Mozilla and Google have extended their search deal for another three years, news outlet ZDNet reported Wednesday, citing sources familiar with thee matter. Mozilla confirmed the news. From a report: The new search deal will ensure Google remains the default search engine provider inside the Firefox browser until 2023 at an estimated price tag of around $400 million to $450 million per year. Mozilla officials are expected to announce the search deal's extension later this fall, in November, when the organization is scheduled to disclose its 2019 financial figures. Terms of the new deal were leaked to this reporter after Mozilla announced plans to lay off more than 250 employees on Wednesday in a move that had many users fearing for the browser maker's future, as Mozilla's current Google search deal was scheduled to expire at the end of the year. However, several sources have confirmed that the organization is sound financially, and the layoffs were part of a restructuring of its core business, with Mozilla moving away from its current role of internet standards steward and experimental approach to its product catalog to more commercially-viable offerings that generate revenues on their own.

Firefox has fixed a bug that was being exploited in the wild by tech support scammers to create artificial mouse cursors and prevent users from easily leaving malicious sites. From a report: The bug was discovered being abused online by UK cyber-security firm Sophos and reported to Mozilla earlier this year. A bugfix was provided and has been live in Firefox since version 79.0, released last week. he bug is a classic "evil cursor" attack and works because modern browsers allow site owners to modify how the mouse cursor looks while users are navigating their websites. This type of customization might look useless, but it's often used for browser-based games, browser augmented reality, or browser virtual reality experiences. However, custom cursors have been a major problem for the regular web. In evil cursor attacks, malicious websites tamper with cursor settings in order to modify where the actual cursor is visible on screen, and where the actual click area is.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For years now, Google Chrome has been an absolute dominant force in the world of web browsers, but since the relaunch of Microsoft Edge based on Google's Chromium, that position has been challenged. Now, Google is preparing to drive more Android owners back to using Chrome through targeted notifications. Over the admittedly brief history of the Internet, there have been a number of fierce competitions, commonly called "browser wars," between companies, in an effort to get more people to use their particular web browser. Mozilla and Netscape waged war against Internet Explorer, and Chrome fought and won against Firefox. Most recently, Microsoft Edge and Samsung Internet have begun to wage war against Chrome on desktop and Android respectively. Now, we've found that Google is preparing to try and win back some of those who have left Chrome for other browsers, starting on Android. Based on our reading of a series of code changes, we believe Google Chrome for Android will send you a notification if you haven't used Chrome in a while.

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today started rolling out Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) 2.0 in Firefox. While the company technically launched Firefox 79 for Windows, Mac, and Linux last week, it only unveiled its marquee feature today. Firefox 79 by default blocks redirect tracking, also known as bounce tracking, and adds a handful of new developer features. [...] Since enabling Enhanced Tracking Protection by default, Mozilla says it has blocked 3.4 trillion tracking cookies. But the company notes the ad industry has since created workarounds and new ways to collect user data as you browse the web.

July's statistics from web analytics firm Net Applications showed continuing changes in the most frequently-used web browsers. Softpedia reports: Last month, Google Chrome increased its market share from 70.19% to 71.00%, while Microsoft Edge jumped from 8.07% to 8.46%... The migration to the Chromium engine allowed Microsoft to turn Edge into a cross-platform browser, and this is one of the reasons that contributed to the growth of the new app. Edge is now available not only on Windows 10, but also on Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and even macOS. At the same time, Microsoft is also working on a Linux version of the browser, and a preview build is expected by the end of the year.

But what made Microsoft Edge the second most-used desktop browser out there so fast after the switch to Chromium is definitely Microsoft offering it as the default browser in Windows 10.
But what about Firefox? And Opera, and Apple's Safari? Computerworld reports: A decade ago, Mozilla's browser may have dreamed of upsetting the then-order of things, taking its April 2010 share of 25.1% and parlaying it into victory over IE — down to 61.2% by then... But that was Firefox's peak.

At the end of July, Firefox stood at 7.3%, down three-tenths of a percentage point from the previous month... Firefox let its second-place spot (far, far behind Chrome) slip away in March, when Edge snatched it. That did not change in July. The gap between the two more than doubled, in fact, to 1.2 points. On almost every browser share metric, Firefox is in trouble... Since the end of January, Firefox has been stuck in the 7s; for the eight months before that, it was mired in the 8s; and between May 2018 and March 2019, Firefox floundered in the 9s. The trend is crystal clear...

