Pinboard (guardiantech)

Mozilla to sell ultra-low-cost smartphones in India soon >> Total Telecom

guardiantech — 2014-06-11T11:44:02+00:00

Mozilla plans to bring what it describes as ultra-low-cost smartphones to India in the near future. The operating system provider on Tuesday said it has partnered with Indian device makers Intex and Spice to enable it to launch the first Firefox OS devices in the country "in the next few months". A statement from the company suggests the phones will be based on the chipset solution Mozilla has developed with Spreadtrum. In February the two companies announced they were working together to create a chipset that would power smartphones costing less than $25. That ultra-low-cost solution is now available, Mozilla said.

The right market to go for (India is giant, Nokia is fading, and people want something new) but will it be in time to compete with Android/AOSP phones from local and foreign names?

To Serve Users >> Hacking for Christ

guardiantech — 2014-05-15T18:54:50+00:00

Gervase Markham of Mozilla on the DRM-in-Firefox row:

we think our stance has worked rather well; over the years, the Mozilla project has been a force for good on the web that other organizations, for whatever reason, have not managed to be. But we aren’t invincible – we don’t win every time. We didn’t win on H.264, although the deal with Cisco to drive the cost of support to $0 everywhere at least allowed us to live to fight another day. And we haven’t, yet, managed to find a way to win on DRM. The question is: is software DRM on the desktop the issue we should die on a hill over? We don’t think so. Bradley accuses us of selling out on our principles regarding preserving the open web. But making a DRM-free web is not within our power at the moment. Our choice is not between “DRM on the web” and “no DRM on the web”, it’s between “allow users to watch DRMed videos” and “prevent users from watching DRMed videos”. And we think the latter is a long-term losing strategy, not just for the fight on DRM (if Firefox didn’t exist, would our chances of a DRM-free web be greater?), but for all the other things Mozilla is working for.

Reasoned debate in the comments too.

Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and W3C EME >> Mozilla Hacks blog

guardiantech — 2014-05-14T21:17:53+00:00

Andreas Gal:

Instead of DRM schemes that limit how users can access content they purchased across devices we have long advocated for more modern approaches to managing content distribution such as watermarking. Watermarking works by tagging the media stream with the user’s identity. This discourages copyright infringement without interfering with lawful sharing of content, for example between different devices of the same user. Mozilla would have preferred to see the content industry move away from locking content to a specific device (so called node-locking), and worked to provide alternatives. Instead, this approach has now been enshrined in the W3C EME specification.

Firefox and Flux: a new, beautiful browser is coming >> DO NOT LICK

guardiantech — 2014-04-29T20:43:24+00:00

This new Firefox, Firefox 29, was borne out of a series of incredible, detail-obsessed designers and engineers understanding that taking products from good to great requires more than a series of incremental improvements. Good can be achieved through incrementalism. Great requires, at times, overhaul. Firefox 29 contains extensive improvements that were planned back when Alex Faaborg, Madhava Enros, and myself were the only designers at Mozilla. Back then, Firefox was beginning to buckle under the weight of its inconsistent code and interface. It’s common enough for large codebases maintained across years to develop inconsistencies. But, Firefox’s nature as an open-source community project contributed to idiosyncratic user experiences. Menus and dialogs used different tenses and tones. Add-ons behaved unpredictably. Customisation was handled differently throughout the browser. Over the past few years, we’ve been working to improve many instances of inconsistent behaviour, such as replacing modal dialogs for tab-modal ones, standardising notifications, and using a uniform tone-of-voice. Making improvements here and there is often what user experience designers at an organisation are expected to do: fix what’s broken, slightly improve what isn’t, and generally don’t get in the way of engineering effort. But, this method can only make an existing product slightly better, and the gaps it causes reveal themselves in time. A sinking ship can’t be patched endlessly when it needs a new hull. This is when user experience design is most effective: when it envisions the system as a whole. When it steps away from the trees and sees the forest holistically. Firefox needed a new hull, and the bulk of that hull is arriving on Tuesday.

