So we run VMware, and this morning I go and check a thing, and Firefox gives me an error.. connection insecure cert is invalid

No I don’t have the exact verbiage

But Edge and Chrome opened it just fine. Whisky Tango?

It was a rekeyed , and re installed the cert for an easy ish fix.

But I’m far more weirded out that FF slapped it down ; and the other two were like; Ja sure no problem…

??

Betterfox

31% faster than regular Firefox1 :rocket:

about:config tweaks to enhance Mozilla Firefox.

:new: Now with ESR support.

Made for everyday browsing

A secure, blazing fast browsing experience. Without breakage.

Betterfox is an opinionated preference list inspired by the law of diminishing returns and the minimum effective dose.

Required reading

If you don't have it already: Get Firefox

0. Create a backup profile.
1. Download the user.js file here (Right click > Save Link As…).
2. Review Common Overrides and make any necessary changes.
   • See also Optional Hardening for other recommendations.
3. Open Firefox. In the URL bar, type about:profiles and press Enter.
4. For the profile you want to use (or use default), click Open Folder in the Root Directory section.
5. Move the user.js file into the folder.

After restarting Firefox:

1. Get an ad blocker like uBlock Origin with our recommended filters.
2. Enable DNS-level protection with NextDNS. Use the link and support this page!
   • Check out our configuration guide for the best experience.
   • See how to quickly enable secure DNS in Firefox.

Simple goals

1. Minimalism: get what isn't needed out of the way
2. Efficiency: unleash Firefox's ability to be fast and performant
3. Privacy: protect your data without causing site breakage

Simple configs

Fastfox, Securefox, Peskyfox, and Smoothfox are guides to settings within Firefox.

The user.js — a configuration file that controls Firefox settings — is curated from these guides.

Recognition

Browser Integration

• Midori | files (Dec 2023?)
• Mercury | files (Sep 2023)
• Waterfox | files (Sep 2023)
• Floorp 1 2 | files (Apr 2023)
• Pulse | files (Dec 2021)
• Ghostery Private Browser 1 2 | files (Feb 2021)

YouTube

• The ULTIMATE Browser Tier List (Mar 2023)
• I Hate Firefox. But I'm Still Switching Back to It. (Nov 2022)
• [Español] Optimize and Accelerate Firefox (Nov 2022)
• How To Improve Firefox Performance (Dec 2021)

Podcasts

• [Italian] Digitalia.fm | 1:41:35–1:42:41 (July 2023)
• GhoSTORIES with Franz & Pete | 17:05–18:40 (Feb 2021)

Articles

• Browsers for Daily Using (Jan 2024)
• Avoiding Manifest V3 – Escaping the Ad-Pocalypse (Dec 2023)
• [German] Pulse Browser Review: Firefox fork with Turbo tweaks and Opera sidebar (Apr 2023)
• 2023 Browser Showdown: Comparing Chrome, Brave, Firefox, Vivaldi, and Opera (Jan 2023)

Guides

• FMHY Browser Tools: Privacy Tweaks
• Firefox-UI-Fix
• Narsil/desktop_user.js
• pyllyukko/user.js comparator

Reviews

• “I use this one ... The performance is absolutely amazing. There’s definitely a huge difference when it comes to loading sites.” - DIRIKtv
• "BetterFox ... will provide good-enough privacy and help with performance." - Qdoit12Super
• "...drastically changed the experience with Firefox for me. Improved speed, security, smoothness, and removed clutter." - AppDate
• "Firefox with uBlock Origin extension and tuned with Betterfox is faster than Safari." - cugeloid
• "I don't think I could use Firefox without Betterfox." - Professional_Fun4616
• "The best collection of tweaks available." - AuRiMaS
• "FF is now much snappier!" - whotheff
• "...the experience is so good now I don’t think I’ll go back to any of the chromium based browsers." - Mr_Compromise

Support

If you like the project, leave a :star: (top right) and become a stargazer!

Credit

• Betterfox mirrors the ongoing work provided by arkenfox. Additionally, this repository includes content reproduced or adapted from other sources. Credit for overlapping material goes to the original authors.
• Appreciation goes to the Firefox team and developers working on Bugzilla, fighting for the open web.
• A special thanks to Alex Kontos of Waterfox for his collaboration in v.116.
• Many thanks to the 2021 Ghostery team for testing Betterfox at scale in its early days.

