2015

Happy birthday Firefox!

Seems longer. I have an old laptop with a working version of 1.something. “Eleven years ago, Firefox 1.0 was released with much excitement and anticipation. With the help of volunteers, The Mozilla Foundation placed a two-page advertisement in the New York Times. Over the last 11 years, Firefox has been been used by millions of people worldwide, becoming one of the most popular web browsers available to surf the Internet. …” Source: Opensource-com

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Thunderbird 38.4.0 and Lightning Issues

Thunderbird 38.4.0 has not yet been released. Reviewing the notes from the status meeting on November 3rd, the release was planned for around November 5th. This delay is not unusual and likely we will be seeing the Thunderbird 38.4.0 release during this coming week. While going through the meeting notes did notice bug 1211160 which had to do with ‘some’ users who updated to Thunderbird 38.3 with Lightning 4.0.3 enabled lost use of the buttons in Thunderbird. Users reported that rolling back to Thunderbird 38.2.0 resolved the issue. Other uses reported success by disabling Lightning 4.0.3 prior to updating to the…

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Windows 10 ‘Forced’ Update and Spying

So Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 7 and 8.1 users are being targeted to be automatically update to Windows 10 via the Windows Update utility. While this has been happening since September and in October Microsoft called this an ‘accident’, now they are admitting that their plan is to get every Windows 7 and 8.1 PC (that can run Windows 10) on to Windows 10.  Right now the Windows 10 Update is only an optional update, but in ‘early 2016’ it will become a recommended update. For those user who have their update settings to automatically download and install recommended updates, they are going to…

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Firefox 42 Released

Mozilla release the next scheduled update of Firefox with Firefox 42 on Tuesday, November 3rd. There are several changes and updates to this version including changes to private browsing. More information is available in the Release Notes. Depending on their update settings, users should be prompted to update within 48-hours of this release or can do so in Firefox via Help > About Firefox or download and manually install the new version via the getfirefox.com site. The next scheduled release is Firefox 43 set for around December 15th.

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Download Manager (S3) Add-On Spies on Users

” Dan Callahan, engineer in Developer Relations at Mozilla, has told Softpedia that their staff contacted Mr. Popov, but he has yet to respond them. He also said they’ve also checked the developer’s other plugins, and that besides Download Manager (S3) another add-on was also found to have a similar behavior and also removed from the add-ons portal. If Mr. Popov removes the user privacy intrusive behavior from his add-on’s code, Mr. Callahan said that the Mozilla staff won’t have any issues with relisting the add-ons on their portal. “ Source: SoftpediaDetails 

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‘Give Microsoft Edge a Shot’

The title of this post sounds quite like a marketing gimmick by Microsoft to promote their new Windows 10 browser. It could be for a TV commercial or online advertisement. Actually it is the messages Windows 10 users may see if a new ‘feature’ in a forthcoming Windows 10 update is left in place when they attempt to change their default browser to Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. Microsoft has already made it a pain for users to change their default browser by making them do it from within the Windows 10 settings instead of allowing from within the browser itself. But, now…

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Firefox 41.0.2 Released

On Thursday, October 15th, Mozilla released an update for the Firefox 41.0 branch with Firefox 41.0.2. This update addressed the following issues: Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2015-115: 2015-115 Cross-origin restriction bypass using Fetch The next planned release will be Firefox 42 on November 3rd.  

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Mozilla to remove NPAPI Plugins from ALL Firefox

Following in the footsteps of Google and Microsoft, Mozilla plans to eliminate support for the ancient NPAPI plugins (with the exception of heavily sandboxed version of Flash) in the next year. This would include the 32-bit versions of Firefox. There has been a lot of heated discussions in the past few months in regards to Mozilla removing the support of NPAPI plugins (mainly Silverlight and Java) from the upcoming (Firefox 43?) Windows 64-bit (Win64) version of Firefox. I agree this needs to be done as NPAPI plugin technology is over 20-years old from the Netscape days and is badly outdated…

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Tool to tweak Firefox about:config settings

Windows only at the moment – I’m not on Windows so can’t try it out but it looked like something that may be useful for some. Source: The Windows ClubReview  ConfigFox: Configure and tweak Firefox about:config settings Source: gHacks Tech NewsReview  ConfigFox: manage advanced Firefox privacy and security settings

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Firefox 41.0.1 Released

On Wednesday, September 30th, Mozilla released an update for the Firefox 41.0 branch with Firefox 41.0.1. This update addressed the following issues: Fix a startup crash related to Yandex toolbar and Adblock Plus (1209124) Fix potential hangs with Flash plugins (1185639) Fix a regression in the bookmark creation (1206376) Fix a startup crash with some Intel Media Accelerator 3150 graphic cards (1207665) Fix a graphic crash, occurring occasionally on Facebook (1178601) Crash when serializing a principal with unknown app id (1205456) The next planned release will be Firefox 42 on November 3rd.  

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