Firefox

A Mozilla employee recently released a Firefox addon to change the user agent to Chrome on sites the user enables it on.

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/
• https://reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1eic7bj/chroe_mask_makes_firefox_wear_a_mask_to_look_like/

I'm actually pissed. I and many other users on the forum got an email from Chris Hayes on this:

Hello,

This is a friendly email to make you aware that your personal email address is currently visible to the whole internet via Mozilla's Discourse forum. It will show up in Google Search results. The affected email is the one that this email was sent to.

Many users may not be aware that their email address is publicly visible and Mozilla has not done anything about it in the 4 years it has been known, so I've taken this into my own hands to inform you.

What can you do?

You can update your profile name to be something else (actually, profile name is completely optional, so you can leave it blank if you want).

Steps to update profile name:

1. If you search for "Mozilla Discourse forum" it should be one of the first results.
2. Login. (Top-right)
3. Click on your profile picture at the top right.
4. Then, click on your username, at the top of the dropdown menu.
5. Click on the "Preferences" button.
6. Change the "Name" field, and click "Save Changes".

How did this happen?

There's a misconfiguration with Mozilla's Discourse forum that when you sign up with your Firefox account, it will by default use your personal email address as your profile's public name.

This is not a new issue, and has been known since 2020. The Mozilla Discourse forum is not actively maintained by Mozilla, so this has yet to be fixed.

You are one of 4,630 other users impacted by this privacy issue. It impacts 19% of all forum users, and 28% of new users.

More information:

There's a Discourse discussion about this problem here: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/email-is-displayed-by-default-for-the-new-account/92266

If you have connections to Mozilla, please help escalate this issue to the right people. This is a serious and long-standing privacy issue at an organization that should value "Privacy by default".

Sincerely,@chrisA fellow Mozillian

I am not Mozilla: This is not an official Mozilla email, I do not represent or work for Mozilla. This is an email from a fellow community member spreading awareness of this unaddressed privacy issue.

I should not be a few keystrokes away from accidentally deleting all of today's entries with no confirmation if I'm sure, and no way to recover them, even if I close the browser in the same second. I don't even know which ones I hit.

For instance, I watch a video on Shout Factory and then pause, close the tab and when I go back to the link it goes back to where I left off.

How in web-extenion to detect whether a website supports dark mode and whether it is in dark mode?

Including not only does it automatically switch to dark mode (with color-scheme)), but also is it in dark mode by default, without using color-scheme, without having a light mode?

I want to expand (Firelux type) with such an automatic, effective detector.

I thought that maybe someone had made an effort to detect dark backgrounds, but also light subtitles, detecting everything possible...

Then it occurred to me that there should be a database of sites that have a dark mode and a way to bypass it...
But I'm doing it myself in Firelux, clicking laboriously.

How in web-extenion to detect whether a website supports dark mode and whether it is in dark mode?

Including not only does it automatically switch to dark mode (with color-scheme)), but also is it in dark mode by default, without using color-scheme, without having a light mode?

I want to expand (Firelux type) with such an automatic, effective detector.

I thought that maybe someone had made an effort to detect dark backgrounds, but also light subtitles, detecting everything possible...

Then it occurred to me that there should be a database of sites that have a dark mode and a way to bypass it...
But I'm doing it myself in Firelux, clicking laboriously.

#firefox #webextensions #css #javascript

The only addons I've been finding are ones that block based on specific urls, domains, or a few glob patterns. I want to specify any regex.

What are the pros and cons of using Android Firefox vs F-Droid Fennec on a Kindle Fire 7? Thx!

#firefox

Version 122.0, first offered to Release channel users on January 23, 2024

New

Firefox now displays images and descriptions for search suggestions when provided by the search engine.

The translations feature received an improvement in the quality of translated webpages. The results should be much more stable. This fixes issues where the content of a page could disappear when translated, or interactive widgets could break.

Firefox now supports creating and using passkeys stored in the iCloud Keychain on macOS.

MDN Web Docs article suggestions from Firefox Suggest will be available in the address bar for users searching for web development-related information.

The line breaking rules of Web content now match the Unicode Standard. This improves Web Browser compatibility for line breaking. An additional improvement for East Asian and South East Asian end users, Firefox now supports proper language-aware word selection when double-clicking on text for languages including Chinese, Japanese, Burmese, Lao, Khmer, and Thai.

Firefox now ships with a new .deb package for Linux users on Ubuntu, Debian, and Linux Mint.

Fixed

Various security fixes.

Enterprise

You can find information about policy updates and enterprise specific bug fixes in the Firefox for Enterprise 122 Release Notes.

