Hacker News Reader

rebelwebmasteron Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox

It uses add-on gating similar to what they do for Web MIDI, so it's not exposed to users unless they specifically opt into it.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/05/web-serial-support-in-fire...

rebelwebmasteron How to make Firefox builds 17% faster

Obviously it'll make the developer more efficient to spend more time twiddling his thumbs waiting for his code to compile rather than creating a simple build performance win that allows him to, you know, spend more time improving Firefox. Not to mention all the other developers who stand to benefit from faster builds.

rebelwebmasteron 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

Can you share a link to a crash report from about:crashes? Sounds like some kind of shutdown hang getting force-killed maybe?

rebelwebmasteron Still using Firefox – but not because of its vision

It's available for testing in Nightly builds at the moment.

rebelwebmasteron FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs

Firefox also does a lot of media decoding in a separate process.

rebelwebmasteron Maintaining an Android app in Google Play Store is a lot of work

Google Play also limits APKs to 100MB maximum size while AABs have a higher limit.

rebelwebmasteron Google rolls back reCaptcha update to fix Firefox issues

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1894735#c15. It was code specifically targeting Firefox on Windows to blame.

rebelwebmasteron Mozilla Launching a Public Voice Dataset

Common Voice is part of the Mozilla Foundation, not the Mozilla Corporation responsible for shipping Firefox. I.e. what donations to Mozilla actually go towards.

rebelwebmasteron Firefox 109 Release Notes

Notably, MV3 extensions are now supported.

rebelwebmasteron The latest OpenSSL vulns were added fairly recently

Isn't openssl included in the oss-fuzz project? If hanno caught it this quickly with his fuzzer, would seem to be surprising if they didn't also.

rebelwebmasteron Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all users

Mozilla occasionally rolls out features in the current release via remote mechanisms. So it's rolling out to existing v101 installs now. I would assume that v102 will also ship with it on by default.

rebelwebmasteron Security Vulnerability in Tor Browser

Citation needed.

Also, they've specifically called that out in the advisory when they're aware of that being the case. See the last out-of-band security update they released for example:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2022-0...

rebelwebmasteron Security Vulnerability in Tor Browser

These are just the pwn2own vulnerabilities. Nowhere did Mozilla ever say they were being exploited in the wild.

rebelwebmasteron Firefox just walked away from a key piece of the open web [progressive web apps]

The article goes out of its way to quote a Google engineer but doesn't bother talking to anyone at Mozilla outside of quoting bug comments?

rebelwebmasteron Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

It was Cylance made by Blackberry.

rebelwebmasteron The Future of Libjpeg-Turbo

They received a MOSS grant once upon a time.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/04/10/mozilla-awards-3650...

That said, given Mozilla's current financial troubles, it seems pretty unlikely they'd be in a position to hire.

rebelwebmasteron Firefox 84.0

Looks like they've fixed the link now: https://blog.mozilla.org/community/2020/12/15/the-new-faces-...

rebelwebmasteron Zero-Days in Desktop Web Browsers

Firefox only uses Freetype on Linux (the system-installed version) and on Android, and the vulnerable code path was only reachable in Firefox with a non-default pref set (gfx.downloadable_fonts.keep_color_bitmaps).

rebelwebmasteron Dear Facebook: Withdraw Your Cease and Desist to NYU

This is coming from the Foundation (i.e. where the donations go), not the Corporation (which ships Firefox).

rebelwebmasteron Firefox 81.0

Looks like they're normally uploaded to Github, but the last release with them there is 80.1.2.

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/releases/

rebelwebmasteron Firefox 80

Incorrect, that was abandoned and pdf.js is very-much what's being used.

rebelwebmasteron Mozilla Lifeboat

If revenue from Firefox isn't enough to pay the bills anymore, then not funding R&D is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

rebelwebmasteron Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

Firefox Quantum was a pretty significant investment in Firefox. It made literally zero impact on their market share decline.

rebelwebmasteron Firefox Android: Camera remains active even when the phone is locked

Yes, the company that laid off 7% of its workforce back in January and still has people on edge about pay cuts and layoffs is secretly rolling in the NSA dough. Makes perfect sense.

rebelwebmasteron Flow browser passes the Acid tests

Web platform tests have overtaken them at this point.

rebelwebmasteron Firefox 76

Firefox ESR updates on the same frequency as the mainline release, they're just more limited in scope (i.e. mostly just security & stability fixes).

rebelwebmasteron Firefox is showing the way back to a world that’s private by default

Mozilla's own public data shows an ongoing decline in usage.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

rebelwebmasteron Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

Firefox switched to CoreAnimation in v70, which made a big difference.

https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/dramatically-red...

rebelwebmasteron Mozilla says a new Firefox security bug is under active attack

Looks like they've been updated now to mention that the fix was included in beta 2. I guess they're reading this thread :)

rebelwebmasteron No to Chrome

Google pays Mozilla Corporation to be the default search engine in Firefox. I wouldn't classify that as a donation, though.