Usama Jawad, writing for Neowin: Early last year, YouTube received a design refresh with Google's own Polymer library which enabled "quicker feature development" for the platform. Now, a Mozilla executive is claiming that Google has made YouTube slower on Edge and Firefox by using this framework. In a thread on Twitter, Mozilla's Technical Program Manager has stated that YouTube's Polymer redesign relies heavily on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API, which is only available in Chrome. This in turn makes the site around five times slower on competing browsers such as Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox. Further reading: Safari Users Unable to Play Newer 4K Video On YouTube in Native Resolution.

Mozilla's latest Nightly builds for Firefox now include an option to mute autoplaying audio. The feature was recently added to the Chrome browser, but Mozilla's update offers a few more options. According to Engadget, "You can turn the feature off entirely, force it to ask for permission, and make exceptions for specific sites." Keep in mind that these are nightly releases, so you will most likely run into some bugs. The "polished version" is likely weeks away.

An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat: It's been more than 20 months since our last browser benchmark battle, and we really wanted to avoid letting two years elapse before getting a fresh set of a results. Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge have all improved significantly over the past year and a half, and as I've argued before, the browser wars are back. You can click on the individual test to see the results:

SunSpider: Edge wins!
Octane: Chrome wins!
Kraken: Firefox wins!
JetStream: Edge wins!
MotionMark: Edge wins!
Speedometer: Chrome wins!
BaseMark: Chrome wins!
WebXPRT: Firefox wins!
HTML5Test: Chrome wins!

Chrome looks to be ahead of the pack according to these tests. That said, browser performance was solid across all three contestants, and it shouldn't be your only consideration when picking your preferred app for consuming internet content.
Chrome wins in four tests, beating Edge's three wins, and Firefox's two wins.

Security researchers have discovered a new malicious campaign that utilizes stolen D-Link certificates to sign malware. From a report: A lesser-known cyber-espionage group known as BlackTech was caught earlier this month using a stolen D-Link certificate to sign malware deployed in a recent campaign. "The exact same certificate had been used to sign [official] D-Link software; therefore, the certificate was likely stolen," says Anton Cherepanov, a security researcher for Slovak antivirus company ESET, and the one who discovered the stolen cert. Cherepanov says BlackTech operators used the stolen cert to sign two malware payloads -- the first is the PLEAD backdoor, while the second is a nondescript password stealer. According to a 2017 Trend Micro report, the BlackTech group has used the PLEAD malware in the past. Just like in previous attacks, the group's targets for these most recent attacks were again located in East Asia, particularly in Taiwan. The password stealer isn't anything special, being capable of extracting passwords from only four apps -- Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Outlook.

Web monoculture is well and truly alive when Google cannot be bothered to make a full-featured cross-browser mobile search page. From a report: It has been over five years since Firefox really turned a corner and started to morph from its bloated memory-munching ways into the lightning-quick browser it is today. Buried in Mozilla's issue tracker is a bug that kicked off in February 2014, and is yet to be resolved: Have Google treat Firefox for Android as a first-class citizen and serve up comparable content to what the search giant hands Chrome and Safari. After years of requests, meetings, and to and fro, it has hit a point where the developers of Firefox are experimenting by manipulating the user agent string in its nightly development builds to trick Google into thinking that Firefox Mobile is a Chrome browser. Not only does Google's search page degrade for Firefox on Android, but some new properties like Google Flights have occasionally taken to outright blocking of the browser.

sombragris writes: Stylish, a popular extension available for Chrome and Firefox which allows for easy customization of any website, now phones home and shares its users' browser history with its corporate parent, according to blogger Robert Heaton. This prompted Firefox to ban the extension from its addons site and prompt all users to disable it. The discussion can be seen in the relevant bug report. In Heaton's words:

Stylish is no longer a well-meaning product with your best interests at heart. If you use and like Stylish, please uninstall it and switch to an alternative like Stylus, an offshoot from the good old version of Stylish that works in much the same way, minus the spyware.

Google too has pulled the extension from its extension store. This is not the first time Stylish is at the centre of a privacy debacle

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: The release of Google Chrome 67 has reopened a "download bomb" bug that was exploited by tech support scammers last winter, and which had been fixed with the release of Chrome 65 in March 2018. Furthermore, the issue also appears to affect other browsers as well, such as Firefox, Vilvadi, Opera, and Brave, according to tests carried out by Bleeping Computer. The "download bomb" trick is a technique that involves initiating hundreds or thousands of downloads to freeze a browser on a specific page. Across the years, there have been multiple variations of download bombs, and they have often been used by tech support scammers to trap users on shady sites that tried to lure victims into calling a tech support number to have their browser unlocked. Over the winter, security researchers from Malwarebytes noticed a tech support scam campaign that employed a new "download bomb" technique to trap users on its shady sites.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google is turning startup investor to further its goal of putting Google services like search, maps, and its voice assistant front and center for the next billion internet users in emerging markets. It has invested $22 million into KaiOS, the company that has built an eponymous operating system for feature phones that packs a range of native apps and other smartphone-like services. As part of the investment, KaiOS will be working on integrating Google services like search, maps, YouTube and its voice assistant into more KaiOS devices, after initially announcing Google apps for KaiOS-powered Nokia phones earlier this year.

