Items tagged with Mozilla
If you’re a fan of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, a big update is coming to the release channel tomorrow. Firefox 55 features support for WebVR, which is a platform for viewing virtual reality content from within a browser environment. Mozilla says that its current implementation of WebVR will be supported on both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive VR headsets. The company describes WebVR, writing: WebVR transforms VR into a first-class experience on the web, giving it the infinite possibilities found in the openness and interoperability of the Web Platform. When coupled with WebGL to render 3D graphics,...
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Google Chrome might be the world’s most popular web browser, but that isn’t stopping Mozilla from trying everything in its power to give Firefox a fighting chance at retaining (and gaining) market share. With that in mind, Mozilla has announced three new experimental features for Firefox as part of the Firefox Test Pilot. The first is called Voice Fill, which relies on Firefox’s built-in Speech to Text (STT) functionality to input text. Voice Fill can be used to conduct searches using Google, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo searches. Using your voice to search is as simple as clicking the microphone...
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How many tabs do you currently have open on your web browser? One? Ten? How about 1691 tabs? Mozilla Quantum Flow Engineer Dietrich Ayala recently demonstrated that Firefox 55 is able to load 1691 tabs in a mere fifteen seconds. Ayala kept track of the wall-clock measurements of start-up time and memory use for Firefox versions 20, 30, 40, and 50 through 56. He discovered that Firefox 51 took almost eight minutes to load the tabs, however, Firefox 55 ad 56 clocked in at 15 seconds. Ayala also realized the Firefox 54 and earlier used roughly 2 GB of memory. Firefox 55 and 56 used less than 0.5 GB....
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You might think that an agency such as the Federal Communications Commission would exist for no other reason than to protect consumers, but that hasn't proven to be the case at all when it comes to our online rights. You might be tired of hearing about net neutrality - and we couldn't even blame you - but now more than ever, we can't let down our guard. To reiterate what net neutrality is supposed to do: it's to treat our internet access as a Title II utility, classifying it the same way our phones and power are. That is to say that companies can't charge whatever they want for whatever they want...
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It’s been eight years in the making, but Mozilla is now rolling out multiprocess support to its production branch of Firefox via the Electrolysis (E10s) project. Firefox 54 is being billed as “the best Firefox ever” and uses its multiprocess support to enable web users, who often have a dozen (or dozens of) tabs open at a time, to enjoy a faster and more stable browsing experience. In the case of Firefox 54, E10s spreads all open tabs across up to four open processes. This allows Firefox 54 to make better use of system resources, and in the event that one rogue tab causes issues that could hamper...
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If you're using Google's Chrome browser as your primary vehicle to surf the web, you may want to think about temporarily parking it and puttering around in something else. That's because the most recent version of Chrome is vulnerable to a devious phishing attack, one that is capable of spoofing a legitimate website in the address bar so that you could be tricked into forking over your login credentials and other sensitive data. This particular variant uses unicode to register domains that look exactly the same as real domains. However, these fake domains can be used for malicious purposes, such...
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Microsoft has a long and somewhat bumpy road in the antivirus field. Even its latest AV solution, Windows Defender, has not always garnered praise, though that is beginning to change. A recent blog post by a security expert who heaped praise on the default security software in Windows has prompted others to come out and speak in favor of using Windows Defender instead of a third-party solution. "At best, there is negligible evidence that major non-MS AV products give a net improvement in security. More likely, they hurt security significantly; for example, see bugs in AV products listed in Google's...
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Firefox users who are still clinging to Windows XP or Windows Vista will soon have reason to consider upgrading to Windows 7 or Windows 10. Mozilla announced in a blog post that it is phasing out support for Microsoft's legacy operating systems in 2017. The phase out period will begin in March of next year when Mozilla moves users on XP and Vista to the Extended Support Release (ESR), a version of Firefox that is not updated as frequently. After that Mozilla will continue providing security updates until September before pulling the plug completely. Users do not need to take any additional action...
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Mozilla is ready to overhaul the rendering engine that underlies its Firefox web browser, and it’s being developed under the name Project Quantum. Quantum is Mozilla’s latest effort to take down Google Chrome as the world’s most popular browser and fend off attacks from Microsoft Edge and Opera. Quantum will take advantage of parallelism and harness the power of modern processors that power our numerous devices. David Bryant, Head of Platform Engineering at Mozilla, explains that the earliest browsers were designed to run on single-core processors, and that most of today’s browser still only take...
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As if we needed another vector for our online privacy to be invaded, it appears that site operators may have another tool at their disposal when it comes tracking visitors. Security researchers from Princeton University have identified two scripts that are actively tracking users across the web using an HTML5 API. The Battery Status API is part of the HTML5 standard, and can be found in modern browsers like Google Chrome, Opera, and Mozilla Firefox. Using the API, a website can determine if a mobile device’s battery is close to full capacity, near depletion, or anywhere in between. The World Wide...
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Flash's days on the web are numbered. That's been evident for the past couple of years as the anti-Flash movement has gained steam. Little by little, software developers and online services have been removing Flash support from their products, and starting in August, you can count Firefox among them. Well, partially anyway. Firefox isn't getting rid of Flash altogether, but the browser will begin blocking certain Flash content that Mozilla feels is not essential to the user experience. The decision to crack down on Flash plugins is one of several things Mozilla has planned to ultimately bring Firefox...
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Firefox has a solution for those of us who like to keep multiple tabs and accounts open at once. With Firefox Containers, users can open tabs in multiple different contexts – Personal, Work, Banking, and Shopping. This is currently an experimental feature in Nightly, a 64-bit version of Firefox. Each context has a fully segregated cookie jar. Containers have individual cookies, indexeddb, localStorage, and caches. Users will not need to use multiple browsers, an account switcher, or constantly log in and out to switch between accounts on the same domain. Containers will only segregate data...
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We suspect there are some high-fives flying around in Mozilla's offices this morning, as the company's Firefox browser has now caught up with and even slightly bumped ahead of both Internet Explorer and Edge combined in desktop browser market share, according to data provided by StatsCounter. It's the narrowest of victories with Firefox claiming a 15.6 percent share of the desktop browser market at the end of April, compared to 15.5 percent for Microsoft's two browsers combined. In horse racing, that would be a photo finish. Even if you want to call it a tie, which you'd be justified in doing,...
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In early December, Mozilla pretty much confirmed that the end was near for Firefox OS on smartphones. “Firefox OS proved the flexibility of the Web, scaling from low-end smartphones all the way up to HD TVs,” said Mozilla SVP of Connected Devices Ari Jaaksi at the time. “However, we weren’t able to offer the best user experience possible and so we will stop offering Firefox OS smartphones through carrier channels.” This week, Mozilla solidified those plans to axe Firefox OS for smartphones by announcing that support will be yanked in the coming months. “We are announcing our plan to end-of-life...
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