An anonymous reader writes "Facebook today began prompting Facebook Messenger for Windows users as well as Facebook Messenger for Firefox users with a message saying the apps are shutting down next week. Without much of an explanation, the company plans to kill off both on March 3. It appears that Facebook is no longer interested in developing desktop apps. The Android and iOS versions are still alive and well." You can always connect to their IM service using a generic XMPP client like Pidgin (too bad Facebook doesn't federate).

Mozilla has announced a new initiative to show sponsored content within the Firefox browser. Currently, opening a new tab in Firefox will display a set of nine tiles showing your most commonly visited websites. When a user installs Firefox and opens it for the first time, they see these tiles, but eight of them are blank (one links to a Firefox tutorial). As the user browses the web, those tiles gradually fill in with visited sites. But Mozilla is going to fill out those blank eight tiles for new users. They say, "Some of these tile placements will be from the Mozilla ecosystem, some will be popular websites in a given geographic location, and some will be sponsored content from hand-picked partners to help support Mozilla’s pursuit of our mission. The sponsored tiles will be clearly labeled as such, while still leading to content we think users will enjoy." Existing users shouldn't see any difference, and the tiles will be replaced with commonly-visited sites like they do now.

jones_supa writes "At FOSDEM 2014 some recent developments of GNU Hurd were discussed (PDF slides). In the name of freedom, GNU Hurd has now the ability to run device drivers from user-space via the project's DDE layer. Among the mentioned use-cases for the GNU Hurd DDE are allowing VPN traffic to just one application, mounting one's own files, redirecting a user's audio, and more flexible hardware support. You can also run Linux kernel drivers in Hurd's user-space. Hurd developers also have working IDE support, X.Org / graphics support, an AHCI driver for Serial ATA, and a Xen PV DomU. Besides the 64-bit support not being in a usable state, USB and sound support is still missing. As some other good news for GNU Hurd, around 79% of the Debian archive is now building for GNU Hurd, including the Xfce desktop (GNOME and KDE soon) and Firefox web browser."

Peter Eckersley writes "Over at EFF, we just released a version of our HTTPS Everywhere extension for Firefox for Android. HTTPS Everywhere upgrades your insecure web requests to HTTPS on many thousands of sites, and this means that Firefox on Android with HTTPS Everywhere is now by far the most secure browser against dragnet surveillance attacks like those performed by the NSA, GCHQ, and other intelligence agencies. Android users should install the Firefox app and then add HTTPS Everywhere to it. iPhone and iPad users will unfortunately have to switch to Android to get this level of security because Apple has locked Mozilla Firefox out of their platforms."

jones_supa writes "Mozilla has released Firefox 27 for Linux, Android, Mac, and Windows (download). One of the big changes is enabling support for TLS 1.1 and 1.2 by default. Firefox 27 also supports the SPDY 3.1 protocol. Developers got some new toys: support was added for ES6 generators in SpiderMonkey, the debugger will de-obfuscate JavaScript, and style sheets can be reset by using all:unset. Mozilla also announced some new social integration options. In addition to all these changes, the Android version got some UI improvements and font readability upgrades. For a future release, Mozilla is currently testing a new approach for Firefox Sync in Nightly builds. They recognized the headaches involved with how it works, and they're now opting to use a simple e-mail and password combination like Google Chrome does. In the old system, users were forced to store an auto-generated authorization code, which, if lost, would render their bookmarks, passwords and browsing history inaccessible. "

darthcamaro writes "The annual Pwn2own hacking competition has always made short work of all browser vendors' security, shredding perception of safety by hacking IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome in minutes. This year the competition is adding a twist — for IE on Windows 8.1, hackers will also have to bypass Microsoft EMET, which is a seemingly bulletproof type of sandbox. The competition is calling this the 'Unicorn Exploit' and the first researcher to successful exploit it will pocket $150,000."