Developer

Developer Information

Fixing keyboard navigation in Inspector Rules view. Starting with Firefox 122, when editing a selector, a property name, or a property value in the Inspector, the Enter key will no longer move the focus to the next input but will validate what was entered and focus the matching element (#1861674). You can still use Ctrl + Enter (Cmd + Enter on macOS) or Tab to validate and move the focus to the next input.

Web Platform

Enabled the offset-position property which is useful for most of the offset-path values. Added support for ray(), basic-shape, coord-box to the offset-path CSS property. Added support for rect() and xywh() basic shapes on clip-path and offset-path CSS properties.

Firefox now supports animating the SVG viewBox attribute using SMIL by animations.
by animations are animations that are relative to the original value. Other attributes such as lengths and angles already support by, but a viewBox consists of four separate values.

The LargestContentfulPaint API has been added, this provides timing information about the largest image or text paint before users interact with a web page.

hr in select is now supported, allowing websites to easily use separators inside a select element.

The showPicker method is now supported on <select> elements, this can be used to trigger the drop-down behavior via JavaScript.

The fallback URL parser for unknown schemes was changed to DefaultURI, this improves specification adherence and web compatibility.

Enabled the ArrayBuffer.prototype.transfer proposal methods, which enables transferring ownership of ArrayBuffer data.

Added support for the Screen Wake Lock API.

Firefox now recognizes the “webauthn” autocomplete token and will suggest passkeys in form autofill dialogs.

Scripts can now store cacheAPI data in Private Browsing mode. Previously, user experience for someone browsing in private browsing mode could be significantly different than in regular mode. With these changes, websites can store cacheAPI data in Private Mode moving towards a uniform experience in regular vs Private Browsing mode.

To further protect user privacy, Firefox now taints filters that use currentColor as an input. Since color can be set by the :visited pseudo selector, it potentially contains privacy-sensitive information and therefore these primitives must be marked as tainted. This means that if you use such a filter, you won’t be able to read the filter output from canvas.

Uneven Level Protection Forward Error Correction (ULPFEC) will now be on by default in Firefox. This provides another tool for WebRTC services to utilize, improving video quality for users with spotty internet connections.

Unresolved

Some machines with older AMD CPUs may see image thumbnails incorrectly rendered as all black in file dialogs. If this is the case, updating the graphics driver should address this issue.

Community Contributions

With the release of Firefox 122, we are pleased to welcome the developers who contributed their first code change to Firefox in this release, 10 of whom were brand new volunteers! Please join us in thanking each of these diligent and enthusiastic individuals, and take a look at their contributions:

• AAR.dev: 1862505, 1865895
• Akylzhan: 1862508
• cmj.grubb: 1862504
• jameshendry05: 1682239, 1739307, 1866273, 1866776
• Jiangjin Wang: 1865969
• matthewnewall: 1862511
• Meera Murthy: 1869033
• peterodejobi9: 1837072
• realstealthninja: 1862506
• Vsevolod Buzinov: 1865494, 1869853

If you don't know about smart keywords, basically you can set phrases as shortcuts for specific bookmarks. I want a folder with all of my keywords synced, and that folder only. On each profile or account I have have whatever other folders and the placement of the folder with the keywords doesn't matter as long as they have the same name.

Apparently I wasn't clear enough in my other post. When I focus on the URL bar on a search page with either CMD L or by clicking it, I want to be able to just copy the phrase "lemmy" instead of having to select the text from https://www.google.com/search?q=lemmy. If I type search queries with spaces in them, the spaces are replaced with +s in the URL so I can't easily copy them.

I often do searches with multiple search engines and extras with the same query but with site:reddit.com added at the end. Being able to press CMD L to focus the URL bar, and then CMD C with all the text selected would make things a lot faster. This was added months ago to Firefox but it looks like it was removed now.

I found the flag to disable it, but I’m really curious why the decision was made in the first place. On Chrome and Firefox, l If you double click this example HTML5 : https://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_video.asp, it will go full screen. I’ve always wondered why sometimes click on a video would make it go fullscreen, it’s laggy and annoying for me, even on high-end laptops. On My Mac, as well as in Windows and Fedora VMs.

I looked at this bugzilla issue and some other pages and changed the flags in about:config. When I look at this page, which shows P3 vs non-P3 colors, I don't see a difference, but do in Safari and Chrome.

gfx.color_management.display_profile = /System/Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Display P3.icc
gfx.color_management.mode = 1
gfx.color_management.native_srgb = false

Firefox allows you set custom search engines (if you enable a flag), as well as smart keywords. I want to write a question for ChatGPT in the URL bar, press enter, see chat.openai.com and the question processed by GPT.

I found that all search engines in Firefox, default and user-added, are stored in the search.json.mozlz4 file in the root of your profile folder. I used this software to decompress it: https://github.com/jusw85/mozlz4 (I compiled it on macOS with cargo build). I tried looking up what each JSON property means but didn't find anything, and found one comment saying that it doesn't work since Firefox always checks it for tampering.

