The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit arm of the Firefox browser maker Mozilla, has laid off 30% of its employees as the organization says it faces a “relentless onslaught of change.”

In 2023, a significant portion of Firefox downloads came from unknown sources. We believe many of them came from 3rd party websites that let you download Firefox. While some websites are okay, others can put you at risk of downloading an old version or a build with the wrong locale, leading to security risks, a bad user experience, or even malicious installations. Help the Firefox team to uncover this mystery by taking part in the Firefox 3rd-party installer campaign!

Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a trailblazer in privacy-preserving digital advertising. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla to help raise the bar for the advertising industry by ensuring user privacy while delivering effective advertising solutions.

About Anonym: Anonym was founded in 2022 by former Meta executives Brad Smallwood and Graham Mudd. The company was backed by Griffin Gaming Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Heracles Capital as well as a number of strategic individual investors.

In alignment with our commitment to an open and accessible internet, Mozilla will reinstate previously restricted listings in Russia. Our initial decision to temporarily restrict these listings was made while we considered the regulatory environment in Russia and the potential risk to our community and staff.

Over the past few months, we’ve been accelerating our ability to execute outstandingly, make faster decisions, and realize our multi-product ambitions. To help facilitate this, I’m excited to announce an organizational change within the product team. This change will enable us to better develop and scale products at different stages of development and maturity.

Today, we have multiple groups across various teams working on new ideas and emerging products: Fakespot, PXI, Mozilla Social, and the Innovation Ecosystems team, plus some newer emerging pods around new product design sprints and ideation. To simplify and accelerate this work, we are consolidating our emerging and seed product portfolios under a single umbrella, led by Adam Fishman, as our SVP of New Products, reporting directly to me.

By setting up Firefox as a standalone product organization, we will also be able to bring more focus to our continual efforts to improve the Firefox experience for everyone who uses it. Firefox is already a leader in foundational qualities like speed and privacy, and now we will be able to faster in developing solutions that bring more useful tools and more joyful experience to our users. Our recent announcement of new Firefox features is just the start, as we close in on Firefox’s 20th birthday in November.

I am really excited about these changes as they help us accelerate our path to a strong, multi-product future as we simultaneously expand on our investment in our flagship core product, Firefox.

Laura Chambers

CEO, Mozilla Corporation

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The nonprofit organization that supports the Firefox web browser said today it is winding down its new partnership with Onerep, an identity protection service recently bundled with Firefox that offers to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites. The move comes just days after a report by KrebsOnSecurity forced Onerep’s CEO to admit that he has founded dozens of people-search networks over the years.

The data privacy company Onerep.com bills itself as a Virginia-based service for helping people remove their personal information from almost 200 people-search websites. However, an investigation into the history of onerep.com finds this company is operating out of Belarus and Cyprus, and that its founder has launched dozens of people-search services over the years.

Today’s Speedometer release is more open and challenging than before and is the best tool for driving browser performance improvements.

Mozilla Firefox should gear up as an excellent option for power users and productivity enthusiasts with this feature.

I would be so happy if this feature makes it into Firefox this year

The only addons I've been finding are ones that block based on specific urls, domains, or a few glob patterns. I want to specify any regex.

Today marks a significant moment in our journey, and I am thrilled to share some important news with you. After much thoughtful consideration, I have decid

If you don't know about smart keywords, basically you can set phrases as shortcuts for specific bookmarks. I want a folder with all of my keywords synced, and that folder only. On each profile or account I have have whatever other folders and the placement of the folder with the keywords doesn't matter as long as they have the same name.

[Platform Tilt] tracks technical issues in major software platforms which disadvantage Firefox relative to the first-party browser. We consider aspects like security, stability, performance, and functionality, and propose changes to create a more level playing field.

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Question about Firefox's Add-On Facebook Container. I really appreciate the fact that Firefox works very hard for us to keep our privacy online. However, I've realized that the Facebook Container Extension Breaks a fair number of Websites, which tells me that Facebook Tracks something like 98% of all internet.

This morning I tried logging into the Mozilla Connect Website and I was surprised to see that the Facebook Container broke it also. I'm wondering one of two things: Either Mozilla now is using Facebook Trackers on their Website, or the Facebook Container Add-On has some bugs, and it breaks random Websites.

Anyone else come across similar issues? Is it in the realm of possibility that Mozilla actually uses Facebook Trackers on their Website themselves??

#firefox

I'm looking to create an "Exit Button" in the Bookmarks Toolbar. I found how to create a Restart Button (creating a Bookmark with the URL about:restartrequired), but I'm having a hard time finding for Exit (or close all Firefox Windows). Perhaps it is not possible, I don't know.

Any help is appreciated.

#firefox

A (fairly brief) interview with Mark Surman, Mozilla's president and executive director.

Is it a fair assessment? I'm still on Firefox. Why is it so hard for Firefox to gain traction?