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Mozilla ends surfing behavior based ‘Suggested Tiles’ advertisements

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Mozilla has announced it will no longer show advertisements on the Firefox Tiles page, a feature the browser developer introduced several months ago. The company planned to show advertisements as ‘Suggested Tiles’ in the Tiles page. The advertisements were based on the surfing behavior of the user to make them more relevant.

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After three months Mozilla has decided to no longer show them. According to Mozilla’s own research users want relevant content that’s engaging and exciting and the browser developer plans to show such content to Firefox users in the future.

“We have therefore made the decision to stop advertising in Firefox through the Tiles experiment in order to focus on content discovery”, according to Mozilla’s VP of Content Services, Darren Herman.

“Advertising in Firefox could be a great business, but it isn’t the right business for us at this time because we want to focus on core experiences for our users”, he added.

Nevertheless, Mozilla believes that their work in our advertising experiments has shown that it can be done better.

“Mozilla will continue to explore ways to bring a better balance to the advertising ecosystem for everyone’s benefit, and to build successful products that respect user privacy and deliver experiences based upon transparency, choice and control”, Herman concludes.

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Firefox OS doomed – Mozilla has almost pulled the plug on alternative mobile OS

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Mozilla will no longer sell devices running the Firefox OS, it’s alternative operating system for mobile devices. The development of the OS continues but no more phones with Firefox OS will be sold. Mozilla announced the news during a developers conference.

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Development of Firefox OS started in 2013 and should have become an alternative to the dominant iOS and Android mobile operating systems. Mozilla marketed it mainly as an experiment to see how a fully internet based OS would work out on the mobile devices market.

Besides some small manufacturers and LG there were hardly any other companies who released devices running on Firefox OS. Only in some third world countries the OS gained some market share because the free operating system could be run on cheap smartphones.

The main difference between Android and iOS is that Firefox is fully HTML5 based. This should have made it easy for web developers to create apps for the operating system but the OS suffered from the same problem as Windows Phone. Developers don’t make apps for operating systems that don’t have users. And users don’t want operating systems with hardly any apps.

 

Although the operating system will no longer be sold on mobile devices, its development will continue. Firefox OS is e.g. used on some Panasonic TVs and the OS can also be installed on selected smartphones who those interested in the OS.

Ceasing sales of Firefox OS based mobile devices is part of a new strategy of Mozilla who wants to focus on its main products, such as the Firefox browser.

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Mozilla finally releases 64-bit Firefox, fixes 21 vulnerabilities in Firefox 43

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After a long beta phase, Mozilla today finally released the 64-bit version of its Firefox browser for Windows. At the same time the developer also released 21 patches for vulnerabilities in the browser.

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The 64-bit version should provide improved performance for web applications and games on 64-bit computers. The company warns that not all plugins are supported by this version. Plugins that work on the 32-bit version of the browser might not work on the 64-bit browser, according to the developer. The 64-bit version is available for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 and can be downloaded from Mozilla.org.

The release comes together with Firefox 43 of which 21 vulnerabilities have been patched of which five were marked critical. In these cases an attacker could execute random code on the computer such as installing malware when the user visits a hacked or malicious website.

As usual, updates can be done through Firefox’s automatic update feature.

Previously only a fork of Firefox was available in 64-bit. Development of the browser called Waterfox started in 2011. It took Mozilla four years to get a 64-bit ready it found stable enough for release to the general public.

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Mozilla toughens Firefox security with W^X feature, at cost of browser performance

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Mozilla is working on a feature called W^X which should help in toughening the security of its Firefox browser. The browser developer has added W^X, which stands for ‘Write XOR Execute’, to an early test version of Firefox.  Although the feature makes the browser more secure, it does come at a cost.

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‘Write or Execute’ is a security measure that should make every page in a process’ address space either writable or executable, but not both simultaneously. Most Just in Time (JIT) compilers use Read, Write and eXecute (RWX) rights for memory pages. A JIT compiler is software that translates code to machine code during execution of the program, instead of when the code is finished like for most regular applications.

Memory pages that can be read, write and executed suffer from several problems. One of them is that it’s easy to abuse several errors. Modern operating systems therefore store code in the executable memory that’s not writeable. RWX JIT code is an exception to that and is an interesting target for attackers. Another possible problem is memory corruption. With W^X enabled all memory pages with JIT code are not writable by default.

W^X has now been added to the latest nightly of Firefox 46 and if there are no major issues it will become part of the definitive version of Firefox 46 which is planned for April this year.