Today, Mozilla announced more than 450 new extensions (software that adds new features or functionality to the browser) to users on Firefox for Android at Mozilla’s AMO Android page. This milestone marks the launch of a new open extension ecosystem on mobile where developers are now free to create and publish extensions and users can easily access and install them on Firefox for Android.

“Extensions were first created as a way for people to customize their own internet experience, from artists designing themes to developers who wanted to make extensions to improve people’s web experience,” said Vicky Chin, Vice President of Engineering at Firefox. “We’re thrilled to bring this experience to Firefox for Android, where we’re the only major Android browser to support an open extension ecosystem. In the coming months, we plan to enable more extensions for people to choose from and customize their own mobile internet experience.”

Our journey to an open extension ecosystem to benefit all

Browser extensions have become an essential part of everyone’s daily internet experience. Nearly half of all Firefox desktop users have installed an extension to customize their online experience. Extensions provide a wide array of powerful features — from privacy tools like anti-trackers and ad blockers, to productivity tools, tab managers, translators and so much more.

Built on Mozilla’s mission for an open and accessible internet for all, Firefox works with an independent community of developers to offer extensions for people who want more personal agency out of their online experience. On desktop, there are thousands of extensions to help you become a better writer, land a job or clean up a chaotic desktop. While the new Android ecosystem will take time to develop the robust diversity of content that desktop extensions offer, quite a few major desktop extensions are already available on Firefox for Android, such as privacy focused content blockers uBlock Origin and Ghostery, anti-tracking gem Privacy Badger and color customizer Dark Reader.

In August, we announced that we had completed building the infrastructure needed to support an open extension ecosystem on Firefox for Android. We were ready for the next chapter: adding extensions. Since then, we’ve been working with developers to test and make hundreds of extensions compatible on mobile. So, are you ready to customize your mobile browsing experience to make it faster, safer or simply more fun? Look no further with today’s release of extensions on Firefox for Android.

**Extensions to help while you’re on the go, just in time for the holidays **

We depend on our mobile devices for many things — quick informational searches, reading articles, listening to music, looking for recipes (like cookies for the annual cookie holiday exchange). So, we understand the value of having experiences that are simple, predictable and offer the time to focus. Here are some extensions available today to help achieve that flow.

• Midnight Lizard – Read easier
  We look at our mobile devices in so many different environments. Whether it’s outside with the sun or inside a dimly lit room, our eyes work hard to adjust. Midnight Lizard is one of those extensions your eyes will feel the difference and thank you. It can change the colors of the page, increase or decrease the brightness and contrast. Add a blue light filter, screen shader and of course, the ever-popular night mode. Midnight Lizard will keep your eyes in good shape!

• Dark Background and Light Text – Keep it simple
  This extension is well-loved by thousands of users for its simplicity. It’s helpful for folks who prefer to work in dark mode, or those with low vision where reading dark text on a white background is challenging. You’re free to customize it so that all web pages are rendered in this elegant way, or just select pages.

• Worldwide Radio – Get into the groove
  Access more than 50,000 radio stations from all over the world right from your Firefox for Android browser. In the mood for a bit of Brazilian Samba? How about some traditional Indian Hindustani? Techno beats from Berlin? The world’s music and real time talk radio is literally at your fingertips.

A big thank you to our developer community

We would like to thank all the developers who worked with us to make their extensions compatible for this launch of the open extension ecosystem on Firefox for Android. Hundreds attended our webinars and brought incredible creative energy to this project.

“The opportunity for innovation is vast,” said Giorgio Natili, Firefox Director of Engineering. “It’s thrilling to see extension developers embrace this moment and create novel browsing experiences and features for Firefox for Android users. People don’t have to browse the mobile web in a strictly singular way anymore. With extensions, you’re free to change the way Firefox for Android looks and behaves. It’s only going to get better as more developers innovate within this exciting new space.”

As more developers create mobile optimized content, you can expect a wave of new Firefox for Android extensions to emerge in the coming months. In the meantime, download the latest Firefox for Android and shape your own internet experience with Android extensions.

By default I use Google and it shows search suggestions, but when I add a custom search engine like https://www.google.com/search?q=, or a completely different one, I don't get any. I don't really care where the suggestions are coming from, they could be the same as the one for the default engine.

Another thing I want to do without right clicking and selecting a context menu item, it would be faster. While there's a hotkey for bookmarking all open tabs, I only want to bookmark the ones selected.

I'm trying to use my keyboard more since doing things with a mouse or trackpad is more time consuming. I'd like something like: pressing Control Shift Alt > to select the tab to the right (along with the current tab), and press it again to select the tab to the right of that, making it three tabs selected. Same thing with tabs to the left.