Mozilla has named Anthony Enzor-DeMeo as its new chief executive, promoting the executive who has spent the past year leading the Firefox browser team and who now plans to make AI central to the company's future.

Enzor-DeMeo announced on Tuesday that an "AI Mode" is coming to Firefox next year. The feature will let users choose from multiple AI models rather than being locked into a single provider. Some options will be open-source models, others will be private "Mozilla-hosted cloud options," and the company also plans to integrate models from major AI companies. Mozilla itself will not train its own large language model.

"We're not incentivized to push one model or the other," Enzor-DeMeo told The Verge. Firefox currently has about 200 million monthly users, a fraction of Chrome's roughly 4 billion, though Enzor-DeMeo insists mobile usage is growing at a decent clip.

He takes over from interim CEO Laura Chambers, who led the company through a major antitrust case and what Mozilla describes as "double-digit mobile growth" in Firefox. Chambers is returning to the Mozilla board of directors. The new CEO has outlined three priorities: ensuring all products give users control over AI features including the ability to turn them off, building a business model around transparent monetization, and expanding Firefox into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Mozilla VPN integration is planned for the browser next year.

Choosing your browser "is one of the most important digital decisions you can make, shaping how you experience the web, protect your data, and express yourself online," says the Firefox blog. They've urged readers to "take a stand for independence and control in your digital life."

But they also recently polled 8,000 adults in France, Germany, the UK and the U.S. on "how they navigate choice and control both online and offline" (attending in-person events in Chicago, Berlin, LA, and Munich, San Diego, Stuttgart): The survey, conducted by research agency YouGov, showcases a tension between people's desire to have control over their data and digital privacy, and the reality of the internet today — a reality defined by Big Tech platforms that make it difficult for people to exercise meaningful choice online:


— Only 16% feel in control of their privacy choices (highest in Germany at 21%)

— 24% feel it's "too late" because Big Tech already has too much control or knows too much about them. And 36% said the feeling of Big Tech companies knowing too much about them is frustrating — highest among respondents in the U.S. (43%) and the UK (40%)

— Practices respondents said frustrated them were Big Tech using their data to train AI without their permission (38%) and tracking their data without asking (47%; highest in U.S. — 55% and lowest in France — 39%)


And from our existing research on browser choice, we know more about how defaults that are hard to change and confusing settings can bury alternatives, limiting people's ability to choose for themselves — the real problem that fuels these dynamics.

Taken together our new and existing insights could also explain why, when asked which actions feel like the strongest expressions of their independence online, choosing not to share their data (44%) was among the top three responses in each country (46% in the UK; 45% in the U.S.; 44% in France; 39% in Germany)... We also see a powerful signal in how people think about choosing the communities and platforms they join — for 29% of respondents, this was one of their top three expressions of independence online.
"For Firefox, community has always been at the heart of what we do," says their VP of Global Marketing, "and we'll keep fighting to put real choice and control back in people's hands so the web once again feels like it belongs to the communities that shape it."

At TwitchCon in San Diego Firefox even launched a satirical new online card game with a privacy theme called Data War.

Stanford researchers spent much of the past year building an AI bot called Artemis that scans networks for software vulnerabilities, and when they pitted it against ten professional penetration testers on the university's own engineering network, the bot outperformed nine of them. The experiment offers a window into how rapidly AI hacking tools have improved after years of underwhelming performance.

"We thought it would probably be below average," said Justin Lin, a Stanford cybersecurity researcher. Artemis found bugs at a fraction of human cost -- just under $60 per hour compared to the $2,000 to $2,500 per day that professional pen testers typically charge. But its performance wasn't flawless. About 18% of its bug reports were false positives, and it completely missed an obvious vulnerability on a webpage that most human testers caught. In one case, Artemis found a bug on an outdated page that didn't render in standard browsers; it used a command-line tool called Curl instead of Chrome or Firefox.

Dan Boneh, a Stanford computer science professor who advised the researchers, noted that vast amounts of software shipped without being vetted by LLMs could now be at risk. "We're in this moment of time where many actors can increase their productivity to find bugs at an extreme scale," said Jacob Klein, head of threat intelligence at Anthropic.

Firefox 146 has been released with native fractional scaling support on Wayland -- finally giving Linux users crisp UI rendering. Other new additions include GPU process improvements on macOS, developer-focused CSS features, and broader access to Firefox Labs. Phoronix reports: Firefox 146 also now makes Firefox Labs available to all users, Firefox on macOS now has a dedicated GPU process by default, dropping Direct2D support on Windows, support for compressed elliptic curve points in WebCrypto, and updated the bundled Skia graphics library. Firefox 146 also has some fun developer enhancements like support for the CSS text-decoration-inset property, the @scope rule now being supported, CSS contrast-color() function being available, and several new experimental web features. The release notes and developer changes can be found at their respective links. Release binaries are available at Mozilla.org.

