and maturity.

Today, we have multiple groups across various teams working on new ideas and emerging products: Fakespot, PXI, Mozilla Social, and the Innovation Ecosystems team, plus some newer emerging pods around new product design sprints and ideation. To simplify and accelerate this work, we are consolidating our emerging and seed product portfolios under a single umbrella, led by Adam Fishman, as our SVP of New Products, reporting directly to me.

By setting up Firefox as a standalone product organization, we will also be able to bring more focus to our continual efforts to improve the Firefox experience for everyone who uses it. Firefox is already a leader in foundational qualities like speed and privacy, and now we will be able to faster in developing solutions that bring more useful tools and more joyful experience to our users. Our recent announcement of new Firefox features is just the start, as we close in on Firefox’s 20th birthday in November.

I am really excited about these changes as they help us accelerate our path to a strong, multi-product future as we simultaneously expand on our investment in our flagship core product, Firefox.

Laura Chambers

CEO, Mozilla Corporation

also: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/why-im-joining-mozilla-as-executive-director/

All I see is crypto bullshit scam posts

Any way to restore pre 125 behaviour in newtab and show fixed number of shortcuts, i.e. show empty shortcuts too?