Elsewhere in Net Applications' numbers, Apple's Safari plunged to 3%, a loss of six-tenths of a point, its lowest mark since late 2008. Opera software's Opera also took a dive, ending July at 0.8%, a decline of three-tenths of a point. Those numbers have to be frightening to both those browsers' makers.

Some Windows 10 users have complained that when Microsoft sets up its Edge browser, it steals data from Chrome and Firefox without asking first, writes ZDNet columnist Chris Matyszczyk.

But today a reader sent him a new complaint involving Windows 7: "My wife's computer, which is running Windows 7, got a Windows update this morning, which then gave the full-screen welcome page for Edge Chromium. She was terrified as this looked exactly as if malware had taken over the machine... How could any application be running that she hadn't started? How is it that Microsoft can't manage to provide security updates for Windows 7, as it is end of life, but still manage to force a new web browser that isn't wanted on Windows 7 users...?"

"The full-screen welcome page for Chomium Edge did have a faint 'close' gadget in the top right, which was the very first thing we clicked... This still left Edge pinned on the taskbar and when I hovered over it, it showed all the recent sites she had visited on Chrome. So it must have stolen that data from Chrome which is the only browser she ever uses."
The ZDNet columnist shared his own reaction to the story. "Edge is a fine browser. It's quick, effective, and has superior privacy instincts than does Chrome. I have begun to use it and I like it. When you launch a new product, however, you have two choices: You can announce it, make people feel good about it, and then rely on word of mouth. Or you can try ramming it down people's throats.

"The former is often more effective. Microsoft has chosen the latter."

"Starting today, there's a VPN on the market from a company you trust," Mozilla announced Wednesday.

Mozilla VPN is now officially available for Windows and Android in six countries: the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Singapore, Malaysia, and New Zealand, and it'll be coming to even more countries later this year, reports the Verge: The service is available for $4.99 a month, and, like other VPNs, it's designed to make your web-browsing more private and secure. As part of the move, the service is being rebranded from Firefox Private Network to Mozilla VPN, a change that was announced last month.

Mozilla argues that its VPN service has a couple of advantages over its many competitors. It says it should offer a faster browsing experience in many cases because it's based on a protocol with less than a third of the lines of code of an average VPN service provider. The company is also banking on the reputation it's built up with its privacy-focused browser, and it adds that it only collects the information it needs to run a service and doesn't keep user data logs.

The VPN's launch follows beta trials in the US, which also included tests of a VPN built directly into the Firefox browser. Last month, Mozilla announced that it would be testing asking users to pay $2.99 a month for unlimited usage of the extension, which is designed to mask your traffic within the browser rather than at a system-wide level.

Mozilla says it's working on fixing a bug in Firefox for Android that keeps the smartphone camera active even after users have moved the browser in the background or the phone screen was locked. From a report: A Mozilla spokesperson told ZDNet in an email this week that a fix is expected for later this year in October. The bug was first spotted and reported to Mozilla a year ago, in July 2019, by an employee of video delivery platform Appear TV. The bug manifests when users chose to video stream from a website loaded in Firefox instead of a native app. Mobile users often choose to stream from a mobile browser for privacy reasons, such as not wanting to install an intrusive app and grant it unfettered access to their smartphone's data. Mobile browsers are better because they prevent websites from accessing smartphone data, keeping their data collection to a minimum. The Appear TV developer noticed that Firefox video streams kept going, even in situations when they should have normally stopped.

The Wall Street Journal's senior personal tech columnist just published an article urging readers to "quit Chrome. Safari and Edge are just better browsers." It begins with the reporter pretending to break up with Chrome, adding "I'd say I'll remember the good times — your speed, your superb handling of Gmail — but your RAM hoovering, battery draining and privacy disregarding make it easy to not look back.

"This is the year, people. It's the year I challenge you to pack up your bookmarks and wave bye-bye to Google's browser..."

And the article is even accompanied by a video titled "Four ways to stop Chrome from slowing down your computer," where tip #1 is just: "Stop using Chrome..." "Sure, Chrome has far more browser market share [than Firefox, Safari, and Edge]. But all of them have actually gotten quite good over the last number of years. Heck, the new Microsoft Edge browser even uses Chromium, the same underlying technology as Chrome, and the performance is much improved, across Windows PCs, and Macs. Yes, Microsoft's browser is available for Mac, and it's good.