The improved security comes at a (small) cost, it degrades the performance of the browser. In benchmarks such as Kraken and Octane with W^X enabled Firefox scores about 1% lower. In the Sunspider benchmark the performance degradation on Windows and Linux is about 3% and on Mac OS X about 4%.

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Mozilla enables unsafe encryption algorithm again to resolve issues with antivirus software

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A new version of Mozilla’s Firefox browser solves an issue that made the antivirus software of G Data crash. A component of the antivirus software that should protect users against malware during internet banking didn’t work as intended with Firefox 43.0.3.

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G Data earlier also released an update that fixed the issue, but with Firefox 43.0.4 the issue has also been resolved. The most important feature of this version of Firefox is also the enabling of SHA-1 certificates again. These certificates were blocked by Firefox because the SHA-1 encryption algorithm is no longer regarded as safe. Unfortunately this caused issues with many antivirus products which is why Mozilla enabled support for SHA-1 certificates again.

The block of SHA-1 certificates caused issues as some virus scanners use a ‘man-in-the-middle‘ method when an user tries to connect to an HTTPS site. The man-in-the-middle device sends Firefox a new SHA-1 certificate instead of the server’s real certificate.

However Firefox blocks SSL certificates that are signed with the SHA-1 algorithm since the beginning of this year. This causes that SSL certificates that are generated by antivirus software are blocked and that Firefox users can no longer visit HTTPS sites.

It’s unknown whether Mozilla is working on a workaround for this issue with antivirus software and will enable the SHA-1 block later again.

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Mozilla moves away from releasing a new Firefox version every 6 weeks

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Mozilla will change its current update cycle where it releases a new version of Firefox every six weeks. Instead the browser developer will take some additional time to finish a new release. The browser developer announced the change today on their website.

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Four years ago Mozilla decided to release a new version of the Firefox browser every six weeks so it could release new updates and features faster to end users. According to the browser developer there was some room for improvement and therefore they decided to change the cyclus. Instead of an update every six weeks, the number of weeks between updates will vary between six and eight.

With the new release cycle the company will now be able, “to adjust release dates to respond to emerging user and market needs and provide at least six working weeks for every release.”

Despite the new release cycle Mozilla still aims to release the same number of new Firefox versions a year. The next Firefox version will be 45 which is scheduled for the 8th of March.

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Erratic YouTube HTML5 video in Firefox and workarounds

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Over the past while, Firefox has an issue with HTML5 video playback on YouTube that affects some computers where sections of video appears with frames played out of sequence, resulting in erratic playback as it occurs.  With faster hardware, this issue may only occur once every hour or two of playback, if at all.  On some other computers such as my ageing workplace PC, this issue occurs in just about every YouTube video played on Firefox, rendering it unwatchable.  Based on checking with other people that ran into this problem, this mainly affects PCs running Windows 8 and 10 with an Nvidia or Intel graphics GPU.  Chrome, Internet Explorer and Edge don’t appear to be affected.

Going by this bug report on Mozilla, one workaround is enter ‘about:config’ into the address bar and create a new Boolean key “media.windows-media-foundation.allow-d3d11-dxva”, set to ‘True’.  On my workplace PC that is worst affected, the erratic playback still occurs but doesn’t seem as severe as beforehand.  With my home PC, the erratic playback still runs for a few seconds each time it occurs.

As I went to try making a screen recording of this issue, this issue would not occur no matter how many times I tried recording the screen.  To rule out the screen capture software, I then recorded the video using my phone, but ended up with the same outcome where the video played fine even on my workplace PC.  I then realised that each time I selected ‘1080p’ mode to ensure YouTube stayed in 1080p through my recording, this actually prevented the issue occurring.

After trying a fair number of videos on my workplace PC including 1080p 60FPS, just simply selecting a video mode prevents the glitches occurring during playback, even if the chosen mode is already what YouTube automatically selected.  So if the Internet connection has sufficient bandwidth to play 1080p without periodic buffering, set YouTube to 1080p.

The following is a demonstration showing how this issue occurs for the first 15 seconds of playback until I set the playback mode to ‘1080p’, even though YouTube was already playing in 1080p from the start.  This is best viewed using Chrome or Internet Explorer which doesn’t present this issue:

This PC at my workplace is running Windows 8.1 32-bit and has a very basic Nvidia GeForce 210 graphics adapter.  Firefox 45.0.1 was used in this demonstration.  The focus hunting is due to the OnePlus Two phone’s camera app lacking the ability to lock the focus.