First time accepted submitter neiras writes "Mozilla is building a map of publicly-observable cell tower and WiFi access points to compete with proprietary geolocation services like Google's. Coverage is a bit thin so far but is improving rapidly. Anyone with an Android phone can help by downloading the MozStumbler app and letting it run while walking or driving around. The application is also available on the F-Droid market." "Thin" is relative; it's quite a few data points since we first mentioned the pilot program a few months ago.

judgecorp writes "Famed cryptography activist Phil Zimmerman is set to launch Blackphone, a privacy-oriented phone which allows secure calls and messages. The phone is a joint venture between Zimmerman's Silent Circle communications provider and Geeksphone, the creator of the first Firefox phone, and will run PrivatOS, a secure version of Android. Zimmerman says the venture will be taking orders for the devices from February 24, after it is unveiled at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona."

On Planet Python, Gregory Szorc asks why many projects continue to support Python releases prior to 2.7, when they are all EOLed (2.4 in 2008, 2.5 in 2011, and 2.6 last October), and Python 2.7 provides a clear upgrade path to Python 3. Quoting: "I think maintainers of Python projects should seriously consider dropping support for Python 2.6 and below. Are there really that many people on systems that don't have Python 2.7 easily available? Why are we Python developers inflicting so much pain on ourselves to support antiquated Python releases? As a data point, I successfully transitioned Firefox's build system from requiring Python 2.5+ to 2.7.3+ and it was relatively pain free." Shortly after posting, other developers responded with their reasons for using older Python releases. First, Rob Galanakis of CCP (EVE Online) explains the difficulties involved in upgrading a mature commercial project embedding Python. Nathan Froyd adds "I think this list of reasons to upgrade misses the larger point in providing software for other people: You do not get to tell your users what to do. ... Maybe those users don’t have sufficient control over their working environments to install a new version of Python. ... Maybe those users rely on certain APIs only available in older versions of Python and don’t wish to take an indeterminate amount of time to rewrite (retest, recertify, etc. etc.) their software. ... Maybe those users are just rationally lazy and don’t want to deal with downloading, configuring, and installing a new version of Python, plus dealing with inevitable fallout, when the old version has worked Just Fine for everything else."

An anonymous reader writes with news of an interesting demo for clmtrackr (a Javascript library for tracking of facial features) that hides your face using 3D masks overlayed on the video from your webcam using WebGL. The effect is kind of neat, and a bit creepy. The demo works in Chromium here, but not in Firefox (Debian unstable). There are a couple other demos; the facial deformation demo is reminiscent of the intro screen to Mario 64.

An anonymous reader writes "At CES 2014 in Las Vegas today, Mozilla announced its plans for Firefox OS this year. Having launched Firefox OS for smartphones in 2013, the company has now partnered with Panasonic to bring its operating system to TVs, and also detailed the progress that has been made around the tablet and desktop versions."

mikejuk writes "Asm.js is a subset of standard JavaScript that is simple enough for JavaScript engines to optimize. Now Mozilla claims that with some new improvements it is at worst only 1.5 times slower than native code. How and why? The problem with JavaScript as an assembly language is that it doesn't support the range of datatypes that are needed for optimization. This is good for human programmers because they can simply use a numeric variable and not worry about the difference between int, int32, float, float32 or float64. JavaScript always uses float64 and this provides maximum precision, but not always maximum efficiency. The big single improvement that Mozilla has made to its SpiderMonkey engine is to add a float32 numeric type to asm.js. This allows the translation of float32 arithmetic in a C/C++ program directly into float32 arithmetic in asm.js. This is also backed up by an earlier float32 optimization introduced into Firefox that benefits JavaScript more generally. Benchmarks show that firefox f32 i.e. with the float32 type is still nearly always slower than native code, it is now approaching the typical speed range of native code. Mozilla thinks this isn't the last speed improvement they can squeeze from JavaScript. So who needs native code now?"