"The internet is being increasingly polluted by AI generated text, images and video," argues the site for a new browser extension called Slop Evader. It promises to use Google's search API "to only return content published before Nov 30th, 2022" — the day ChatGPT launched — "so you can be sure that it was written or produced by the human hand."

404 Media calls it "a scorched earth approach that virtually guarantees your searches will be slop-free." Slop Evader was created by artist and researcher Tega Brain, who says she was motivated by the growing dismay over the tech industry's unrelenting, aggressive rollout of so-called "generative AI" — despite widespread criticism and the wider public's distaste for it. "This sowing of mistrust in our relationship with media is a huge thing, a huge effect of this synthetic media moment we're in," Brain told 404 Media, describing how tools like Sora 2 have short-circuited our ability to determine reality within a sea of artificial online junk. "I've been thinking about ways to refuse it, and the simplest, dumbest way to do that is to only search before 2022...."

Currently, Slop Evader can be used to search pre-GPT archives of seven different sites where slop has become commonplace, including YouTube, Reddit, Stack Exchange, and the parenting site MumsNet. The obvious downside to this, from a user perspective, is that you won't be able to find anything time-sensitive or current — including this very website, which did not exist in 2022. The experience is simultaneously refreshing and harrowing, allowing you to browse freely without having to constantly question reality, but always knowing that this freedom will be forever locked in time — nostalgia for a human-centric world wide web that no longer exists.

Of course, the tool's limitations are part of its provocation. Brain says she has plans to add support for more sites, and release a new version that uses DuckDuckGo's search indexing instead of Google's. But the real goal, she says, is prompting people to question how they can collectively refuse the dystopian, inhuman version of the internet that Silicon Valley's AI-pushers have forced on us... With enough cultural pushback, Brain suggests, we could start to see alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo adding options to filter out search results suspected of having synthetic content (DuckDuckGo added the ability to filter out AI images in search earlier this year)... But no matter what form AI slop-refusal takes, it will need to be a group effort.

"Fresh from announcing it is building an AI browsing mode in Firefox and laying the groundwork for agentic interactions in the Firefox 145 release, the corp arm of Mozilla is now flexing its AI muscles in the direction of those more likely to care," writes the blog OMG Ubuntu: If you're a developer building AI agents, you can sign up to get early access to Mozilla's TABS API, a "powerful web content extraction and transformation toolkit designed specifically for AI agent builders"... The TABS API enables devs to create agents to automate web interactions, like clicking, scrolling, searching, and submitting forms "just like a human". Real-time feedback and adaptive behaviours will, Mozilla say, offer "full control of the web, without the complexity."

As TABS is not powered by a Mozilla-backed LLM you'll need to connect it to your choice of third-party LLM for any relevant processing... Developers get 1,000 requests monthly on the free tier, which seems reasonable for prototyping personal projects. Complex agentic workloads may require more. Though pricing is yet to be locked in, the TABS API website suggests it'll cost ~$5 per 1000 requests. Paid plans will offer additional features too, like lower latency and, somewhat ironically, CAPTCHA solving so AI can 'prove' it's not a robot on pages gated to prevent automated activities.

Google, OpenAI, and other major AI vendors offer their own agentic APIs. Mozilla is pitching up late, but it plans to play differently. It touts a "strong focus on data minimisation and security", with scraped data treated ephemerally — i.e., not kept. As a distinction, that matters. AI agents can be given complex online tasks that involve all sorts of personal or sensitive data being fetched and worked with.... If you're minded to make one, perhaps without a motivation to asset-strip the common good, Mozilla's TABS API look like a solid place to start.

Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: A 21 year old bug report requesting support of the XDG Base Directory specification is finally being addressed by Firefox. The Firefox 147 release should respect this XDG specification around where files should be positioned within Linux users' home directory.

The XDG Base Directory specification lays out where application data files, configuration files, cached assets, and other files and file formats should be positioned within a user's home directory and the XDG environment variables for accessing those locations. To date Firefox has just positioned all files under ~/.mozilla rather than the likes of ~/.config and ~/.local/share.