Botnet enlists Firefox users to hack websites >> Krebs on Security

guardiantech — 2013-12-16T22:14:09+00:00

Brian Krebs:

An unusual botnet that has ensnared more than 12,500 systems disguises itself as a legitimate add-on for Mozilla Firefox and forces infected PCs to scour Web sites for security vulnerabilities, an investigation by KrebsOnSecurity has discovered.
The botnet, dubbed “Advanced Power” by its operators, appears to have been quietly working since at least May 2013. It’s not clear yet how the initial infection is being spread, but the malware enslaves PCs in a botnet that conducts SQL injection attacks on virtually any Web sites visited by the victim.

Not so much "enlists" as "press-gangs".

(Re)building a simplified Firefox logo >> Reticulating Splines

guardiantech — 2013-06-30T21:57:01+00:00

Sean Martell:

Today we are excited to announce a visual evolution of our Firefox brand that will better fit its extended usage beyond that of a desktop web browser.

Can one say that it's flatter?

Firefox to follow Safari, start blocking cookies from third-party advertisers >> The Verge

guardiantech — 2013-03-12T18:15:11+00:00

Firefox is set to start blocking cookies from third-party ad networks by default, thanks to a patch submitted by Stanford law student and online privacy activist Jonathan Mayer. The patch is slated for distribution in release 22 of the popular browser, and mimics the behavior of Apple’s Safari, allowing sites that you’ve actually visited (first parties) to set cookies on your system, but blocking cookies from third parties like advertising networks unless they already have one on your machine. Firefox already supports the Do Not Track header, which has the effect of asking advertisers not to track your browsing around the web, but Mayer’s patch goes a step further, adding a default setting that refuses unwelcome third-party cookies altogether.

This is about three weeks old, but it might be significant. Meyer is the person who spotted that Google was hacking around Safari's protections against cookies - which landed Google in hot water with the FTC.

Firefox Mobile >> Benedict Evans

guardiantech — 2013-02-25T21:34:08+00:00

Amongst many other things, today I went to the Firefox stand at MWC. It was very full of excited people talking about their new venture with some of the leading mobile operators to launch a new phone OS, aimed at the tier just below 'real' smartphones. There was much talk of openness and other ideologically correct things, and none at all about any consumer benefits. I did hear someone from Mozilla say that 'Firefox is a great consumer brand', though, which is a pretty questionable claim: the target consumers would be pushed to name ANY browser, let alone Firefox. There is a reference phone from ZTE (and also one from Alcatel I haven't seen yet): the software is slow and not especially elegant, and the device is targeted to cost $100.
50 yards away there is a half-empty stand from Haier, a second-tier Chinese OEM. Their W619 is a 2G android smartphone running Android 4, with 2 SIM slots, a 3.5" screen and an MTK chipset. It is very solid and the UI is perfectly fluid. The wholesale price is $50: 3G versions are $75.

Quite a punchline too.

Firefox killing 64-bit version on Windows >> Firefox Google Groups

guardiantech — 2012-11-24T23:42:51+00:00

* Amazingly, there is still the perception by some Windows Nightly users that the 64-bit MSVC builds are faster than their 32-bit counterparts [8], whereas even before the recent regressions that was not the case [5] [6].
* Users of 64-bit versions of Windows may be under the impression that 64-bit builds of Nightly are somehow "more correct" for their platform, especially since http://nightly.mozilla.org displays 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Nightly builds with equal prominence and no indication that the 64-bit builds are experimental/effectively untested.
* Whilst there was a thorough discussion of the Win64 pros/cons [9], a follow-up summary of facts [10], and internally most of us know that Win64 builds aren't something that we'll be focusing on near-term - there doesn't appear to have been any public newsgroup/blog postings communicating the final decision. So it's not surprising that the average Nightly user is not aware that Win64 builds are pretty much unsuited for public consumption.

Upshot: Mozilla is killing 64-bit Firefox on Windows. But the people who've been using it in nightly builds are horrified and outraged.

In Russia, Yandex gets ousted as default search option in Firefox >> The Next Web

guardiantech — 2012-06-10T20:48:18+00:00

The commercial agreement between Mozilla and Yandex is notably set to expire on the 31st of December 2012, which begs the question: why was Yandex ousted in favor of Google in the most recent Russian-language Firefox browser build way before that date?
For the record, Mozilla wasn’t contractually bound to keep Yandex as the default search option in the Russian Firefox build – but still, why the change?

The Firefox change was done as a bugfix. Neat.