KaiOS is a U.S.-based project that started in 2017, built on the ashes of Mozilla's failed Firefox OS experiment, as a fork of the Linux codebase. Firefox OS was intended to be the basis of a new wave of HTML-5, low-cost smartphones. And while those devices and the wider ecosystem never really took off, KaiOS has fared significantly better. KaiOS powers phones made by OEMs including Nokia (HMD), Micromax and Alcatel, and it works with carriers including Sprint and AT&T -- it counts offices in North America, Europe and Asia. But its most significant deployment to date has been with India's Reliance Jio, the challenger telco that disrupted the Indian market with affordable 4G data packages. "This funding will help us fast-track development and global deployment of KaiOS-enabled smart feature phones, allowing us to connect the vast population that still cannot access the internet, especially in emerging markets," said KaiOS CEO Sebastien Codeville in a statement.

On Tuesday, Mozilla released Firefox 61, the newest version of its web browser for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android platforms. The release builds on Firefox Quantum, which the company calls "by far the biggest update since Firefox 1.0 in 2004." VentureBeat: Version 61 brings TLS 1.3, the ability to add custom search engines to the location bar, tab warming, retained display lists, WebExtension tab management, and the Accessibility Tools Inspector. Mozilla doesn't break out the exact numbers for Firefox, though the company does say "half a billion people around the world" use the browser. In other words, it's a major platform that web developers have to consider.

Troy Hunt, web security expert and creator of the website Have I Been Pwned (HIBP), wrote a blog post announcing his partnerships with Firefox and 1Password. For those unfamiliar with the site, Have I Been Pwned allows you to search across multiple data breaches to see if your email address has been compromised. The service is especially handy now that data breaches are becoming a daily occurrence. Hunt writes: Last November, there was much press about Mozilla integrating HIBP into Firefox. I was a bit surprised at the time as it was nothing more than their Breach Alerts feature which simply highlighted if the site being visited had previously been in a data breach (it draws this from the freely accessible breach API on HIBP). But the press picked up on some signals which indicated that in the long term, we had bigger plans than that and the whole thing got a heap of very positive attention. I ended up fielding a heap of media calls just on that one little feature - people loved the idea of HIBP in Firefox, even in a very simple form. As it turns out, we had much bigger plans and that's what I'm sharing here today. Over the coming weeks, Mozilla will begin trialling integration between HIBP and Firefox to make breach data searchable via a new tool called "Firefox Monitor." Here's what Hunt has to say about 1Password: As of now, you can search HIBP from directly within 1Password via the Watchtower feature in the web version of the product. This helps Watchtower become "mission control" for accounts and introduces the "Breach Report" feature. If you're a 1Password user you can use this feature right now, just head on over to the 1Password login page.

Catalin Cimpanu, reporting for BleepingComputer: Upcoming additions to the WebAssembly standard may render useless some of the mitigations put up at the browser level against Meltdown and Spectre attacks, according to John Bergbom, a security researcher at Forcepoint. WebAssembly (WA or Wasm) is a new technology that shipped last year and is currently supported within all major browsers, such as Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.

The technology is a compact binary language that a browser will convert into machine code and run it directly on the CPU. Browser makers created WebAssembly to improve the speed of delivery and performance of JavaScript code, but as a side effect, they also created a way for developers to port code from other high-level languages (such as C, C++, and others) into Wasm, and then run it inside a browser. All in all, the WebAssembly standard is viewed as a success in the web dev community, and there've been praises for it all around.

Another high-profile endorsement for Firefox -- this time from the lead consumer technology writer for The New York Times. (Alternate link here). The web has reached a new low. It has become an annoying, often toxic and occasionally unsafe place to hang out. More important, it has become an unfair trade: You give up your privacy online, and what you get in return are somewhat convenient services and hyper-targeted ads. That's why it may be time to try a different browser.

Remember Firefox...? About two years ago, six Mozilla employees were huddled around a bonfire one night in Santa Cruz, Calif., when they began discussing the state of web browsers. Eventually, they concluded there was a "crisis of confidence" in the web. "If they don't trust the web, they won't use the web," Mark Mayo, Mozilla's chief product officer, said in an interview.... After testing Firefox for the last three months, I found it to be on a par with Chrome in most categories. In the end, Firefox's thoughtful privacy features persuaded me to make the switch and make it my primary browser.
The Times cites privacy features like Firefox's "Facebook Container," which prevents Facebook from tracking you after you've left their site.

While both Chrome and Firefox have tough security (including sandboxing), Cooper Quintin, a security researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells the Times that Google "is fundamentally an advertising company, so it's unlikely that they will ever have a business interest in making Chrome more privacy friendly."

Exploit kits, once a preferred choice of attackers to invade a victim's browser and find way to their computer, are increasingly diminishing in their effectiveness. If you have an updated browser, chances are it packs adequate resources to fight such attacks. Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: Exploit kits (EK) have been around on the criminal underground for more than a decade and were once pretty advanced, often being a place where researchers found zero-days on a regular basis. But as browsers got more secure in recent years, exploit kits started to die out in 2016-2017. Most operators were arrested, moved to other things, and nobody developed new exploits to add to the arsenal of EK left on the market, which slowly began falling behind when it came to their effectiveness to infect new victims.

