Your web browser should never act as surveillance software. Unfortunately Google Chrome’s surveillance methods make it highly insecure by allowing trackers to follow you around the web. Over a recent week of Web surfing, I peered under the hood of Google Chrome and found it brought along a few thousand friends. Shopping, news and even government sites quietly tagged my browser to let ad...
When Facebook users learned last March about Facebook trackers and that the social media giant had given their sensitive information to political-data firm Cambridge Analytica, Mozilla (parent company of the security-focused browser Firefox) reacted fast: Within eight hours, the product team had built a browser extension called the Facebook Container. The plug-in, now the most popular browser extension Mozilla has ever built (1.5 million...
In numerous Mozilla bug tickets that were recently updated, Mozilla is getting closer to adding cryptomining and fingerprinting blocking to their Firefox browser. In May 2018 it was revealed that Mozilla was planning on blocking cryptominers and fingerprinters starting in Firefox 63. Firefox 63 has come and gone and now Firefox 65 is here, but unfortunately those features were never fully added to the browser. A series...
Mozilla is taking a bold stance against more insidious web advertising practices with an announcement today that its Firefox browser will soon block web trackers by default. The move, which will involve a series of updates over the course of the next few months, is among one of the most proactive approaches to protect consumer privacy that it’s ever employed. “Anyone who isn’t an...
Google is finally getting serious about blocking annoying autoplaying videos that start with the sound blaring. The next update to Chrome (version 66) will include changes to autoplay videos that mean the browser will only play them automatically if the sound isn’t playing by default, or if you click and interact with the site, or have previously “shown an interest in media on the...
Internet advertising firms are losing hundreds of millions of dollars following the introduction of a new privacy feature from Apple that prevents users from being tracked around the web. Advertising technology firm Criteo, one of the largest in the industry, says that the Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) feature for Safari, which holds 15% of the global browser market, is likely to cut its 2018...
Firefox Quantum is now available in Developer Edition, and this Firefox is fast. As a reader of the Hacks blog, you may be familiar with Project Quantum, our attempt to refactor, redesign, replace, and modernize the very core of Firefox. We’ve shipped many incremental improvements to Firefox in the past, but this release marks the first milestone where we believe Firefox fundamentally feels like...
There’s been a whole lot of talk about initial coin offerings (ICO), company fundraising events based around the sale of cryptocurrencies, but not much in the way of action until yesterday. That’s when web browser maker Brave, founded by former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, raised $35 million from its ICO — and it did it in less than 30 seconds, too. ICOs operate by selling...
Google is hosting its Chrome Dev Summit today. Rumors have it that Chrome has 2 billion active installs. Aside from that, there hasn’t been a lot of news out of the event. But one number that stood out in today’s keynote by Chrome Engineering VP Darin Fisher was that there are now 2 billion Chrome installs in active use across desktop and mobile. This...
With multi-process Firefox slowly rolling out to stable channel installations of the browser, further work is done on improving the feature for all Firefox users. Mozilla made the decision to roll out the new multi-process architecture with a single content process initially that is separated from the browser core. The company plans to change that by adding more processes to Firefox.The feature needs to...
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