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla today officially launched Firefox 26 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Additions include Click-to-Play turned on by default for all Java plugins, more seamless updates on Windows, and a new Home design for Android. Firefox 26 has been released over on Firefox.com and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play. Release notes are here: desktop and mobile."

An anonymous reader writes "With the latest Firefox nightly builds the VP9 video codec is enabled by default. VP9 is a step ahead of the open-source VP8 codec but up to now has only been supported by the Chrome browser. VP9 support will officially appear in Firefox 28."

sfcrazy writes "Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox browser and operating system, is organizing a contest for creating games. They have teamed up with Goo Technologies for Mozilla and Goo's Game Creator Challenge to engage 'budding' game creators. The game contest is aimed at showcasing powerful open source technologies developed with the help of Mozilla at the same time building a loyal gaming community around these technologies."

An anonymous reader writes "Google has launched the Google Voice Search Hotword extension for Chrome, bringing the 'OK Google' feature to the desktop. You can download the new tool, currently in beta, now directly from the Chrome Web Store. Android users with version 4.4 KitKat will recognize the feature: it lets you talk to Google without first clicking or typing. It's completely hands-free, provided you're already on Google.com: just say 'OK Google' and then ask your question." Quick, someone wire Pocketsphinx up to Firefox, or integrate Simon into Krunner.

sfcrazy writes "Ubuntu developer Oliver Grawert does not prefer to do online banking with Linux Mint. In the official mailing list of the distribution, Ubuntu developers stated that the popular Ubuntu derivative is a vulnerable system and people shouldn't go for online banking on it. One of the Ubuntu developers, Oliver Grawert, originally pointed out that it is not necessary that security updates from Ubuntu get down to Linux Mint users since changes from X.Org, the kernel, Firefox, the boot-loader, and other core components are blocked from being automatically upgraded." Clement Lefebvre, the Linux Mint project founder, has since made a statement and confirmed that Oliver Grawert seems "more opinionated than knowledgeable" adding "the press blew what he said out of proportion."

stoolpigeon writes "Yesterday marked the release of Dart SDK 1.0, a cross-browser, open source toolkit for structured web applications. The Dart SDK 1.0 includes everything you need to write structured web applications: a simple yet powerful programming language, robust tools, and comprehensive core libraries. The language has been somewhat controversial, but Google continues to move it forward." Reader slack_justyb adds some more detail: "The new release brings a much tighter dart2js compiler reducing overall JavaScript output up to 40%; Dartium — a version of Google Chrome that has the DartVM in addition to the JavaScript VM as native to the browser; PUB, a package manager for Dart add-ons; and several favorite 3rd party plug-ins that now come out-of-box, in addition to a lot of work for Dart server-side tools that can work to automate server side tasks and help in the construction of web pages. However Dart has many critics not only from the IE and Apple camps, as one would guess, but from the Firefox and Opera camps as well. In addition to the low adoption of Dart from third parties there are some asking where does Dart go from here? Especially considering that Google is one of the strongest pushers for EcmaScript 6."

Nine years ago today, Firefox 1.0 was released. Mozilla writes "Mozilla created Firefox to be an amazingly fun, safe, and fast Web browser that embodies the values of our mission to promote openness, innovation and opportunity online. In the nine years since we first launched Firefox, we have moved and shaped the Web into the most valuable public resource of our time." The first release of the little project to write a lighter alternative to Seamonkey is a bit over a year older.

An anonymous reader writes "Remember when Mozilla announced that it would soon block third-party cookies by default? Not so fast. According to a new behind-the-scenes report in the San Francisco Chronicle, 'it's not clear when it will happen — or if it will at all.' Mozilla's leadership is apparently no longer committed to the feature, and the related Cookie Clearinghouse collaboration is delayed well into 2014. Who's to blame? According to Dan Auerbach, Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, 'The ad industry has a ton of people, basically lobbyists, who spent a lot of time trying to convince Mozilla this was bad for the economy... I think they were somewhat successful.' Not a good showing for the purportedly pro-user organization."