So until Firefox fixes this issue, the main workaround work that consistently works at least for us is to manually select a suitable video resolution (e.g. ‘1080p’) at the start of every YouTube video.

Update: From further checking on my home Windows 10 PC, the boolean key mentioned in the second paragraph needs to be added for the second workaround to also have any effect, at least with Firefox running on Windows 10 64-bit.

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Firefox finally gets sandboxing again to improve security, stability and performance

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Mozilla has decided to add sandbox technology to Firefox again. This should improve security, stability and performance of the browser. Firefox is currently the only large browser that doesn’t feature sandbox technology.

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Sandboxing is considered an important security measure because it can prevent an exploit to abuse a vulnerability that provides direct access to the entire system. Last year Mozilla revived its Electrolysis (e10s) project. Thanks to this, Firefox uses multiple processes for the browser instead of a single one. This has multiple benefits, such as the fact that a single tab can’t crash the entire browser. Using multiple processes also makes it possible to separate processes for sandboxes for web content and performance should increase because multiple processes can use multiple cores.

Users might worry that sandboxes increase the memory usage of the browser, but according to Mozilla this isn’t the case. While multiple processes have a larger memory footprint, the impact should be limited, a recent test version shows a memory usage increase of 10-20%. However, according to Mozilla, this is still half the memory consumption of Google Chrome on the same page.

When the sandbox ends up in a final version of Firefox is unknown. “The move to multi-process is an investment in the future: we’re paying down technical debt and redesigning Firefox’s architecture at a fundamental level. Like any change of this magnitude, there are associated challenges”, according to Mozilla’s developer Dan Callahan. One challenge will be required changes to many add-ons.

Users that want to test the sandbox technology in Firefox can download Firefox Developers Edition.

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Chrome and Firefox block KickAssTorrents for alledged phising

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Both Chrome and Firefox currently block the popular illegal torrent site KickAssTorrents. The website is marked as deceptive and according to the warning ‘attackers on kat.cr may trick you into doing something dangerous like installing software or revealing your personal information (for example, passwords, phone numbers, or credit cards).’

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It’s unclear why the browsers block the torrent site, but it’s not the first time. Previously the site was blocked by both browsers because it served malicious advertisements. Both browser uses Google’s Safe Browsing technology which is why they report the same.

KickAssTorrents is currently the most popular site amongst internet pirates. The site especially blossomed when The Pirate Bay was down for several months.

It’s possible to ignore the warning from Chrome and Firefox by clicking ‘details’ and then ‘ visit this unsafe site’ but it’s not advisable.

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Mozilla patches 4 critical vulnerabilities with the release of Firefox 46

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Mozilla today released Firefox 46 which fixes 14 vulnerabilities of which 4 have been marked critical. Some of the critical vulnerabilities showed evidence of memory corruption which according to Mozilla would allow them to be exploited to run arbitrary code. Exploiting these vulnerabilities would require no more than visiting a malicious website.

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Besides the 4 critical leaks, also 4 high impact vulnerabilities were patched and also 5 vulnerabilities that were marked as low impact.

One of the high impact vulnerabilities is in Firefox for Android and allowed an attacker to read out orientation data and motion sensors. This could be done with Javascript and allowed an attacker to infer touch actions on the device through these sensors when orientation events are triggered in the browser, compromising user privacy and including potentially revealing entered PIN code and other activities.

It’s recommend to upgrade to Firefox 46 as soon as possible which on most systems is done automatically.

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Mozilla releases Firefox 47 with performance monitor and more HTML5 video support

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The latest version of Mozilla’s browser, Firefox 47, comes with additional HTML5 video support and new developer features. Mozilla today released the stable version of version 47 of its browser which was in beta since April this year.

The new HTML5 video features include support for Google’s Widevine CDM DRM protected HTML5 video streams. Video streaming services like Amazon Video and Netflix already support this alternative to Silverlight. Another new HTML5 video feature is that the latest version of Firefox can now also play HTML5 embedded Youtube videos if Flash is not installed.

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Mozilla has also added a performance monitor to Firefox that for example shows how much CPU load individual websites use. To view this information users can visit about:performance in Firefox 47.

This tab shows in real time how much load is generated by tabs and add-ons. This makes it easy to detect resource eating add-ons which can be directly disabled or uninstalled from the performance tab.

Users can get Firefox 47 through the browser’s automatic update feature or by downloading it from Mozilla website.

 

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Firefox gets container feature to separate between personal, work, banking and shopping tabs

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Mozilla’s Firefox browser will get a new feature that makes it possible to open separate tabs for work, personal, internet banking and online shopping. The feature is called ‘Containers’ and makes it possible to open tabs in different contexts.

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Each Container has its own cookies, cache and local storage. This makes it possible to open a business social account on one tab in the work Container, while also using a personal social media account in the personal Container. Besides the personal and work container users can also use one for internet banking and online shopping.

Mozilla hopes that this way users don’t use different browsers or have to switch between accounts on the same domain.

Users can test the feature in the nightly Firefox 50 but it’s unknown when or if  the feature will ever make it to a final version of Firefox. Mozilla mentions it a experimental feature and is mainly interested in feedback of testers.

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Mozilla invests in German privacy protecting browser and search engine developer Cliqz

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Mozilla today announced it has invested in the company that develops the privacy browser Cliqz. Currently Cliqz is mainly targeted at Germany and Mozilla should help expand it to other countries. Both parties have not disclosed the amount of money involved in this ‘strategic investment’.

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Cliqz is already available for Firefox as a free add-on. It adds a quick search engine as well as privacy and safety enhancements such as anti-tracking to Firefox for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. Especially the search engine is an advantage because it is maintained by Cliqz. The company has therefore full control of what is stored about users and searches. Other browser that try to provide as much privacy as possible usually use an engine from e.g. Google, Bing or Yahoo.

The search engine from Cliqz is improved by using user data. It uses a search algorithm that weighs data about people’s behavior on the web instead of a technical analysis of websites. The company guarantees collected data is anonymized and offers the option to opt-out.

The developers also try to limit how much user data Cliqz sends to web servers and trackers and show how many tracking items are blocked. Another feature provided by the Cliqz browser is the detection of phishing websites.

While Cliqz is currently targeted at German users, it’s also already usable outside the country.

When it comes to making money from Cliqz, the idea is to offer an ‘offers app’. This should analyze the user’s surfing behavior and present them with a relevant offer. To avoid privacy issues the analysis of the user data will be performed offline after which the browser only downloads relevant offers. Actual user data should not be sent to Cliqz.

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Mozilla remotely disabled add-on that sent browsing history to third party server

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Mozilla has blocked older versions of the Stop Ads adblock add-on because it sent the entire browsing history of its users to a third party. The browser developer is able to remotely block malicious and problematic add-ons.

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The Stop Ads extension should block advertisements, pop-ups and trackers but version 0.0.4 also sent all visited sites to a third party. A ‘feature’ not required for proper functioning of the add-on and a reason for Mozilla to take measures against this unwanted behavior.

The open-source browser developer used its technology that makes it possible to remotely block add-ons. Firefox users that feel the add-on should be enabled again can do this manually if they want. Stop Ads has 56,000 users and the developers released a new version (0.0.5) to its users that isn’t blocked.

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Firefox and Chrome can shorten SSD lifetime

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Firefox and Chrome have been found to continuously write so much data that it might affect the durability of SSDs. Both browsers write an incredible amount of data to disk, even when idle.

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This was discovered by researcher Sergei Bobik who used the software SSDLife to monitor how much data was read and written on his system. He found both browsers write a lot of data as they continuously make a backup of themselves.

Firefox makes a backup of itself every 15 seconds and Chrome follows a similar schedule.The backups are made to make it easy to recover all tabs with one click in case of a crash. While it’s a very useful feature, it requires a lot of reading and writing by the browser which could impact the lifetime of a SSD.

According to Bobik, Firefox writs about 1.5GB of data per hour and Chrome was spotted writing 1GB of data per hour. Bobik also mentions that it’s possible to change the interval at which the browser makes a backup of itself. This is currently only possible for Firefox by browsing to about:config and changing the value ‘browser.sessionstore.interval’ from 15000 to 1800000 which changes the interval from 15 seconds to 30 minutes.

Bobik states that this might provide better endurance of your SSD, however if you have a modern SSD this isn’t really something to worry about. E.g. a 250GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD with TLC NAND (released in 2014) has a specified endurance of 41GB per day for 5 years.  If you use your computer 10 hours a day, you should have enough writes left to continue to use your SSD for a long time.

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Firefox 53 marks the end of support for Windows XP and Vista

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Windows XP and Windows Vista will no longer be supported starting with Firefox 53, scheduled for March 2017. After that date none of the popular browsers provide an up-to-date browser for both outdated operating systems.

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Users on XP and Vista can still use the Extended Support Release (ESR) of Firefox 52 for which only security updates will be released till mid-2018. The decision to stop support for the older operating system is made because it saves developers time. They no longer have to support new features on the outdated operating systems.

Non-ESR Firefox versions will continue to work with XP and Vista but as soon as new features are added that require new Windows system dependencies, the non-ESR versions won’t work anymore. Mozilla will then also make changes to the installer so the browser can’t be installed on XP and Vista systems anymore.

The end of support comes a month before Microsoft ends the official support for Windows Vista, on April 11th 2017. Earlier this year also Google Chrome stopped supporting XP and Vista.

Chrome started to show a notification warning users that support for their OS ended, it’s unclear whether Firefox will also alert users on XP and Vista that the end is near.

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Microsoft’s browser market share is fading away

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Microsoft’s browsers Internet Explorer and Edge continue to decline in popularity, Edge can’t even make up for the number of users that stop using Internet Explorer. The latest numbers of market analyst Netmarketshare show how Microsoft’s browsers continue to lose users.

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Internet Explorer’s market share has dropped to 26% from about 45% at the beginning of this year. It’s a downwards trend that has been going on for some time. But because Internet Explorer is replaced by Edge in Windows 10, the drop isn’t surprising.

Unfortunately Edge isn’t making up for the losses of Internet Explorer. There are less users switching to Edge than users stopping to use Internet Explorer. Edge’s market share is currently about 5%. This means Edge hasn’t seen its market share grow since the last two months and it only won 2% since the beginning of this year.

The increase of Edge users has come to a halt while the number of active Windows 10 device has grown to 400 million. Together Microsoft’s browsers have a market share of about 31%. If the market share continues to decline at the same pace, the market share will drop to below 25% by the end of this year.

Chrome and Firefox benefit from the declining usage of Microsoft’s browser. Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox grew to respectively 55% and 9%. Apple’s Safari also saw a slight decline to 4%.

It appears Edge isn’t impressing users, they appear to be mainly searching for a browser that synchronizes the desktop and their mobile devices.

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Microsoft makes it Update Catalog finally work with Firefox and Chrome

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Chrome and Firefox users can now also access the Microsoft Update Catalog to download software updates from the software giant. Previously the website could only be used by Internet Explorer as support for ActiveX was required for the catalog to properly function.

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The Microsoft Update Catalog allows users to downloads all kinds of update of Microsoft software. Last month Microsoft already announced that it would no longer require ActiveX which would make the website work with all browsers.

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A quick test shows that the website indeed works with Chrome and Firefox and also with Opera. When the site is visited with Microsoft’s Edge browser it shows a message that the website uses outdated web technology and has to be opened with Internet Explorer.

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Firefox update prevents websites from accessing your browsing history

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Mozilla today released a security update for Firefox that fixes two vulnerabilities, one made the browser crash and the other allowed websites to retrieve the browsing history of users.

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A developer discovered that websites could access information in Firefox’s HTTP cache. This allowed websites to retrieve previously visited URLs and even the content of those pages. The problem only affected Firefox 48 and Firefox 49, according to Mozilla. Exact details on the issue are not available as Mozilla hides the bug report from the general public, likely till most people have updated their browser.

Firefox 49.0.2 also fixes some other non-security related bugs.

Updates can be downloaded and installed through the automatic update feature of Firefox. Manually updates can be performed by downloading the update from Mozilla.org.

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Mozilla announces new Quantum engine that will better utilize modern CPUs and video cards

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Mozilla plans to release a new web engine for its Firefox browser next year that should load websites superfast and should provide an improved user experience. The new engine is called Quantum and the browser developer claims it will be a giant leap forward on browser performance.

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The performance increase is possible due to better utilisation of modern hardware, such as multi-core CPU and GPUs. The engine will also render the most important content with the highest priority.  The new engine will first be based on Mozilla’s current engine Gecko and over time,  major engine components that will benefit most from parallelization, or from offloading to the GPU, will be replaced by Quantum components.

“We’re taking on a lot of separate but related initiatives as part of Quantum, and we’re revisiting many old assumptions and implementations. The high-level approach is to rethink many fundamental aspects of how a browser engine works,” David Bryant, Head of Platform Engineering writes in a blog.

“We’ll be re-engineering foundational building blocks, like how we apply CSS styles, how we execute DOM operations, and how we render graphics to your screen,” he adds.

Mozilla stress it’s an ambitious project but that users won’t have to wait long before they can benefit from it. The first large improvements are scheduled for next year. A first version of the new Quantum engine will be released for Android, Linux, Mac and Windows and later possibly also for iOS.

“We’re confident Quantum will deliver significantly improved performance,” Bryant concludes.

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