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/

Hello all,

As you may be aware, Firefox introduced on-device translations on the desktop a few months ago and according to this knowledge base page it has been available since version 126, but unfortunately only on some unnamed devices.

Do you know of any way (i.e. preferences in about:config) to forcefully enable the feature?

Thanks in advance

PSA (?): just got this popup in Firefox when i was on an amazon product page. looked into it a bit because it seemed weird and it turns out if you click the big "yes, try it" button, you agree to mandatory binding arbitration with Fakespot and you waive your right to bring a class action lawsuit against them. this is awesome thank you so much mozilla very cool

https://queer.party/@m04/112872517189786676

So, Mozilla adds an AI review features for products you view using Firefox. Other than being very useless, it's T&C are as anti-consumer as it possibly can be. It's like mozilla saying directly "we don't care about your privacy".

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.

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…

??

I'm almost sorry to ask this, but does anyone have experience with Firefox on Linux taking a long time to open? I'm running Pop!_OS on a fairly modern machine. All other programs open pretty quickly, but Firefox seems to drag its feet on startup. Once it's open it's great, no problems with speed.

I have tried disabling extensions (ublock origin, sponsorblock, decentraleyes, i still don't care about cookies) and I have tried setting my default profile as one without any custom user.js (I have a profile with Arkenfox and one with Betterfox's user.js). Nothing I have done so far has seemed to make any difference, but Help->Troubleshoot Mode allows Firefox to open quickly, so there must be something that I can disable that is causing the issue... Any ideas? Thanks.

Edit: Seems like swapping to the flatpak version made things much faster. The Pop!_OS .deb version must be snap like you all said :) Thanks everyone!

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.

I'm doing a quick review of the Addons that I am using on my Windows PC. I've had a look at some of the previous posts to try to get an idea of where things are at

Currently I have the following Container related Addons but I think things have moved on a bit since I looked at this.

• Facebook Container
• Google Container
• Switch Container

This means that opening Facebook and Google automatically goes into relevant containers and using Switch I can create separate containers for Work, Banking etc.

I noticed that I'm not using Mozzilla's Multi-Account Containers

Ideally I'd like to be able to:

• Have Facebook and Google Open in their own containers
• Potentially open separate containers for different Google Accounts
• Allocate other domains to open by default in a specific container (e.g a list of Bank websites into a specific container) but be able to override that
• Have links from Thunderbird open in relevant containers

What are people using in terms of Container addons?

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

Wonder if all those people very publicly dumping Firefox, will also dump their Apple products in such a high profile fashion?

Just wanted to surface this comment, because not enough people are cognizant of the fact that adblockers do their job and prevent any PPA submissions.

I'm trying to use the Web Archives addons on Firefox Mobile and I have it installed and can configure it but I'm not sure how to actually use it. I can't right click like on desktop. Maybe I'm missing something obvious. Thanks.

Edit: so I guess I can go into the main menu, open my extension list, select Web Archives, then select the archive source I want to view the current page in. I suppose it works, but with that many taps it hardly seems any faster than just copying the url and pasting it in an archive.is bookmark. If anyone know a more efficient way please let me know.

Edit2: actually, changing this setting and reducing the included archives helps

I just got the update on my phone on Google play, Firefox now supports 3rd party password managers for passkeys (on android 14+). Just tried it, and I got prompted with my 3rd party password manager, so it works!

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.

This should be redesigned. The dot-menu has close and bookmark options. There is more than enough to move these to the front. Dot-menu just adds more touch.

Going into quick settings or full settings from search result menu, I disable AI in Search Results. It goes away.

Opening Firefox again and searching it turns back on.

How can this be disabled in Brave permanently? Not only do I want to not wait for AI, it's trash to begin with.

TIA

Especially ones that you find useful on android Firefox, as they seem to be less popular?

Recently got to know about bookmarklets due to a thread here in this community itself:
https://lemm.ee/comment/12623456
^An unrelated question: Is there some way to link comments so that they are automatically opened in home instances for eveyone, like how we can link communities and usernames currently?^

Some interesting/useful bookmarklets that I know of:

1. Bullshit.js as mentioned in that link
2. dotepub. It does say that data is sent to their server.
   For some sites it's better than the inbuilt save as pdf option.
3. A bookmarklet that opens the current site in G-translate
4. Saw a bookmarklet which works like reader mode.

The freecodecamp article on bookmarklets maybe useful for those new to it(It helped me). It seems cool.
https://wiki.greasespot.net/User_Script_Hosting links to sources for userscripts. Most of them seem to be desktop-centric.

Which are your favorites? Any cool ones that you have made on your own?

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.

I have the search bar added to the toolbar which I use to either search straight from it or use it to bring up google.

It looks like in the latest update you can no longer select the text box, hit enter and get taken to the search page.

You have to enter some text before it does so.

Does anyone else have the same issue?

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.