Mozilla is officially ending its partnership with Onerep after more than a year of controversy over the company's founder secretly running people-search and data-broker sites. Monitor Plus will be discontinued by December 2025, existing subscribers will receive prorated refunds, and Mozilla says it will focus on privacy tools it fully controls. KrebsOnSecurity reports: In a statement published Tuesday, Mozilla said it will soon discontinue Monitor Plus, which offered data broker site scans and automated personal data removal from Onerep. "We will continue to offer our free Monitor data breach service, which is integrated into Firefox's credential manager, and we are focused on integrating more of our privacy and security experiences in Firefox, including our VPN, for free," the advisory reads.

Mozilla said current Monitor Plus subscribers will retain full access through the wind-down period, which ends on Dec. 17, 2025. After that, those subscribers will automatically receive a prorated refund for the unused portion of their subscription. "We explored several options to keep Monitor Plus going, but our high standards for vendors, and the realities of the data broker ecosystem made it challenging to consistently deliver the level of value and reliability we expect for our users," Mozilla statement reads.

Tech entrepreneur/blogger Anil Dash has been critical of AI browsers like ChatGPT Atlas. (He's written that Atlas "substitutes its own AI-generated content for the web, but it looks like it's showing you the web," while its prompt-based/command-line interface resembles a clunky text adventure, and it's true purpose seems to be ingesting more training data.)

And at the Mozilla Festival in Spain, "Virtually everyone shared some version of what I'd articulated as the majority view on AI, which is approximately that LLMs can be interesting as a technology, but that Big Tech, and especially Big AI, are decidedly awful and people are very motivated to stop them from committing their worst harms upon the vulnerable."

But... Another reality that people were a little more quiet in acknowledging, and sometimes reluctant to engage with out loud, is the reality that hundreds of millions of people are using the major AI tools every day... I don't know why today's Firefox users, even if they're the most rabid anti-AI zealots in the world, don't say, "well, even if I hate AI, I want to make sure Firefox is good at protecting the privacy of AI users so I can recommend it to my friends and family who use AI"...

My personal wishlist would be pretty simple:

* Just give people the "shut off all AI features" button. It's a tiny percentage of people who want it, but they're never going to shut up about it, and they're convinced they're the whole world and they can't distinguish between being mad at big companies and being mad at a technology so give them a toggle switch and write up a blog post explaining how extraordinarily expensive it is to maintain a configuration option over the lifespan of a global product.

* Market Firefox as "The best AI browser for people who hate Big AI". Regular users have no idea how creepy the Big AI companies are — they've just heard their local news talk about how AI is the inevitable future. If Mozilla can warn me how to protect my privacy from ChatGPT, then it can also mention that ChatGPT tells children how to self-harm, and should be aggressive in engaging with the community on how to build tools that help mitigate those kinds of harms — how do we catalyze that innovation?

* Remind people that there isn't "a Firefox" — everyone is Firefox. Whether it's Zen, or your custom build of Firefox with your favorite extensions and skins, it's all part of the same story. Got a local LLM that runs entirely as a Firefox extension? Great! That should be one of the many Firefoxes, too. Right now, so much of the drama and heightened emotions and tension are coming from people's (well... dudes') egos about there being One True Firefox, and wanting to be the one who controls what's in that version, as an expression of one set of values. This isn't some blood-feud fork, there can just be a lot of different choices for different situations. Make it all work.

Mozilla announced on Thursday that it is building an AI Window for Firefox, a new opt-in browsing mode that will let users interact with an AI assistant and chatbot. The feature will become one of three browsing experiences in Firefox alongside the existing classic and private windows. Users will be able to select which AI model they want to use in the AI Window, according to a post on the Mozilla Connect forum.

The company opened a waitlist for users who want to receive updates and be among the first to test the feature. Mozilla described the AI Window as an "intelligent and user-controlled space" that it is developing in the open through community feedback. Users who try the feature and decide against it can switch it off entirely.

FFmpeg, the open source multimedia framework that powers video processing in Google Chrome, Firefox, YouTube and other major platforms, has called on Google to either fund the project or stop burdening its volunteer maintainers with security vulnerabilities found by the company's AI tools. The maintainers patched a bug that Google's AI agent discovered in code for decoding a 1995 video game but described the finding as "CVE slop."

The confrontation centered on a Google Project Zero policy announced in July that publicly discloses reported vulnerabilities within a week and starts a ninety-day countdown to full disclosure regardless of patch availability. FFmpeg, written primarily in assembly language, handles format conversion and streaming for VLC, Kodi and Plex but operates without adequate funding from the corporations that depend on it. Nick Wellnhofer resigned as maintainer of libxml2, a library used in all major web browsers, because of the unsustainable workload of addressing security reports without compensation and said he would stop maintaining the project in December.

BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla has released Firefox 145.0, and the standout change in this version is the official end of support for 32-bit Linux systems. Users on 32-bit distributions will no longer receive updates and are being encouraged to switch to the 64-bit build to continue getting security patches and new features. While most major Linux distributions have already moved past 32-bit support, this shift will still impact older hardware users and lightweight community projects that have held on to 32-bit for the sake of performance or preservation.

The rest of the update introduces features such as built-in PDF comments, improved fingerprinting resistance for private browsing, tab group previews, password management in the sidebar, and minor UI refinements. Firefox also now compresses local translation models with Zstandard to reduce storage needs. But the end of 32-bit Linux support is the change that will leave the biggest mark, signaling another step toward a web ecosystem firmly centered on 64-bit computing.

A maintainer of Debian's Advanced Package Tool (APT) "has announced plans to introduce hard Rust dependencies into APT starting May 2026," reports the blog It's FOSS. The integration targets critical areas like parsing .deb, .ar, and tar files plus HTTP signature verification using Sequoia. [APT maintainer Julian Andres Klode] said these components "would strongly benefit from memory safe languages and a stronger approach to unit testing."

He also gave a firm message to maintainers of Debian ports: "If you maintain a port without a working Rust toolchain, please ensure it has one within the next 6 months, or sunset the port."

The reasoning is straightforward. Debian wants to move forward with modern tools rather than being held back by legacy architecture... Debian ports running on CPU architectures without Rust compiler support have six months to add proper toolchains. If they can't meet this deadline, those ports will need to be discontinued. As a result, some obscure or legacy platforms may lose official support. For most users on mainstream architectures like x86_64 and ARM, nothing changes. Your APT will simply become more secure and reliable under the hood.
It's FOSS argues that "If done right, this could significantly strengthen APT's security and code quality."

And the blog Linuxiac also supports the move. "By embedding Rust into APT, the distro joins a growing number of major open-source projects, such as the Linux kernel, Firefox, and systemd, that are gradually adopting Rust. And if I had to guess, I'd say this is just one of the first steps toward even deeper Rust integration in this legendary distribution, which is a good thing."

"The Firefox brand is getting a refresh and you get the first look," says a new web page at Firefox.com. "Kit's our new mascot and your new companion through an internet that's private, open and actually yours."

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli believes the new mascot "is meant to communicate that message in a warmer, more relatable way."

And Firefox is already selling shirts with Kit over the pocket (as well as stickers)...

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from Linuxiac: The Japanese branch of Mozilla's Support Mozilla (SUMO) community — responsible for localizing and maintaining Japanese-language support documentation for Firefox and other Mozilla products (consisting of Japanese native speakers) — has officially disbanded after more than two decades of voluntary work...

SUMO, short for Support Mozilla, is the umbrella project for Mozilla's user support platform, support.mozilla.org, that brings together volunteers and contributors worldwide who translate, maintain, and update documentation, tutorials, and troubleshooting guides for Firefox, Thunderbird, and other Mozilla products... According to marsf, the long-time locale leader of the Japanese SUMO team, the decision to disband was triggered by the recent introduction of an automated translation system known as Sumobot. Deployed on October 22, the bot began editing and approving Japanese Knowledge Base articles without community oversight.
The article notes marsf's complaints in a post to the SUMO discussion forum, including the fact that the new automated system automatically approved machine-translated content with only a 72-hour window for human review. As a result, more than 300 Knowledge Base articles were overwritten on the production server, which marsf called "mass destruction of our work."

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Mozilla is testing a new Firefox feature that delivers direct results inside the address bar instead of forcing users through a search results page. The company says the feature will use a privacy framework called Oblivious HTTP, encrypting queries so that no single party can see both what you type and who you are. Some results could be sponsored, but Mozilla insists neither it nor advertisers will know user identities. The system is starting in the U.S. and may expand later if performance and privacy benchmarks are met. Further reading: Mozilla to Require Data-Collection Disclosure in All New Firefox Extensions

"Mozilla is introducing a new privacy framework for Firefox extensions that will require developers to disclose whether their add-ons collect or transmit user data..." reports the blog Linuxiac: The policy takes effect on November 3, 2025, and applies to all new Firefox extensions submitted to addons.mozilla.org. According to Mozilla's announcement, extension developers must now include a new key in their manifest.json files. This key specifies whether an extension gathers any personal data. Even extensions that collect nothing must explicitly state "none" in this field to confirm that no data is being collected or shared.

