Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Mozilla/Firefox: TenFourFox and Listening Devices

Filed under
Moz/FF
  • TenFourFox FPR14b1 available (now with H.264 video)

    I had originally plotted three main features for this release, but getting the urgent FPR13 SPR1 set me back a few days with confidence testing and rebuilds and I have business trips and some vacation time coming up, so I jettisoned the riskiest of the three features (a set of JavaScript updates and a ugly hack to get Github and other sites working fully again) and concentrated on the other two. I'll be looking at that again for FPR15, so more on that later.

    Before we get to the marquee features, though, there are two changes which you may not immediately notice. The first is a mitigation for a long-standing issue where some malicious sites keep popping up authentication modals using HTTP Auth. Essentially you can't do anything with the window until the modal is dealt with, so the site just asks for your credentials over and over, ultimately making the browser useless (as a means to make you call their "support line" where they can then social engineer their way into your computer). The ultimate solution is to make such things tab-modal rather than window-modal, but that's involved and sort of out of scope, so we now implement a similar change to what current Firefox does where there is a cap of three Cancels. If you cancel three times, the malicious site is not allowed to issue any more requests until you reload it. No actual data is leaked, assuming you don't type anything in, but it can be a nasty denial of service and it would have succeeded in ruining your day on TenFourFox just as easily as any other Firefox derivative. That said, just avoid iffy sites, yes?

    The second change is more fundamental. For Firefox 66 Mozilla briefly experimented with setting a frame rate cap on low-end devices. Surprise, surprise: all of our systems are low-end devices! In FPR13 and prior, TenFourFox would try to push as many frames to the compositor as possible, no matter what it was trying to do, to achieve a 60fps target or better. However, probably none of our computers with the possible exception of high-end G5s were probably achieving 60fps consistently on most modern websites, and the browser would flail trying to desperately keep up. Instead, by setting a cap and enforcing it with software v-sync, frames aren't pushed as often and the browser can do more layout and rendering work per frame. Mozilla selected a 30fps cap, so that's what I selected as an arbitrary first cut. Some sites are less smooth, but many sites now render faster to first paint, particularly pages that do a lot of DOM transforms because now the resulting visual changes are batched. This might seem like an obvious change to make but the numbers had never been proven until then.

  • Sustainable smart home with the TXT

    Mozilla started venturing into IoT recently. They are trying to advocate for better privacy and user freedom by promoting interoperability. These goals are unified in a proposal for a device API that is based on web protocols called “Web of Things”. It is developed in collaboration with smart home and “industry 4.0” manufacturers. This API isn’t necessarily implemented by each device directly, some devices are too low powered to provide a web server or are using other successful local mesh networks like Z-Wave or Zigbee. In these cases a gateway that is connected to the user’s local network would provide the web thing API.

    The web thing API breaks physical devices down into three attributes: properties, actions and events. Properties as stateful values that can both be changed by the device and the user (I’ll often refer to the user as the client). A device can however declare a property as read-only or add input value restrictions. Actions let the user execute an action on the device that either isn’t stateful or affects multiple properties. Lastly, events are fired by the device to indicate a momentary effect that is not reflected in the state. Above that is a capabilities system, with which devices can indicate the semantics of their features. For example a light bulb can advertise itself as being a “Lamp”, it’s brightness property will be a “BrightnessProperty” and the power toggle will be an “OnOffProperty”. These allow clients to expose appropriate UIs and behaviors for devices. The protocol is available over HTTP(S) and optionally WebSockets for real-time communication of changes.

    Mozilla is developing both a reference gateway to control devices using this protocol and reference implementations in multiple languages to build web things with. The “WebThing gateway” also has an adapter system to bridge other smart home protocols to the web of things data model.

April Fools!

  • Mozilla Thunderbird: All Thunderbird Bugs Have Been Fixed!

    We’re calling this the “Game of Bugs”, named after the popular show Game of Thrones – where we will try to “slay” all the bugs. Those who participate fully in the event will get a Thunderbird Game of Bugs t-shirt for their participation (with the design below).

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.