Firefox

Context

Senate Bill (SB) 1047 is legislation proposed by Senator Scott Wiener for regulating AI models that cost over $100 million to train. The bill was designed to hold AI companies accountable for potential damages caused by their models.

It gained widespread support from the population of California and a broad coalition of labor unions, AI safety advocates, Hollywood figures, and current and ex-employees of AI megacorporations.

However, many giant corporations including Google, Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI opposed the bill, asking Gavin Newsom to veto it.

Mozilla's statement

On August 29, Mozilla joined the corporations to endorse a veto, publishing its own statement:

Mozilla is a champion for both openness and trustworthiness in AI, and we are deeply concerned that SB 1047 would imperil both of those objectives. For over 25 years, Mozilla has fought Big Tech to make the Internet better, creating an open source browser that challenged incumbents and raised the bar on privacy, security, and functionality for everyone in line with our manifesto.

Today, we see parallels to the early Internet in the AI ecosystem, which has also become increasingly closed and consolidated in the hands of a few large, tech companies. >We are concerned that SB 1047 would further this trend, harming the open-source community and making AI less safe — not more.

Mozilla has engaged with Senator Wiener's team on the legislation; we appreciate the Senator’s collaboration, along with many of the positive changes made throughout the legislative process. However, we continue to be concerned about key provisions likely to have serious repercussions. For instance, provisions like those that grant the Board of Frontier Models oversight of computing thresholds without statutory requirements for updating thresholds as AI proves safe will likely harm the open-source AI community and the startups, small businesses, researchers, and academic communities that utilize open-source AI.

As the bill heads to the Governor’s desk, we ask that Governor Newsom consider the serious harm this bill may do to the open source ecosystem and pursue alternatives that address concrete AI risks to ensure a better AI future for all.

Source: Mozilla (PDF).

Gavin Newsom vetoed this bill on September 29th.

Mull builds were delayed due to Google removing a necessary component from the NDK in revision 27. But the devs found a way to build the latest version.

Mull is available on the DivestOS f-droid repo

I just got a x86 tablet, and it works great with GNOME(Wayland), having pretty good touch support, except for on Firefox. I can't get multi-touch gestures to work, nor touch scrolling. I've tried environment variables(MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1,MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1), but that didn't change anything. I've also had a look in about:config and couldn't tell what options would change my experience. It should be noted that I have WebGL disabled, but I don't forsee that changing anything. I also see under about:support that the Window Protocol is xwayland, and I'm wondering if that changed anything aswell(the protocol doesn't change even with environment variables).

Does anyone have an idea about what's gone wrong with my browser? Thank you very much!

Mozilla Thunderbird for Android is now available in beta, built upon the K-9 Mail app.

The beta includes core email features like account setup, email organization, and notifications, with feedback encouraged from users.

Thunderbird for Android will remain a separate app from K-9 Mail, requiring users to migrate if they previously used K-9.

#Features

• Thunderbird for Android branding is now available

• Material 3 Navigation drawer

• Updated color scheme

• Allow migrating settings directly from an existing K-9 or Thunderbird for Android install

• Make use of Glean SDK

• Add basic feature setup for funding via Google Play subscriptions (we'll use this for financial contributions)

• Use [...] for outer subject when encrypting the subject

• Remove "Move/copy destination folders" setting

• Remove "Folders to search" setting

• Remove folder push class to simplify folder notifications

So... Yeah. Just that. How can i enable Firefox translation in Android? I'd like to be able to use the offline translation feature.

Thanks!

Mozilla recently removed every version of uBlock Origin Lite from their add-on store except for the oldest version.

Mozilla says a manual review flagged these issues:

Consent, specifically Nonexistent: For add-ons that collect or transmit user data, the user must be informed...

Your add-on contains minified, concatenated or otherwise machine-generated code. You need to provide the original sources...

uBlock Origin's developer gorhill refutes this with linked evidence.

Contrary to what these emails suggest, the source code files highlighted in the email:

• Have nothing to do with data collection, there is no such thing anywhere in uBOL
• There is no minified code in uBOL, and certainly none in the supposed faulty files

Even for people who did not prefer this add-on, the removal could have a chilling effect on uBlock Origin itself.

Incidentally, all the files reported as having issues are exactly the same files being used in uBO for years, and have been used in uBOL as well for over a year with no modification. Given this, it's worrisome what could happen to uBO in the future.

And gorhill notes uBO Lite had a purpose on Firefox, especially on mobile devices:

[T]here were people who preferred the Lite approach of uBOL, which was designed from the ground up to be an efficient suspendable extension, thus a good match for Firefox for Android.

New releases of uBO Lite do not have a Firefox extension; the last version of this coincides with gorhill's message. The Firefox addon page for uBO Lite is also gone.

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/17910251

Hello everyone!

Multi-account containers (MAC) is looking for more contributors and we are asking for your help! Multi-account containers is an open-source Firefox extension that enhances your browsing experience by enabling color coded custom tab configurations. For more information on what you can do with MAC, check out this article.