"In my weeks of testing, Edge used 5% less resources than Chrome on Windows. Safari used up to 10% less in some of my tests on my Mac. That meant up to 2 extra hours of battery life in their respective operating systems. Firefox, unfortunately, took up just as much power as Chrome. Google says it's working on some resource-saving improvements that will come in the next few months.

If you can switch to just one of those, go for it, even if just for their better privacy tools."
The video opens with a cartoon depiction of "Chrome-y," who lives inside your computer and eats your RAM and other resouces. "But don't worry. You can put him on a diet and take back your computer with some of these tips." The other tips including uninstalling extensions, and using Chrome's Task Manager to "spot and kill the RAM gobblers."

But throughout the video, "Chrome-y" continues chomping on your RAM...

The new lightweight and royalty-free AVIF image format is coming to web browsers. Work is almost complete on adding AVIF support to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. From a report: The new image format is considered one of the lightest and most optimized image compression formats, and has already gained praise from companies such as Netflix, which considers it superior to existing image formats such as JPEG, PNG, and even the newer WebP. The acronym of AVIF stands for AV1 Image File Format. As its name hints, AVIF is based on AV1, which is a video codec that was developed in 2015, following a collaboration between Google, Cisco, and Xiph.org (who also worked with Mozilla). At the time, the three decided to pool their respective in-house video codecs (VPX, Thor, and Daala) to create a new one (AV1) that they planned to offer as an open-source and royalty-free alternative to all the commercial video codecs that had fragmented and clogged the video streaming market in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla has temporarily suspended the Firefox Send file-sharing service as the organization investigates reports of abuse from malware operators and while it adds a "Report abuse" button. The browser maker took down the service today after ZDNet reached out to inquire about Firefox Send's increasing prevalence in current malware operations. Since last year, several malware operations have hosted payloads on the service. This includes ransomware gangs like REvil/Sodinokibi, financial crime crews like FIN7, the Zloader and Ursnif banking trojans operations, and government surveillance groups targeting human rights defenders. Reasons include the fact that Firefox Send doesn't have an Report Abuse mechanism, all file uploads are encrypted (useful to dodge malware scanners), and the Firefox URL is whitelisted in most orgs (useful for bypassing email filters).

Mozilla today released the latest version of Common Voice, its open source collection of transcribed voice data for startups, researchers, and hobbyists to build voice-enabled apps, services, and devices. Common Voice now contains over 7,226 total hours of contributed voice data in 54 different languages, up from 1,400 hours across 18 languages in February 2019. From a report: Common Voice consists not only of voice snippets, but of voluntarily contributed metadata useful for training speech engines, like speakers' ages, sex, and accents. It's designed to be integrated with DeepSpeech, a suite of open source speech-to-text, text-to-speech engines, and trained models maintained by Mozilla's Machine Learning Group. Collecting the over 5.5 million clips in Common Voice required a lot of legwork, namely because the prompts on the Common Voice website had to be translated into each language. Still, 5,591 of the 7,226 hours have been confirmed valid by the project's contributors so far. And according to Mozilla, five languages in Common Voice -- English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish -- now have over 5,000 unique speakers, while seven languages -- English, German, French, Kabyle, Catalan, Spanish, and Kinyarwandan -- have over 500 recorded hours.

williamyf shares a report from The Register: Mozilla has released Firefox 78 with a new Protections Dashboard and a bunch of updates for web developers. This is also the last supported version of Firefox for macOS El Capitan (10.11) and earlier. Firefox is on a "rapid release plan," which means a new version every four to five weeks. This means that major new features should not be expected every time. That said, Firefox 78 is also an extended support release (ESR), which means users who stick with ESR get updates from this and the previous 10 releases. The main new user-facing feature in Firefox 78 is the Protections Dashboard, a screen which shows trackers and scripts blocked, a link to the settings, a link to Firefox Monitor for checking your email address against known data breaches, and a button for password management.

Developers get a bunch of new features. The Accessibility inspector is out of beta -- this is a tab in the developer tools that will check a page for accessibility issues when enabled. Source maps are a JavaScript feature that map minified code back to the original code to make debugging easier. Firefox has a Map option that lets you use source maps in the debugger, and this now works with logpoints, a type of breakpoint that writes a message to the console rather than pausing execution, so that you see the original variable names. Mozilla has also worked on debugging JavaScript promises, so you can see more detail when exceptions are thrown.