It's a short blog post, but essentially talks about a world beyond surveillance advertising.

BTW this is on gigabit internet

It is quite annoyting, it prevents some other addons like close duplicates from running at all, as it does not run as long as there is something loading

Fortunately, "Stop all" does work to shut them off

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/98152847-4f2b-4391-92c1-f146e755c54c.png

This is a new behaviour from today, possibly ?

I just gave it a try, openned 3 tabs and waited 60 seconds, they didn't finish loading.

I tried turning off ublock, no effect

NOTE :

Issue has resolved itself after a reboot. This is a system with a amd 5950x and 64gb ram.

Copied from reddit:

Firefox CTO here.

There’s been a lot of discussion over the weekend about the origin trial for a private attribution prototype in Firefox 128. It’s clear in retrospect that we should have communicated more on this one, and so I wanted to take a minute to explain our thinking and clarify a few things. I figured I’d post this here on Reddit so it’s easy for folks to ask followup questions. I’ll do my best to address them, though I’ve got a busy week so it might take me a bit.

The Internet has become a massive web of surveillance, and doing something about it is a primary reason many of us are at Mozilla. Our historical approach to this problem has been to ship browser-based anti-tracking features designed to thwart the most common surveillance techniques. We have a pretty good track record with this approach, but it has two inherent limitations.

First, in the absence of alternatives, there are enormous economic incentives for advertisers to try to bypass these countermeasures, leading to a perpetual arms race that we may not win. Second, this approach only helps the people that choose to use Firefox, and we want to improve privacy for everyone.

This second point gets to a deeper problem with the way that privacy discourse has unfolded, which is the focus on choice and consent. Most users just accept the defaults they’re given, and framing the issue as one of individual responsibility is a great way to mollify savvy users while ensuring that most peoples’ privacy remains compromised. Cookie banners are a good example of where this thinking ends up.

Whatever opinion you may have of advertising as an economic model, it’s a powerful industry that’s not going to pack up and go away. A mechanism for advertisers to accomplish their goals in a way that did not entail gathering a bunch of personal data would be a profound improvement to the Internet we have today, and so we’ve invested a significant amount of technical effort into trying to figure it out.

The devil is in the details, and not everything that claims to be privacy-preserving actually is. We’ve published extensive analyses of how certain other proposals in this vein come up short. But rather than just taking shots, we’re also trying to design a system that actually meets the bar. We’ve been collaborating with Meta on this, because any successful mechanism will need to be actually useful to advertisers, and designing something that Mozilla and Meta are simultaneously happy with is a good indicator we’ve hit the mark.

This work has been underway for several years at the W3C’s PATCG, and is showing real promise. To inform that work, we’ve deployed an experimental prototype of this concept in Firefox 128 that is feature-wise quite bare-bones but uncompromising on the privacy front. The implementation uses a Multi-Party Computation (MPC) system called DAP/Prio (operated in partnership with ISRG) whose privacy properties have been vetted by some of the best cryptographers in the field. Feedback on the design is always welcome, but please show your work.

The prototype is temporary, restricted to a handful of test sites, and only works in Firefox. We expect it to be extremely low-volume, and its purpose is to inform the technical work in PATCG and make it more likely to succeed. It’s about measurement (aggregate counts of impressions and conversions) rather than targeting. It’s based on several years of ongoing research and standards work, and is unrelated to Anonym.

The privacy properties of this prototype are much stronger than even some garden variety features of the web platform, and unlike those of most other proposals in this space, meet our high bar for default behavior. There is a toggle to turn it off because some people object to advertising irrespective of the privacy properties, and we support people configuring their browser however they choose. That said, we consider modal consent dialogs to be a user-hostile distraction from better defaults, and do not believe such an experience would have been an improvement here.

Digital advertising is not going away, but the surveillance parts could actually go away if we get it right. A truly private attribution mechanism would make it viable for businesses to stop tracking people, and enable browsers and regulators to clamp down much more aggressively on those that continue to do so.

Now that Google and Microsoft each consume more power than some fairly big countries, maybe it's time for 2024 Mozilla to take heed of 2021 Mozilla's warnings.

Anyone else hate this? I don't want a dumbed down bar. If Im on the homepage, I want to know. Same as if I'm on a subpage.

This is in reference to Mozilla changing the URL to ALWAYS show only the domain. Absolutely terrible IMO. As for the double tall menu now? That is mostly fine.