Do Not Track: It’s the user’s voice that matters >> Mozilla Privacy Blog

guardiantech — 2012-06-01T21:25:58+00:00

Following Microsoft's announcement that IE10 will enable "Do Not Track" (of users by third-party cookies) by default, Mozilla's privacy officers speak up:

There are three different signals to consider in broadcasting the user’s preferences for tracking:
User says they accept tracking; User says they reject tracking; User hasn’t chosen anything
Firefox defaults to state 3: we don’t know what the user wants, so we’re not sending any signals to servers.

Which is the equivalent default of state 2, that the user accepts tracking. See if you can think of a company which pays Firefox to be its default search engine, and might benefit from tracking being enabled.

Browsing behavior in February: Internet Explorer and Chrome down, Firefox up >> Ars Technica

guardiantech — 2012-03-15T22:53:11+00:00

This means that Firefox is retaining a slender lead over Google's browser. Last month we speculated that the halt in Chrome's growth might be related to Google's decision to penalize Chrome's positioning in its search results due to an advertising campaign that contravened Google's rules. The sixty day penalty will expire in the next few days, restoring Chrome's prominent positioning in Google searches.

Get your diaries out and watch for those Chrome ads.

Hardware-accelerated audio/video decoding in Gecko (bug 714408) - mozilla.dev.platform >> Mozilla mailing list

guardiantech — 2012-03-12T23:35:17+00:00

Andreas Gal is one of the Mozilla team leaders:

I want to land bug 714408 on mozilla-central as soon as I get review for it. It adds hardware-accelerated audio/video decoding support to Gecko using system decoders already present on the system. Android, for example, ships by default with a number of decoders, and in particular for such mobile devices we really have to use these hardware-accelerated decoders for good battery life (and performance).

Looks innocuous; in fact, it's the Firefox team caving in and using system decoders for H.264 and AAC and MP3 (patent-encumbered all), and essentially admitting that the open source WebM video codec is not going to get any traction on the web. Those with long(ish) memories may recall which company said it would drop H.264 support from its browser - but so far hasn't. Read the whole thing; fascinating.

Interactive demo: how sites track you across the net >> Collusion

guardiantech — 2012-03-02T17:07:14+00:00

HTML5 demo showing how you get tracked by cookies across various sites. Available as a downloadable add-on for Firefox. More than a little creepy:

If you haven't realized it yet, companies are tracking you across most of the sites you visit daily on the web. It's quite likely that these companies know more about you than your government. Some of them might even know more about you than your best friends.

Mozilla and Google Sign New Agreement for Default Search in Firefox | The Mozilla Blog

guardiantech — 2011-12-23T00:02:13+00:00

"'We’re pleased to announce that we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google. This new agreement extends our long term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years.' “'Under this multi-year agreement, Google Search will continue to be the default search provider for hundreds of millions of Firefox users around the world,' said Gary Kovacs, CEO, Mozilla." The report by Kara Swisher suggests Google will pay $300m per year to Mozilla. That's a big increase on the last contract. And Google beat Yahoo and Microsoft to it. There's still life and rivalry in web search

Yes, Firefox is chewing up your memory (but is getting fixed) >> Mozilla bugs

guardiantech — 2011-07-05T06:09:03+00:00

Email thread from the Bugzilla dev list showing that (on OSX at least) Firefox swallows memory and won't release it in an orderly fashion. Happily, a fix is in the works, and should go through very soon.

Fake Firefox warnings lead to scareware >> Naked Security

guardiantech — 2011-05-31T12:21:59+00:00

"While most of the talk for the past month has been [scareware scammers'] move to Mac with fake Finder pop-ups that appear to scan your computer, they haven't stopped innovating on Windows either.
"Their latest scam? They detect your user-agent string from your web browser and display a fake Firefox security alert if you are using the Mozilla Firefox web browser."

Why We Need Firefox >> Open Enterprise

guardiantech — 2011-05-06T17:13:18+00:00

Mozilla gets bolshy when the Feds come calling.

No, Microsoft didn't rush IE 9 into Windows Update >> ZDNet

guardiantech — 2011-04-13T05:48:29+00:00

"Did Microsoft really rush Internet Explorer 9 into Windows Update in a desperate move to catch up with Firefox?
"Sorry, conspiracy theorists, but the answer is an emphatic no."