Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Mozilla: VPN, Firefox 81 Plans and Add-ons

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 31st of August 2020 10:35:58 PM Filed under
Moz/FF
  • No judgment digital definitions: What is the difference between a VPN and a web proxy?

    Virtual private networks (VPNs) and secure web proxies are solutions for better privacy and security online, but it can be confusing to figure out which one is right for you. Here’s a look at how these services protect you and how to choose the best option for when you’re online.

    [...]

    A secure web proxy works for tasks that you might do only in your browser. This can amount to a lot of activity like shopping, paying bills, logging into social media and reading emails. A secure web proxy serves as an intermediary between your browser and the internet. Your web browsing data will pass through a secure tunnel to the internet directly from your browser, masking your IP address, so the web server you are contacting doesn’t know exactly where you are in the world. And that makes you harder to track and target.

    A proxy is useful when you’re browsing the web on a public WiFi. When a proxy is enabled, it will stop eavesdroppers on the same network from spying on your browsing activity or reading your transactions on unencrypted sites. It sounds harmless, but public WiFi networks can be like a backdoor for hackers.

  • These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 78

    The tab modal print UI work is still in full swing, and is aiming for Firefox 81.

  • Wladimir Palant: A grim outlook on the future of browser add-ons

    A few days ago Mozilla announced the release of their new Android browser. This release, dubbed “Firefox Daylight,” is supposed to achieve nothing less than to “revolutionize mobile browsing.”

    [...]

    What this text carefully avoids stating directly: that’s the only nine (as in: single-digit 9) add-ons which you will be able to install on Firefox for Android now. After being able to use thousands of add-ons before, this feels like a significant downgrade. Particularly given that there appears to be no technical reason why none of the other add-ons are allowed any more, it being merely a policy decision. I already verified that my add-ons can still run on Firefox for Android but aren’t allowed to, same should be true for the majority of other add-ons.

    [...]

    Before this release, Firefox was the only mobile browser to allow arbitrary add-ons. Chrome experimented with add-ons on mobile but never actually released this functionality. Safari implemented a halfhearted ad blocking interface, received much applause for it, but never made this feature truly useful or flexible. So it would seem that Firefox had a significant competitive advantage here. Why throw it away?

    Unfortunately, supporting add-ons comes at a considerable cost. It isn’t merely the cost of developing and maintaining the necessary functionality, there is also the performance and security impact of browser extensions. Mozilla has been struggling with this for a while. The initial solution was reviewing all extensions before publication. It was a costly process which also introduced delays, so by now all add-ons are published immediately but are still supposed to be reviewed manually eventually.

    Mozilla is currently facing challenges both in terms of market share and financially, the latter being linked to the former. This once again became obvious when Mozilla laid off a quarter of its workforce a few weeks ago. In the past, add-ons have done little to help Mozilla achieve a breakthrough on mobile, so costs being cut here isn’t much of a surprise. And properly reviewing nine extensions is certainly cheaper than keeping tabs on a thousand.

»

More in Tux Machines

today's howtos

  • Comprehensive Guide to Using FFmpeg to Convert Media Files

    FFmpeg is one of those modern marvels of open source software. It is a suite of libraries and smaller programs to handle video and audio files primarily. It works with images and other multimedia files such as video streaming formats. It has lots of uses like video transcoding, video editing, video scaling, video cropping or other video manipulation work. At its heart FFmpeg is a command line tool used with the ffmpeg command. It has a basic simple video player and ability to probe video media information for analysis. FFmpeg is also included in the workflow of other software like the popular video player VLC. Enterprise companies like YouTube use it in their core processing when ingesting video uploads. Overall FFmpeg can play, record, convert, and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec – the leading audio/video codec library. In this tutorial we’ll install FFmpeg and learn how to use some its most popular features through practical examples and detailed explanations.

  • Extracting substrings on Linux [Ed: This should say "GNU", not "Linux"]

    There are many ways to extract substrings from lines of text using Linux and doing so can be extremely useful when preparing scripts that may be used to process large amounts of data. This post describes ways you can take advantage of the commands that make extracting substrings easy.

  • How to Install WordPress with Apache and Let's Encrypt SSL on Ubuntu 22.04
  • How to install Godot Mono 3.4.4 on a Chromebook
  • How to install Steam Link on Debian 11 - Invidious

    In this video, we are looking at how to install Steam Link on Debian 11.

Hackers getting married

We had several of our old-time friends from the GNU Project, and some guests with young children still unused to such an international context who soon enough learned to enjoy the sound of different languages and the happy chaos of people meeting for the first time, some more traditional if not formal, others fun and weird. Read more

Fedora Releases and Red Hat/IBM Puff Pieces

  • Ben Williams: F36-20220516 updated Live isos released

    The Fedora Respins SIG is pleased to announce the latest release of Updated F36-20220516-Live ISOs, carrying the 5.17.6-300 kernel. This set of updated isos will save considerable amounts of updates after install. ((for new installs.)(New installs of Workstation have about 1GB of updates savings )).

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6: Better security, more options

    Do you want a solid Linux distribution that also delivers the latest languages and solid security? Yes? Then consider getting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6. Red Hat announced this new release at the Red Hat Summit. It has numerous new features, but the ones that caught my eye were the security improvements.

  • OS consistency solves Linux talent issues, says RHEL executive

    The new Red Hat Enterprise Linux, released during the recent Red Hat Summit, caters to rapidly escalating hardware development occurring throughout tech, along with a growing Linux admin skills shortage. RHEL 9 performs the combo double act, in part, by more efficiently optimizing the operating system, according to Gunnar Hellekson (pictured), general manager of the Enterprise Linux Business Unit at Red Hat Inc. Upgrading to the new OS means enterprises can get by with fewer admins. A skills shortage is caused, in part, by a lack of U.S. visas.

These two Linux desktops are the simplest picks for new users

Let's face it, any time you come across articles that offer advice on choosing the right Linux distribution, they tend to get bogged down in a lot of technical advice that rarely (if ever) applies to those who've never experienced Linux. They'll speak of things like rolling releases, package managers, kernels, open-source licensing, and other features and ideologies that not only have little bearing on those new to Linux and open-source technology but mire the decision in unnecessary complications. I want to take a very different approach, one that should make the process quite simple for anyone looking to dive into the world of desktop Linux for the first time. I'm going to shrug off the usual advice and aim straight for the heart of the matter. What exactly is that matter? Read more

More on Tux Machines: About ● Gallery ● Forum ● Blogs ● Search ● News ● RSS Feed

Part of Bytes Media ● Sister sites below.

TechBytes Techrights button

Powered by Drupal, an open source content management system

Content available under CC-BY-SA CC

© by original authors

Powered by CentOS 6.5 (GNU/Linux), Varnish, and Drupal 6