A big feature for debugging web applications when running on mobile is the ability to connect an Android phone with USB, and navigate and refresh mobile web pages from the desktop. Patience is required though, since this will only work with a forthcoming new version of Firefox for Android. Mozilla has been working on a new Regular Expression (RegExp) evaluator and this is included in SpiderMonkey (Mozilla's JavaScript engine) in Firefox 78. This brings the evaluator up to date with the requirements of ECMAScript 2018.

Both Edge and Chrome already allow users to try unreleased, experimental features (by typing about:flags in the address bar). Soon there'll be a similar "Firefox Experiments" option starting in Firefox 79.

Slashdot reader techtsp shares this report from the Windows Club: Mozilla has a dedicated Experimental Features page on MDN just for that. But limiting experimental features to Firefox's Nightly channel has a limitation: A fairly limited number of "curious" users. Now, extending some of these experimental features to stable releases will increase the scope of "Firefox Experiments" as a whole... This option will allow users to enable/disable experimental features under Preferences...

[In Firefox 79] Navigate to Preferences by entering about:preferences in the browser's address bar or click the gear icon and got to "Preferences." Discover and set browser.preferences.experimental to True. Now, you should be able to see the "Firefox Experiments" menu under Firefox 79 Preferences.

Comcast has joined Cloudflare and NextDNS in partnering with Mozilla's Trusted Recursive Resolver program, which aims to make DNS more trusted and secure. Neowin reports: Commenting on the move, Firefox CTO Eric Rescorla, said: "Comcast has moved quickly to adopt DNS encryption technology and we're excited to have them join the TRR program. Bringing ISPs into the TRR program helps us protect user privacy online without disrupting existing user experiences. We hope this sets a precedent for further cooperation between browsers and ISPs."

With its TRR program, Mozilla said that encrypting DNS data with DoH is just the first step in securing DNS. It said that the second step requires companies handling the data to have appropriate rules in place for handling it. Mozilla believes these rules include limiting data collection and retention, ensuring transparency about any retained data, and limiting the use of the resolver to block access or modify content. Ars Technica notes that joining Mozilla's program means that Comcast agreed that it won't "retain, sell, or transfer to any third party (except as may be required by law) any personal information, IP addresses, or other user identifiers, or user query patterns from the DNS queries sent from the Firefox browser," along with other requirements.

When the change happens, it'll be automatic for users unless they've chosen a different DoH provider or disabled DoH altogether. Comcast told Ars yesterday that "Firefox users on Xfinity should automatically default to Xfinity resolvers under Mozilla's Trusted Recursive Resolver program, unless they have manually chosen a different resolver, or if DoH is disabled. The precise mechanism is still being tested and the companies plan to document it soon in an IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force] Draft."

With Safari on iOS 14, MacOS Big Sur and iPadOS 14, you'll be able to log in to websites using Apple's Face ID and Touch ID biometric authentication. That's a powerful endorsement for technology called FIDO -- Fast Identity Online -- that's paving the way to a future without passwords. From a report: Apple disclosed the biometric authentication support in Safari on Wednesday at WWDC, its annual developers conference. "It's both much faster and more secure," Apple Safari programmer Jiewen Tan said during one of the WWDC video sessions Apple offered after the coronavirus pandemic pushed the conference online. The change is a big boost for browser technology called Web Authentication, aka WebAuthn, developed by the FIDO consortium allies. Apple's not the first supporter -- it's already in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, and works with Windows Hello facial recognition and Android fingerprint authentication.

Safari 14, scheduled to be released later this fall with iOS 14 and macOS 11, is a release that is packed choke-full with features. From a report: The biggest and most important of the new additions is support for WebExtensions, a technology for creating browser extensions. What this means for Safari users is that starting this fall, they'll see a huge influx of new Safari extensions as add-on developers are expected to port their existing Chrome and Firefox extensions to work on Apple's browser as well. Apple said that, for now, WebExtensions will only be available for Safari on macOS.

Safari 14 is also an end of an era, as this will be the first version of Safari that won't support Adobe Flash Player content. But while old stuff is being removed, new stuff is also being added. One of the new technologies added to Safari is support for HTTP/3, a new web standard that will make loading websites faster and safer. Another important addition in Safari is support for WebP, a lightweight image format that has been gaining widespread adoption across the internet. The format, created by Google, serves as an alternative to the older JPEG format, and Safari has been the last browser to add support for it. [...] But Safari hasn't been lagging behind other browsers just in terms of HTTP/3 and WebP support. Apple has also added support for another cool feature, namely breach alerts, already present in both Chrome and Firefox. Starting this fall, Apple says that Safari 14 will scan a user's locally-stored passwords and show a prompt if one or more of the user's credentials are present in publicly available lists of breached accounts.