MAC improvements heavily rely on our core community. There are currently 516 open issues on MAC's GitHub repository. These issues consist of bugs and feature requests.

A guide to setting up your local repository and starting to contribute can be found here.

Tips for contributing:

1. Choose an issue that you would like to work on.
2. Fork the repository and follow the instructions for setting it up locally.
3. Run the add-on locally and try reproducing the issue.
4. Debug add-ons by clicking the “Settings” icon in about:addons, and then clicking “Debug Add-ons”
5. Click “Inspect” on the MAC add-on to open developer tools for the popup extension (see this documentation for more information)
6. Once you have a fix ready, commit your changes with the following commit message template: “Fix #<insert issue id #>: ”
7. Push your changes and open a pull request for review.

Have any questions? Head over to the Q&A section on our GitHub discussions.

Hi guys! I'm trying to disable Firefox' menu that shows when you right click. Sometimes, depending on context (ie, right click on a youtube video) you might get a webpage menu. But Firefox places their right click menu on top of the web's menu, blocking everything. I want to disable this, so the website/extension takes precedence, and the menu doesn't show in this case.

I see on some pages the option should be: dom.event.contextmenu.enabled, which should be set to TRUE in order to let webs or apps take precedence. It is already set to true, and yet FF keeps placing their menu on top of the website's. What else can I check?

EDIT: Just in case, there seems to be also an services.sync.prefs.sync.dom.event.contextmenu.enabled, which might be synced from my mozilla account? Not sure how this one should be set.

https://noyb.eu/en/firefox-tracks-you-privacy-preserving-feature

Hi guys! Just...this. Whenever I search for firefox on the software installation app, or via dnf, I can see the only available version is v121...or I can update via flatpak to a newer one. How come the repo version is so old? How can I get the v130 officially?

Thanks!

Hello! Im trying to get going on LibreWolf with as minimal inconvenience as possible. Is there a way I can migrate all of my data from firefox into librewolf so its almost just as if It didnt change? I guess the biggest thing is saved passwords and their associations which im going to be migrating into BitWarden really soon.

Mozilla has overhauled its branding to pay homage to its Netscape roots and better distinguish the wider organization from its Firefox web browser. The most notable change is to the company’s logo: what was previously a sans-serif wordmark styled as “Moz://a” has been updated to correctly spell out the Mozilla name, featuring a new customized typeface and an M-shaped flag.

According to Mozilla, the flag symbolizes the brand’s “activist spirit.” That fits with the image that the Mozilla Foundation, which is leading the company, is attempting to build: describing itself as “a non-profit organization that promotes openness, innovation, and participation on the Internet” and regularly releasing privacy reports that investigate tech companies’ policy and security practices.

I have recently realized that I will occasionally hear notification sounds from applications that I had previously opened but no longer has any active tabs (email client, discord, etc.). I'm assuming this means they are allowed to keep some sort of connection in the background until I close all Firefox windows. Is this a bug or a "feature"? How do I turn it off? I don't want any application running at any capacity except when I have tab(s) open for them.

Solution:

Hm, Discord didn't have anything registered there. After some digging, I found about:debugging#workers which does list Discord stuff under "Other Workers". It's unsettling to see there's no way to force confirmation and/or disable these stuff. I use Discord when I have to every once in a while. I don't want their code running all the time in my browser..

edit: you can disable service workers with dom.serviceWorkers.enabled = false but this has no effect on Other Workers.

edit2: uBlock can disable Other Workers by setting the filter ||$csp=worker-src 'none' in My Filters and enabling Suspend network activity until all filter lists are loaded in Filter lists. It funny how this "trick" is written for Chromium-based browsers with the note that Firefox allows global disabling of service workers when the sites can just register a different type of worker with no way of disabling them. I am sure the api is less powerful than service workers bla bla bla, let me decide what runs on my browser without needing third party tools, please.

An old article but provides a detailed view on the choice of removing the old XUL addons

Most of Mozilla's money of course comes from Google to make them the default search engine on Firefox. And of course its a way for Google to ensure there's at least one alternative browser engine. Reading about how Texeira was recently fired and how executives have been pushing for AI features for a long time, Mozilla certainly loves chasing trends and then forgetting them, like how Google kills lots of products. It seems like the company can't stand on its own two feet without Google's funding and is poorly run.

What happened to Mozilla over the years? How much effort did they put in to trying to be a successful tech company? because it hasn't been until the past few that I really started following Firefox and Mozilla news.

I wonder if Mozilla could've been Proton, years before Proton AG existed, making their own comprehensive suite of privacy-friendly tools, since Mozilla makes privacy their brand. And they were late to the smartphone game with Firefox OS. If they were smart, they would've ensured their long term survival with an actual business, to continue funding development of their privacy and FOSS software like Firefox, without large funding sources like Google.

sigh

Let’s try LibreWolf, Floorp and Zen until Mozilla decides they want to make a browser again