firefox

When the video conferencing trend kicked up last year thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was no surprise that Microsoft would jump on the bandwagon as well. What was a bit surprising, however, was that it prioritized bringing its younger Teams platform up to snuff instead of promoting the video conferencing service it has had for years. In fact, some might have almost forgotten about Skype at this point, including Microsoft. Two years after launching its new Web app, Microsoft has finally made Skype work on Firefox, though not without what might be an unnecessary warning.

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As a non-profit organization, Mozilla has always had the problem of finding ways to keep the lights on. Like many Web companies, it tried to resort to some form of advertisement in order to bring in some revenue to support the development of Firefox, among other things. Those efforts never sat well with Firefox's more privacy-minded users, and some have either been removed or remained in seclusion. This latest attempt might fall by the wayside as well, but, at least for now, you can still turn off these Firefox search bar ads until it gets removed completely.

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Mozilla has announced a redesign for its Firefox Focus mobile privacy browser, retaining the same simple and private browsing experience while improving things a bit for those who use the product regularly. Among other things, Firefox Focus now features shortcuts, an arguably vital feature for a browser that aims to get users to their destinations as easily as possible.

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Today, Mozilla announced several new security features for Firefox on Android. These new features are centered around passwords and keeping your various online identities secure. What's particularly interesting about these features is that they offer some degree of cross-app functionality, allowing you to do things like accessing your stored passwords outside of the Firefox browser itself.

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Mozilla announced today that it's adding recommendations to the URL bar in Firefox through a new feature called "Firefox Suggest." Now, in addition to the autocomplete suggestions that show whenever you begin typing something, you'll see suggestions from Mozilla itself. It also looks like Mozilla will use Firefox Suggest to serve ads, though users will have some degree of control over the recommendations they see.

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Microsoft is making security an indispensable pillar and marketing point for Windows 11 to the point that all eligible PCs are required to have TPM 2.0 present and enabled. Given Windows' image and recent security incidents in the past few years, that move isn't exactly surprising. Microsoft, however, might be taking things too far when it revamped Windows 11's system for setting default applications. Mozilla has apparently had enough and has implemented a one-click way to set Firefox as the default web browser on Windows 11 against Microsoft's envisioned policy.

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Slowly but surely, the Web has mostly moved to use secure HTTP or HTTPS as the default for browsing web pages. There are still a few exceptions, however, especially when talking about content that is downloaded via those supposedly secure web pages. It's no longer enough just to mark web pages as "secure" but also the resources that come from them. Starting next month, Mozilla will follow in Chrome's footsteps and will make Firefox block downloads on HTTPS pages that come from unsecured HTTP content.

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Mozilla has announced a new update to its Firefox browser bringing the browser to version 91. A key update has been made in Firefox 91 with Private Browsing Windows using HTTPS encrypted connections by default if possible. For those unfamiliar with HTTPS, it supports secure and encrypted connections between the browser and the websites the user is visiting. Standard HTTP connections send data across the Internet in unprotected clear text allowing any hacker to intercept and view the data.

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There was a time when you could do almost anything in a web browser or could at least install extensions to do what the browser natively can't. While the craze of turning browsers into Swiss Army knives has mellowed down a bit, there's still plenty of things you can do with the software that would normally require a separate app for the same task. Ironically, Firefox is moving in the opposite direction and is removing FTP functionality that has been a staple in web browsers for decades.

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The most basic kind of protection against tracking that web browsers offer is Private Browsing mode, a.k.a. Incognito Mode that often blocks third parties and even the browser itself from tracking your movement through the Internet. This basic privacy measure isn't perfect, and it also causes some functionality to break. Unfortunately, one of those is being able to sign in to sites and services using a Facebook account, a problem that Firefox 90's new SmartBlock 2.0 is finally fixing.

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Despite all the magic that web apps and web browsers are able to do these days, much of the Web and the Internet in general still operates on top of decades-old technologies. This isn't just about applications like e-mail or IRC (yes, those still exist) but also technologies like TCP/IP, HTTP (without the S), and FTP. Those won't be going away anytime soon, at least without breaking the Internet, but some, such as FTP, are becoming more obscure to the point that Mozilla has decided to start its retirement from the Firefox web browser.

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Mozilla as an organization has been having trouble finding ways to generate revenue without betraying its principles and its community. One of the steps it has taken to keep operating despite that is to consolidate its resources to focus on efforts that have a bigger ROI. That involves restructuring, layoffs, and dropping projects it may no longer consider worthwhile. One of those, it seems, is the version of Firefox for Amazon devices which will no longer be supported after April.

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