Windows Central: “Mozilla says Firefox will evolve into an AI browser, and nobody is happy about it”

Every product we build must give people agency in how it works. Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable, says Enzor-Demeo. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off … Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.

Even with the confirmation that AI features will be optional, the internet is not pleased. Users online have expressed their disappointment in Mozilla focusing on AI features and capabilities. One post on X says This is a good example of how management doesn’t understand its own user base, which has amassed over 380K views so far.

Another post says I’ve never seen a company so astoundingly out of touch with the people who want to use its software, highlighting how a lot of people choose to use Firefox to get away from the AI obsession that other browsers such as Edge, Chrome, Opera, and Brave have endured over the last year.

Zac Bowden

I’ve been meaning to harp on Mozilla’s penchant for chasing the hype cycle of the broader tech landscape for the past decade or so, never quite managing to deliver a compelling addition to Firefox. Browsing through my posts, I was amused to rediscover the same plans for AI in Firefox from March 2024 – evidently nothing has moved forward yet, another sign of the terrible management at Mozilla. The potential silver lining I see here is that usually Mozilla joins the hype train late in the cycle when much of the enthusiasm has already drained away and people are looking for the next shiny mirage to sell to naive investors.

TechCrunch: “Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI”

Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and its Online Footprint Scrubber. Mozilla will also shut down Hubs, the 3D virtual world it launched back in 2018, and scale back its investment in its mozilla.social Mastodon instance. The layoffs will affect roughly 60 employees. Bloomberg previously reported the layoffs.

Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox”. To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.

Frederic Lardinois

It’s frankly astounding how much time and resources Mozilla has squandered over the years chasing the latest tech hype instead of investing in its one successful product. Public tech giants can easily afford various wasteful side-projects and course corrections, and examples abound: from Google’s countless aborted social media attempts and messaging products to the perpetually work-in-progress self-driving cars, to Meta’s exorbitant VR ambitions, and most recently, Apple’s failed electric car project. But a non-profit, existing at the goodwill of donors alone, should be more focused and disciplined. Who can forget the time when Mozilla attempted to build an entire mobile OS, a feat even Microsoft failed at?

TechCrunch: “LastPass says hackers stole customers’ password vaults”

Password manager giant LastPass has confirmed that cybercriminals stole its customers’ encrypted password vaults, which store its customers’ passwords and other secrets, in a data breach earlier this year.

In an updated blog post on its disclosure, LastPass CEO Karim Toubba said the intruders took a copy of a backup of customer vault data by using cloud storage keys stolen from a LastPass employee. The cache of customer password vaults is stored in a “proprietary binary format” that contains both unencrypted and encrypted vault data, but technical and security details of this proprietary format weren’t specified. The unencrypted data includes vault-stored web addresses. It’s not clear how recent the stolen backups are.

LastPass said customers’ password vaults are encrypted and can only be unlocked with the customers’ master password, which is only known to the customer. But the company warned that the cybercriminals behind the intrusion may attempt to use brute force to guess your master password and decrypt the copies of vault data they took.

Zack Whittaker

I have moved away from LastPass after they restricted free accounts to a single device type, either desktop or mobile. The string of hacks that followed and the company’s bad practices continue to reassure me that I have made the right choice. Nevertheless, I haven’t deleted my account or any of the stored data, so it might have been affected by this breach. I use a fairly strong master password on LastPass, but that’s no guarantee that the encryption won’t be cracked eventually. It might be time to go through all those passwords, update them for critical services, and eventually remove my LastPass account altogether.

Bloomberg: “A Startup wants to Rescue You from Browser Tab Hell”

Miller’s blandly named startup, the Browser Co. of New York Inc., has raised about $25 million from strategic investors such as Salesforce and big-name founder-CEOs including Stripe’s Patrick Collison and Zoom’s Eric Yuan to explore that possibility. This is the place where most people spend most of their time on their computers, but from a building-blocks level, the browser has not had a lot of brand-new thinking in a really long time, says Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, another investor.

The first thing a newcomer notices in Miller’s browser, called Arc, is the lack of menus or tabs across the top. Navigation tools have been pushed instead to a skinny side panel hugging the web page vertically. Users are prompted to tailor this panel to their day-to-day habits by creating spaces, say, for work or personal interests, each with its own distinct bookmarks and colors. Swiping will slide through these mini-libraries.

