2015

Experimental Private Browsing now in Firefox Beta

As mentioned in the Three Pillars of Firefox from July 2015. The Uniquely Firefox Pillar hinted towards an improved private browsing mode. In the past Private Browsing would not show up in your history, or keep cookies and temporary files. So, now Mozilla has expanded on what happens in a private browsing session and has rolled this out in the current Firefox 40 Beta. Our hypothesis is that when you open a Private Browsing window in Firefox you’re sending a signal that you want more control over your privacy than current private browsing experiences actually provide. The experimental Private Browsing enhancements ready…

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Mozilla to Depreciate add-ons using XUL, XPCOM, or XBL

Back in July Mozilla’s Dave Camp had talked about in his email how to get Firefox away from being dependent on XBL and XUL. At that time, many on mozillaZine were concerned that this could have dire consequences on the future of Firefox as trying to move away from a development system that has been used for the past decade would not be easy. If anything, it would require a complete rewrite/redesign of the desktop version of Firefox. Many had hoped this would be like a campaign promise and people would forget about it. Unfortunately, Mozilla has lived up their…

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Coming This Weekend…

Been busy adapting to a new work schedule (and soon will be adding school into the mix), so posting is somewhat limited to the weekends. There are some Firefox related news items that have come out during the week which I will be posting over the weekend. Some of these have to do with the ‘announcements‘ that were made this past summer during Mozilla’s annual retreat in Whistler, BC. Including New Experimental Private Browsing and depreciation of XBL/XUL/XPCOM based addons. The latter could have a huge negative impact on the desktop based Firefox browser and also seems to support Mozilla’s (unofficial) plan to make…

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Extension Signing in Thunderbird?

Apparently someone thought it would be a good idea to introduce extension signing into Mozilla Thunderbird. At the end of May 2015 Magnus Melin filed Bug 1168571: consider force signing add-ons requirements on in beta/release for thunderbird (too). So Mozilla is going to shoot themselves in the other foot if they are stupid enough to do this. A couple interesting points against this: Unlike Firefox, Thunderbird does not have issues with rogue add-ons Thunderbird dropped the ESR Branch a while back which would likely have to be reintroduced in order to support proprietary enterprise add-ons that shouldn’t be hosted on AMO. It…

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Enable 1080p YouTube Support in Firefox 40 for Linux

“You can check if your browser supports all the codecs for YouTube by checking the YouTube HTML5 Video Player website, which list everything supported on your PC. If you have a Linux systems and Firefox 40, it’s likely that some of those codecs will have a red sign, meaning that they are not enabled. All you have to do is open about:config and make the following changes. Please make sure that you don’t change anything else. …” Source: Softpedia

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Windows 10: Read the fine Print

Either Microsoft Microsoft Corporation 394,94 +5,61 +1,44% is going really too far with what they can do with your Windows 10 machine or else they were too lazy to modify the EULA and copied this section of the Windows 10 EULA straight from the XBox Live EULA” Section 7b reads: “We may automatically check your version of the software and download software updates or configuration changes, including those that prevent you from accessing the [Windows] Services, playing counterfeit games, or using unauthorised hardware peripheral devices.” The forced updates are bad enough (especially when they are causing multiple crashing issues), but now…

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Windows 10 Update to Fix Crashes Crashing.

Yep, you read that right. The update (KB 308148) pushed out on Friday, August 14th which was suppose to fix the botched update (KB 308146) is failing to install correctly and also resulting in an endless crash loop. Like the previous update there is no detailed explanation what this update does (besides causes crashing).  According to Microsoft: “This update includes improvements to enhance the functionality of Windows 10.” So is Microsoft saying that crashing is now a functionality of Windows 10 and it has been enhanced with this latest update? via Forbes > Gordon Kelly

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Block Firefox from connecting to sites when you hover over links

I thought I had these all off but I missed one. ” Find out how to prevent the Firefox web browser from connecting to sites when you hover over links in the browser. “ @ www.ghacks.net/Block Firefox from connecting to sites when you hover over links – gHacks Tech News

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Firefox 41 (and Headaches) Coming September 22nd

Mozilla is moving right along with getting Firefox 41 ready to ship for the September 22nd release. Having had a chance to play with the current Beta version of Firefox 41, here are THREE major changes users should be aware of to avoid headaches upon updating/downloading: New ‘New Tab’ behavior. Gone are the days users could set their preference as to what comes up when they open a new tab via the browser.newtab.url preference in about:config. Nope, that was being ‘exploited’ so Mozilla removed this functionality that has been in Firefox since Firefox 13 (June 2012). There is a simple solution, Custom New…

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Thunderbird 38.2.0 Released

Mozilla released the next scheduled update for the Thunderbird 38.x branch with 38.2.0 on August 14, 2015. There have been some changes to this version for increased stability. CHANGED: Hardware acceleration is now disabled by default to avoid crashing Thunderbird FIXED: A few bugs have been fixed to avoid crashing Thunderbird UNRESOLVED: The “maildir” storage type can no longer be set through the UI due to various issues. Power users can still set the storage type using the config editor. The next planned update for the Thunderbird 38.x branch will be around September 22nd with Thunderbird 38.3.0 release. Users can update…

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