Repost from r/firefox:

Right. I'm getting tired of seeing people dump on Firefox and Mozilla about this thing in the release notes:

Firefox now supports the experimental Privacy Preserving Attribution API, which provides an alternative to user tracking for ad attribution. This experiment is only enabled via origin trial and can be disabled in the new Website Advertising Preferences section in the Privacy and Security settings.

What is this? And why is it not something to get heated about?

Attribution is how advertisers know how to pay the right site owner when someone clicks on their ad. It's important for ad-supported sites that clicks get attributed.

Right now, attribution is basically incompatible with protecting privacy. Advertisers use every method of tracking you can name, and some you can't, to provide accurate attribution.

The Privacy Preserving Attribution API is an experimental way of informing an advertiser that someone clicked on an ad on a given site without leaking that it was you, specifically, who did that. Specifically, ads using the API ask Firefox to remember that they were seen, on what sites, and to what sites they lead. Then, when the user visits the destination site, the destination site asks Firefox to generate a report and submit it via a separate service that mixes your report with reports from other people and forwards these aggregated reports in large batches. Any traces that might be unique to you are lost in the crowd.

This is still experimental, being enabled by Mozilla on a site-by-site basis as developers request it. It's not a free-for-all yet, and I can only find one entry on Bugzilla of a site who's requested it.

Mozilla's latest changelog confirms that Firefox now has support for an Android 14 feature designed to consolidate passkeys and third-party sign-in tools. As of version 128, when you create a passkey for an account on supported websites, Firefox can pass these credentials along to your password manager — even if you're using a third-party password manager, provided that app also supports Android 14's upgraded Credential Manager.

"In the next few days, we will start the Nightly experiment which provides easy access to AI services from the sidebar. This functionality is entirely optional, and it’s there to see if it’s a helpful addition to Firefox. It is not built into any core functionality and needs to be turned on by you to see it.

If you want to try the experiment, activate it via Nightly Settings > Nightly Experiments (please see full instructions here).

We’d love to hear your feedback once you try out the feature, and we’re open to all your ideas and thoughts, whether it’s small tweaks to the current experience or big, creative suggestions that could boost your productivity and make accessing your favorite tools and services in Firefox even easier."

The most requested Vertical Tabs will make an appearance in the upcoming Firefox. The feature can now be turned on in Nightly itself without the need to rely on third-party extensions or separate Nightly builds.

Mozilla did their biggest Reddit AMA yet on Thursday, June 13, with eight members of the Firefox leadership team. With 400 total comments on the post, they c...

In 2023, a significant portion of Firefox downloads came from unknown sources. We believe many of them came from 3rd party websites that let you download Firefox. While some websites are okay, others can put you at risk of downloading an old version or a build with the wrong locale, leading to security risks, a bad user experience, or even malicious installations. Help the Firefox team to uncover this mystery by taking part in the Firefox 3rd-party installer campaign!

There used to be an option called browser.privateWindowSeparation.enabled, which ever since Firefox 106 back in October 2022 resulted in separate taskbar icons for normal and private Firefox windows. In version 127, this option has gone away, removed in this code change. Users complained on Mozilla's forums and on Reddit at the time, but it was at least possible to recombine the icons with the option in about:config – but no longer.

As you might imagine, people are not happy, although according to the official response in this complaint, it looks like the change will be reverted in Firefox 128...

"Working at Mozilla has taken my shopping habits to new heights. I feel armed with information and shortcuts and have a world of add ons at my fingertips. Keep reading for more on Fakespot and other hacks to shop smarter on Firefox."

cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/9940873

And this is 100% Youtube's fault, not Firefox's fault, they created this issue:

This problem is triggered by bad muxed VP9 bytestream served by Youtube, so it's not a regression on our side, this issue can also be reproduced on old versions Firefox. Usually when muxing a video bytestream, the video samples' timestamp should be monotonizally increasing and no overlap between samples. But there are some bad video samples in YT's bytesteam, they overlapped with the previous sample. Eg. [124416000, 125126000] and [125125000, 131382000]. The next one should start from 12516000 instead of starting from 125125000 causing an overlapping.

That overlapped sample triggers this and our WebM demuxer fails to calculate the next timestamp in that situation. The end time of video sample was set to the same as the sample's start time, and that causes a gap being detected for the next sample, resulting in resetting append state. When doing so, mNeedRandomAccessPoint would be set to true and that triggers the sample skipping mechanism per the spec.

Therefore, there would be many sample being incorrectly skipped and won't be added into the buffered range. When entering the buffering state, Firefox would be waiting those sample which has been skipped but Youtube thought that those samples were already appended. That makes the endless buffering happened.

Source: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1878510#c113 (Alastor Wu [:alwu])

Google Earth is almost not usable in Firefox. I’d like to ask for suggestions from the community because I really don’t want to use Google Chrome where it works great. I’m on Linux Mint, an Ubuntu derivative.

Some Firefox users noticed playback issues on YouTube for several months. These affected high resolution videos only, from 1080p and up. To make matters worse, no clear pattern could be identified.

Some videos played fine, others would stop abruptly when they ran out of buffer.

Mozilla Firefox finally allows you to further protect local access to stored credentials in the browser's password manager using your device's login, including a password, fingerprint, pin, or other biometrics

Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a trailblazer in privacy-preserving digital advertising. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla to help raise the bar for the advertising industry by ensuring user privacy while delivering effective advertising solutions.

About Anonym: Anonym was founded in 2022 by former Meta executives Brad Smallwood and Graham Mudd. The company was backed by Griffin Gaming Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Heracles Capital as well as a number of strategic individual investors.

Below is the next installation in our series of community updates designed to provide clarity and transparency as we continue to deliver Manifest V3 related improvements with each new Firefox release.

Streamline your creative workflow with Firefox's picture-in-picture, eyedropper tool, PDF editor, dark mode and more.

In alignment with our commitment to an open and accessible internet, Mozilla will reinstate previously restricted listings in Russia. Our initial decision to temporarily restrict these listings was made while we considered the regulatory environment in Russia and the potential risk to our community and staff.

Firefox 130 will feature an on-device AI model that automatically generates alt-text for images, integrated into its built-in PDF editor.

Last week we shared a number of updates with our community of users, and now we want to share them here: At Mozilla, we work hard to make Firefox the best

Firefox update