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Arc, by contrast, isn’t defending any other business. This stance means it’s not afraid to serve fewer (or any) ads. By extension, that leaves it more open to a fundamentally different environment. Arc comes with a built-in ad blocker and promises not to track users with cookies or log their search queries. It will be free upfront; the team is looking at developing premium subscription features for enterprise users, perhaps somewhere around $12 a month, echoing the freemium model of Slack Technologies Inc., Dropbox Inc., and other productivity services.

Austin Carr

Imagine writing an entire article about an experimental browser with vertical tabs and not mentioning once that Edge added this as an option more than a year ago…

24 Accessibility: “The Trials and Tribulations of the Title Attribute”

The title attribute gets a lot of flack. And largely the disdain towards the attribute is quite justified.

In June of 1993, twenty-four and a half years ago, title was proposed as part of the HTML 1.2 draft. It is primarily displayed as a native tooltip in desktop browsers, and revealed when a user mouse hovers over markup elements the title is set to. Because of this, it has been a universal usability challenge since its inception, as not all users have been consistently able to interact with it.

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If all of that weren’t enough, the guidance from the W3C HTML specification is pretty damning:

Relying on the title attribute is currently discouraged as many user agents do not expose the attribute in an accessible manner as required by this specification (e.g., requiring a pointing device such as a mouse to cause a tooltip to appear, which excludes keyboard-only users and touch-only users, such as anyone with a modern phone or tablet).

Scott O’Hara

An informative article, but the dismissive tone of the author towards a HTML attribute is misguided and reveals more about the state of web standards and development than the title attribute itself. In this particular case, a vicious cycle has been in effect from the start: most browsers never bothered to implement more accessible ways to reveal titles, so developers rarely used them, so browsers didn’t feel compelled to work on this feature, and so on. And when Internet Explorer 10 and later Microsoft Edge started displaying tooltips on focusable elements with titles during keyboard navigation, another common, but rarely acknowledged, bias in web development intervened: it’s almost fashionable to dismiss anything proposed or introduced by Microsoft, so no other browser considered following suit.

Ctrl blog: “Brave and Firefox to intercept links that force-open in Microsoft Edge”

Microsoft has inadvertently re-heated the web browser wars with the company’s anti-competitive changes to Windows 11. It made it more difficult to change the default web browser and has expanded the use of links that force-opens Edge instead of the default browser.

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So, how did we get here? Until the release of iOS version 14 in September 2020, you couldn’t change the default web browser on iPhones and iPads. Google has many apps for iOS, including a shell for its Chrome browser. To tie all its apps together, Google introduced a googlechrome: URL scheme in February 2014. It could use these links to direct you from its Search or Mail app and over to Chrome instead of Apple’s Safari browser.

These vendor-specific URL schemes were introduced to combat Apple’s anti-competitive behavior on its iOS platform. Microsoft just turned the racket on its head and changed more and more links in its operating system and apps to use its vendor-specific URL scheme. The original sin was Apple’s, but Microsoft is gulping the juice of the apple with gusto.

Daniel Aleksandersen

I haven’t paid much attention to the default browser controversy in Windows 11 since I use Edge as my default browser anyway, and have no intention of upgrading from Windows 10 anytime soon. But this bit of context is certainly illuminating: the primary culprit was Apple and its relentless drive to lock down iOS and prevent competition. Funny how rarely this connection is mentioned whenever the press criticizes Microsoft…

Vertical tabs in Microsoft Edge

Vertical tabs in web browsers have always seemed the kind of user interface idea that sounds good in theory, but never quite works out in practice. As most browser features, it started out years ago in Opera, until Opera abandoned its proprietary rendering engine and switched to Chromium. Firefox had several extensions for vertical tab placement, Chrome at some point experimented with a flag to enable them, but they never became a standard part of browser interfaces. Until, at least, Microsoft Edge started working on the concept, and launched a preview of vertical tabs late last year in the Dev channel. The feature has graduated to the Stable version of the browser earlier this month, so it should be currently available to all Edge users.

I have both the Dev and Stable versions installed, and I switched the Dev version to vertical tabs as soon as this was available, but I still browse predominantly in the stable version. I honestly did not expect to find vertical tabs this convenient and usable. Now that they are available in Stable Edge, I have them on most of the time. Having a visible button to switch back is extremely helpful, both to make the feature discoverable to users, and as a ‘safety net’, allowing people to quickly switch back to the familiar horizontal placement if they feel overwhelmed or annoyed by vertical tabs.