Ah yes, Pocket the third-party feature nobody wanted, but Mozilla decided they would integrate into Firefox anyway. Well, that is not really fair to say. Apparently about 220K Firefox user (less than 1% of the user base) have downloaded Pocket when it was only an add-on. Mozilla makes it sound like it is no big deal saying that its impact on memory is minimal. Um okay, but I don’t think most users are concerned about the resources Pocket uses. They are upset about the integration of a third-party service as in from another company (NOT Mozilla) into their Firefox browser without their consent. A…
Browsers
Read More
Even though Mozilla is forcing you to accept Pocket as part of your Firefox experience since they integrated into Firefox (which may be a violation of Pocket’s own TOS), doesn’t mean you have to keep it active. If you want to get rid of this feature that you didn’t ask for, didn’t want and don’t plan to use, follow these simple steps: Remove the Pocket icon from the toolbar by right-clicking on the icon and select ‘Remove from Toolbar’ Open a new tab and in the address bar type about:config and press enter (if applicable) click the I’ll be careful,…
Came across this gHacks article via Grand Stream Dreams. Starting with Pale Moon 26 the rendering engine is going to move from Gecko to Goanna. From what I gather, the change is more for legal reasons (Gecko is registered trademark licensed to the Mozilla Foundation by Netscape/AOL) and also to fix compatibility issues with websites detecting the wrong version of Gecko because of the numbering differences with Pale Moon and Firefox. There is really not going to much changes under the hood so to say. It is going to be a fork off of Gecko much like Chromium (Open Source Project based…
I had mentioned in the in Three Pillars of Firefox post that I was going to try to find more info about the “Uniquely Firefox” pillar. So far the only thing I have come across is Tracking Protection may be included in Private Browsing mode. KWierso explained on mozillaZine Tracking Protection versus Do Not Track: “Do Not Track” really only indicates your wish that the site doesn’t track you while you visit. Tracking Protection is a feature that actively blocks tracking scripts while you browse. Of course, I am wondering how long until certain websites will either not allow you to access them…
This is a continuation of The Three Pillars post as the article referenced in that post also discusses this as well. In another email, Dave Camp is “Revisiting how we build Firefox”. This one is a lot more technical as it focuses a lot on getting Firefox away from XUL and XBL. However, in the beginning of the email he does talk about speeding up deployment: Since Firefox began, the industry has continually evolved how it deploys code to users, and today it isn’t done on an 18-week cycle. We think there are big wins to be had in shortening the time that new features reaches users. Critical…
Mozilla is making major announcements about Firefox again. In an e-mail to the firefox-dev mailing list, Firefox Director of Engineering Dave Camp has outlined what he calls the Three Pillars of the new Firefox: Uncompromised Quality – aim to strip out Firefox’s half-baked ideas or carry them through to completion so that they’re “polished, functional, and a joy to use.” This program is internally dubbed “Great or Dead”—as in, if the Firefox devs can’t make a feature great, it should be killed off. Best Of The Web – a slightly more nebulous pillar that will concern itself with the add-ons community…
Mozilla released the next update for Firefox on Thursday, July 2nd (release notes show the original planned release date of June 30th) with the Firefox 39.0 release. There are various OS related changes and fixes, the complete details can be found in the Firefox 39.0 Release Notes. Depending on their update settings, users will be prompted to update within the next 24-48 hours. Users can also manually update by going to the Firefox Help Menu and selecting About Firefox and follow the prompts to update. Alternatively users can also down and manually install the update via getfirefox.com site. The next planned release…
Currently Firefox users can go into the about:config and customize the preference browser.newtab.url to a specific web address (URL) or even set it to about:blank for a blank tab. However, so can malicious/unwanted software (McAfee, Ask, AVG, Babylon, Yahoo, etc.) by directly making changes the user’s prefs.js profile file. However, many novice Firefox users don’t know about or how to work within the about:config interface. Mozilla’s solution to this as purposed in Bug 118285 (The browser.newtab.url preference is abused and should be removed) is to only allow (approved) add-ons to change the behavior of the new tab page. This would be landed in Firefox…
Over the course of the last year I have noticed Firefox is becoming more and more bloated. Martin Brinkmann (ghacks), talks about what Firefox was like when it was first introduced: Back then, the core development philosophy was to create and maintain a user-friendly browser with a high level of customization options and a powerful extension ecosystem that adds new features to the browser. This worked really well, kept the core browser rather slim without sacrificing features as users were able to install extensions or scripts, or use other customization options such as styles to modify the browser for their needs and…
This is a really an odd one and it affects both Chrome and Firefox (possibly Safari as well), but NOT Internet Explorer. If you have had unexplained crashes while/after visiting a WordPress (WP) site, it is possible it could be caused by this bug. The good news is this bug has been reported to Mozilla [Bug 1174811] and it was patched on Wednesday (June 17th). Just not sure yet when it is going to be pushed out. Firefox 39 is due out in less than two weeks (June 30th), but then there could also be a 38.0.6 release between now and then (though…