At least give me an option to see the full url.

Original toot:

It has come to my attention that many of the people complaining about #Firefox's #PPA experiment don't actually understand what PPA is, what it does, and what Firefox is trying to accomplish with it, so an explainer 🧵 is in order.

Targeted advertising sucks. It is invasive and privacy-violating, it enables populations to be manipulated by bad actors in democracy-endangering ways, and it doesn't actually sell products.

Nevertheless, commercial advertisers are addicted to the data they get from targeted advertising. They aren't going to stop using it until someone convinces them there's something else that will work better.

"Contextual advertising works better." Yes, it does! But, again, advertisers are addicted to the data, and contextual advertising provides much less data, so they don't trust it.

What PPA says is, "Suppose we give you anonymized, aggregated data about which of your ads on which sites resulted in sales or other significant commitments from users?" The data that the browser collects under PPA are sent to a third-party (in Firefox's case, the third party is the same organization that runs Let's Encrypt; does anybody think they're not trustworthy?) and aggregated and anonymized there. Noise is introduced into the data to prevent de-anonymization.

This allows advertisers to "target" which sites they put their ads on. It doesn't allow them to target individuals. In Days Of Yore, advertisers would do things like ask people to bring newspapers ads into the store or mention a certain phrase to get deals. These were for collecting conversion statistics on paper ads. Ditto for coupons. PPA is a way to do this online.

Is there a potential for abuse? Sure, which is why the data need to be aggregated and anonymized by a trusted third party. If at some point they discover they're doing insufficient aggregation or anonymization, then they can fix that all in one place. And if the work they're doing is transparent, as compared to the entirely opaque adtech industry, the entire internet can weigh in on any bugs in their algorithms.

Is this a utopia? No. Would it be better than what we have now? Indisputably. Is there a clear path right now to anything better? Not that I can see. We can keep fighting for something better while still accepting this as an improvement over what we have now.

Original post (not mine): https://reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e1rskb/mozila_needs_to_learn_that_chromes_uiux_is_not/

I can't exactly make out what it says after the error code thanks to the mystery unicode characters but I will try my best.

"The package couldn't pass the updating, or verification."

Recently I installed Firefox on my parents' phones (uBlock Origin too) in order to make them surf the web more securely as we've had a few cases in the past with malware. (Google Chrome, the advertisement company's browser, does not like ad blockers. Wonder why?)

All they care about it is it openning Google.com and apparently they don't like Firefox's home screen. There are only options for "the last tab", "home screen" and "home screen after few hours of inactivity" but no option to go to a specific web address. In this case, google.com.

So... how do?

I want URLs of a page to stay the same no matter where I scroll, including on Discourse where stopping at a certain comment changes the url to that comment's number. Scroll this page to see: https://meta.discourse.org/t/should-url-change-as-you-scroll/55302

Thunderbird's addon store is very lacking to compare to Firefox. Are there even technical limitations to this if Thunderbird use Firefox / Gecko under the hood?

Wow, that's awesome! I was very sad without the clickbait articles. I was staring at Firefox thinking "i wish it had a cluttered start page with clickbait articles and sponsored content like MS Edge" - and then with this new update the devs nailed it! Thanks!

That's really perfect!

Crossposted another Reddit user's post: https://reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1dso5sz/easy_trick_to_make_firefox_compact_1_in_firefoxs/

I just pulled down the latest Firefox Dev Edition AppImage and still getting the same result. I try to login to GitLab and I get an endless loop of checking whether I'm human or not. I tried to turn off tracking protection for GitLab and Cloudflare and added both to accept all cookies. In the network tab it eventually shows 403s. Anyone else have this happen or know if I can disable any more safety/privacy features to get it working?

Fingerprinting works by collecting bits of information about the browser and device to identify users. Couldn't browsers like Firefox see when a website gets such info with JS and either prevent or ask permission from the user for the website to make HTTP requests to upload such information to the website. Idk if they do something like this already.

I did the tests on fingerprint.com/demo/ and https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ and they both said I have a unique fingerprint, even when I enabled privacy.resistFingerprinting to True.

This is part of the Android release for Firefox 127.0.2.

Release notes

Please leave a comment on Bug : Android idle battery drain due to Firefox if you still experience this issue after updating Firefox and restarting your phone: