Mozilla

Firefox version 85 will be released in January 2021, and one of its features is increased user privacy via improvements in client-side storage (cache) partitioning. This has been widely and incorrectly reported elsewhere as network partitioning, likely due to confusion around the privacy.partition.network_state flag in Firefox, which allows advanced users to enable or disable cache partitioning as desired.

Over the past two weeks, Mozilla's add-on review team has banned 197 Firefox add-ons that were caught executing malicious code, stealing user data, or using obfuscation to hide their source code.

The add-ons have been banned and removed from the Mozilla Add-on (AMO) portal to prevent new installs, but they've also been disabled in the browsers of the users who already installed them.

The latest update to Firefox comes with a patch to a critical vulnerability that's being abused by hackers, says Mozilla, the browser's maker. The flaw could let attackers take over your system, according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

That's about as serious as a vulnerability can get. The good news is that Mozilla, which prides itself on protecting user privacy, released the patch Wednesday. Even better: The company has automatic updates on by default.

Mozilla has released Firefox 72, an update that, like many recent browser updates, focuses on privacy features—specifically, ways to deal with fingerprinting, and a new way of managing websites' requests to send you notifications.

Mozilla look to reclaim some ground from the all-powerful Chrome with a new way to send and receive files securely from inside the browser. Firefox Send first emerged in 2017, promising an easy way to send documents without fuss. The training wheels have now come off and Send is ready to go primetime. Will it catch on with the masses, or will only a small, niche group use it to play document tennis?

How does it work?

Mozilla, an organization that is best known for its Firefox web browser, is starting 2019 by renewing focus on its Thunderbird email client. It's a move that comes after a meandering 20-year path for the open-source organization's email efforts.

Malware authors, ad farmers, and scammers are abusing a Firefox bug to trap users on malicious sites.

This wouldn't be a big deal, as the web is fraught with this kind of malicious sites, but these websites aren't abusing some new never-before-seen trick, but a Firefox bug that Mozilla engineers appear to have failed to fix in the 11 years ever since it was first reported back in April 2007.

Today, Mozilla announced that it had developed two new apps for Apple's iOS and Google's Android mobile operating systems, Firefox Lockbox for iOS and Notes by Firefox for Android. The two apps are currently available for testing through the company's Mobile Test Pilot Experiments initiative.

If you're using Thunderbird for your email needs, make sure you're on version 52.5.2. Mozilla recently released the new version, which has patches that squash a handful of bugs.

Mozilla is making Firefox a more private experience by taking cues from Tor, the browser of choice for those who dare to visit the dark web.

The non-profit Mozilla Foundation will remove a “feature” called canvas fingerprinting from Firefox, which allows user-tracking across multiple sites without cookies, in it’s upcoming build. It’ll do this by imitating Tor, which was built on modified Firefox code and already blocks tracking.