Some Firefox users have discovered that the new default Windows 10 browser, which is shipped to their devices via Windows Update, sometimes imports the data from Mozilla's application even if they don't give their permission. Softpedia reports: Some of these Firefox users decided to kill the initial setup process of Microsoft Edge, only to discover that despite the wizard shutting down prematurely, the browser still copied data stored by Mozilla's browser. Several users confirmed on reddit that this behavior happened on their computers too. Microsoft has remained tight-lipped on this, so for the time being, it's still not known why Edge imports Firefox data despite the initial wizard actually killed off manually by the user. Users who don't want to be offered the new Edge on Windows Update can turn to the dedicated toolkit that Microsoft released earlier this year, while removing the browser is possible by just uninstalling the update from the device.

Ars Technica's technology reporter Jim Salter tested Walmart's 11.6-inch EVOO laptop, which sells for $139 and ships with just 2GiB of RAM and a 32GB SSD, which he worries "simply is not enough room for Windows itself, let alone any applications." The first thing I noticed while looking through the Windows install is that our "internal" Wi-Fi is actually a cheap USB 2.0 Realtek adapter — and it's 2.4GHz-only 802.11n, at that. The second thing I noticed was the fact that I couldn't install even simple applications, because the laptop was in S mode. For those unfamiliar, S mode locks a system into using only the Edge browser and only apps from the Microsoft Store. Many users end up badly confused by S mode, and some unnecessarily buy a new copy of Windows trying to get out of it. Fortunately, if you click the "learn more" link in the S mode warning that pops up when you attempt to load a non-Store app, you are eventually led to a free Microsoft Store app which turns S mode off. On my first try, this app crashed. But on the second, it successfully disabled S mode, leaving me with a normal Windows install....

I verified that I was on an older version of Windows 10 — build 1903, from March 2019 — and initiated an upgrade to build 2004, from April 2020. Windows 10 was having none of it. It wanted at least 8GiB of free space on C:, and I couldn't even get to 6GiB free, after only a day of using the system.... Meaningful benchmark results were impossible to attain on this laptop, since it was too slow and quirky to even run the benchmarks reliably. But I didn't let a silly thing like "being obviously inappropriate" stop me from slogging painfully through the benchmarks and getting what numbers I could. The first suite up, PCMark 10, eventually produced a score of zero. I didn't know that a zero score was even possible. Apparently, it is... Cinebench R20 also took several tries to complete successfully, and eventually the test produced a jaw-droppingly bad score of 118...

Under Fedora 32 — selected due to its ultra-modern kernel, and lightweight Wayland display manager — the EVOO was incredibly balky and sluggish. To be fair, Fedora felt significantly snappier than Windows 10 had on this laptop, but that was a very, very low bar to hurdle. The laptop frequently took as long as 12 seconds just to launch Firefox. Actually navigating webpages wasn't much better, with very long pauses for no apparent reason. The launcher was also balky to render — and this time, with significantly lower memory usage than Windows, I couldn't just blame it on swap thrashing... [W]ith the laptop completely open, several questions are answered — the reason I hadn't heard any fan noise up until this point is because there is no fan, and the horrible CPU performance is because the CPU can't perform any better than it does without cooking itself in its own juices....

At first, I mistakenly assumed that the A4-9120 was just thermally throttling itself 24/7. After re-assembling it and booting back into Fedora, I found the real answer — the normally 2.5GHz chip is underclocked to an anemic 1.5GHz. The system BIOS confirms this clockrate but offers no room to adjust it — which is a shame, since the system never hit temperatures higher than about 62C in my testing.
His verdict? Walmart's EVOO laptop "doesn't have either the RAM or the storage to do an even vaguely reasonable job for normal people doing normal things under Windows, even when limited to S mode...

"There may be a purpose this laptop is well-suited to — but for the life of me, I cannot think what it might be."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Mozilla has announced today that its highly anticipated VPN (virtual private network) service will launch later this summer, "in the next few weeks." The product has also been renamed from its original name of Firefox Private Network to its new brand of the "Mozilla VPN." The name change came after Mozilla expanded the VPN product from the initial Firefox extension to a full-device VPN, capable of routing traffic for the entire OS, including other browsers. Currently, the Mozilla VPN offers clients for Windows 10, Chromebooks, Android, and iOS devices. Mozilla said beta testers also requested a Mac client, which they plan to provide, along with a Linux app.