This information will be visible to users at multiple points: during the installation prompt, on the extension's listing page on addons.mozilla.org, and in the Permissions and Data section of Firefox's about:addons page. In practice, this means users will be able to see at a glance whether a new extension collects any data before they install it.

Thursday Ubuntu-maker Canonical "officially launched Canonical Academy, a new certification platform designed to help professionals validate their Linux and Ubuntu skills through practical, hands-on assessments," writes the blog It's FOSS: Focusing on real-world scenarios, Canonical Academy aims to foster practical skills rather than theoretical knowledge. The end goal? Getting professionals ready for the actual challenges they will face on the job. The learning platform is already live with its first course offering, the System Administrator track (with three certification exams), which is tailored for anyone looking to validate their Linux and Ubuntu expertise.

The exams use cloud-based testing environments that simulate real workplace scenarios. Each assessment is modular, meaning you can progress through individual exams and earn badges for each one. Complete all the exams in this track to earn the full Sysadmin qualification... Canonical is also looking for community members to contribute as beta testers and subject-matter experts (SME). If you are interested in helping shape the platform or want to get started with your certification, you can visit the Canonical Academy website.
The sys-admin track offers exams for Linux Terminal, Ubuntu Desktop 2024, Ubuntu Server 2024, and "managing complex systems," according to an official FAQ. "Each exam provides an in-browser remote desktop interface into a functional Ubuntu Desktop environment running GNOME. From this initial node, you will be expected to troubleshoot, configure, install, and maintain systems, processes, and other general activities associated with managing Linux. The exam is a hybrid format featuring multiple choice, scenario-based, and performance-based questions..."

"Test-takers interested in the types of material covered on each exam can review links to tutorials and documentation on our website."

The FAQ advises test takers to use a Chromium-based browser, as Firefox "is NOT supported at this time... There is a known issue with keyboards and Firefox in the CUE.01 Linux 24.04 preview release at this time, which will be resolved in the CUE.01 Linux 24.10 exam release."

"Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems," writes longtime Slashdot reader jrepin. "Among other things, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.5." From the announcement: This fresh new release is all about fine-tuning, fresh features, and a making everything smooth and sleek for everyone. The new version brings automatic light-to-dark theme switching based on the time of day. You can configure which global themes it switches between. You can also configure whether you want the wallpaper to switch between its light and dark versions based on the color scheme, the time of day, or be always light or dark.

Next up is a "Pinned clipboard items" feature, which lets you save text you use regularly into the clipboard. Breeze-themed windows will now have the same level of roundness in all four corners, even the bottom one. Flatpak Permissions page has been transformed into a general Application Permissions page, where you can configure applications' ability to do things like take screenshots and accept remote control requests. The utility that reads the level of ink or toner from your printer now informs you when it's running low or empty.

For the gamers out there, you can now see more relevant info about game controllers on System Settings' Game Controller page. Artists among you can now configure any rotary dials and touch rings on your drawing tablet. Users sensitive to color can now make use of a grayscale color filter, which desaturates or removes color systemwide.

Plasma 6.5 implements support for an experimental version of the Wayland picture-in-picture protocol that promises to allow apps like Firefox to eventually display proper PiP windows that stay above others automatically. Support for "overlay planes" was added, which can reduce CPU usage and power draw when displaying full-screen content using a compatible GPU. You can read more about these and many other new features in the Plasma 6.5 release announcement and complete changelog.

Mozilla is testing a free, built-in VPN for Firefox that routes traffic through Mozilla-managed servers directly in the browser. The Register reports: According to a staff post on Mozilla Connect, the company's idea-sharing platform, Firefox VPN is still an experimental feature in the early stages of development, but users will be selected at random to test it "over the next few months." Moz describes the feature as one that will sit beside the search bar on Firefox, routing web traffic through a Mozilla-managed VPN server, concealing the user's real IP address while adding a layer of encryption to their communications. Firefox VPN is a different project entirely from Mozilla VPN, a separate, paid-for product. The Firefox version will be free to use and confined to the browser itself, while Mozilla VPN can be used by up to five devices at a time.

The Moz staffer on the product team who announced the feature said of the upcoming beta test: "We'll start simple, then gradually add new capabilities while learning how it impacts browsing, usage, and overall satisfaction. "Our long-term vision is ambitious: to build the best VPN-integrated browser on the market." In response to feedback, the staffer noted that while it will be a desktop browser feature first, "mobile is definitely a natural next step."