A Palo Alto Networks report published yesterday details statistics about the vulnerabilities used by current exploit kits in the first three months of the year (Q1 2018). According to the gathered data, researchers found 1,583 malicious URLs across 496 different domains, leading to landing pages (URLs) where an EK attempted to run exploits only for only a meager eight vulnerabilities. All eight were old and known bugs, with the newest dating back to 2016. Seven of the eight vulnerabilities targeted Internet Explorer, meaning that using a more modern browser like Chrome and Firefox is a simple, yet effective way of avoiding falling victim to exploit kits.

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: Pocket, which lets you save articles and videos you find around the web to consume later, now has a home inside Firefox as the engine powering recommendations to 50 million people a month. By analyzing the articles and videos people save into Pocket, [Pocket founder and CEO Nate] Weiner believes the company can show people the best of the web -- in a personalized way -- without building an all-knowing, Facebook-style profile of the user.

"We're testing this really cool personalization system within Firefox where it uses your browser history to target personalized [recommendations], but none of that data actually comes back to Pocket or Mozilla," Weiner said. "It all happens on the client, inside the browser itself. There is this notion today... I feel like you saw it in the Zuckerberg hearings. It was like, 'Oh, users. They will give us their data in return for a better experience.' That's the premise, right? And yes, you could do that. But we don't feel like that is the required premise. There are ways to build these things where you don't have to trade your life profile in order to actually get a good experience."

Pocket can analyze which articles and videos from around the web are being shared as well as which ones are being read and watched. Over time, that gives the company a good understanding of which links lead to high-quality content that users of either Pocket or Firefox might enjoy.
I use Firefox, but I don't use Pocket. Are there any Slashdot readers who want to share their experiences with read-it-later services, or thoughts about what Firefox is attempting?

jrepin writes: KDE unveils the final release of Plasma 5.13, the free and open-source desktop environment. Members of the Plasma team have focused on optimizing startup and minimizing memory usage. Plasma Browser Integration is a suite of new features which make Firefox, Chrome and Chromium-based browsers work with your desktop. For example, downloads are now displayed in the Plasma notification popup, and the Media Controls Plasmoid can mute and skip videos and music playing from within the browser. Browser tabs can be opened directly using KRunner via the Alt-Space keyboard shortcut. System Settings design has been improved further. Window manager gained much-improved effects for blur and desktop switching. Wayland work continued, with the return of window rules, and initial support for screencasts and desktop sharing. You can view the changelog here.

An anonymous reader quotes an associate technology editor at Fast Company's Co.Design: While the amount of data about me may not have caused harm in my life yet -- as far as I know -- I don't want to be the victim of monopolistic internet oligarchs as they continue to cash in on surveillance-based business models. What's a concerned citizen of the internet to do? Here's one no-brainer: Stop using Chrome and switch to Firefox... [W]hy should I continue to use the company's browser, which acts as literally the window through which I experience much of the internet, when its incentives -- to learn a lot about me so it can sell advertisements -- don't align with mine....?

Unlike Chrome, Firefox is run by Mozilla, a nonprofit organization that advocates for a "healthy" internet. Its mission is to help build an internet in an open-source manner that's accessible to everyone -- and where privacy and security are built in. Contrast that to Chrome's privacy policy, which states that it stores your browsing data locally unless you are signed in to your Google account, which enables the browser to send that information back to Google. The policy also states that Chrome allows third-party websites to access your IP address and any information that site has tracked using cookies. If you care about privacy at all, you should ditch the browser that supports a company using data to sell advertisements and enabling other companies to track your online movements for one that does not use your data at all.... Firefox protects you from being tracked by advertising networks across websites, which has the lovely side effect of making sites load faster...

Ultimately, Firefox's designers have the leeway to make these privacy-first decisions because Mozilla's motivations are fundamentally different from Google's. Mozilla is a nonprofit with a mission, and Google is a for-profit corporation with an advertising-based business model.. While Firefox and Chrome ultimately perform the same service, the browsers' developers approached their design in a radically different way because one organization has to serve a bottom line, and the other doesn't.
The article points out that ironically, Mozilla supports its developers partly with revenue from Google, which (along with other search engines) pays to be listed as one of the search engines available in Firefox's search bar.

"But because it relies on these agreements rather than gathering user data so it can sell advertisements, the Mozilla Corporation has a fundamentally different business model than Google."

The latest installment of Microsoft's browser battery challenge shows once again that Edge consumes less energy than Chrome and Firefox. From a report: With the Windows 10 April 2018 Update rolling out across the globe, Microsoft thinks it's once again time to square Edge up against Chrome and Firefox in a new battery-life test. Microsoft's browser experiment shows a time-lapse of "three identical devices, three different browsers, streaming one video." Firefox, Edge, and Chrome play what appears to be a Netflix video on three Surface Books. As usual, the Edge device lasts the longest, depleting the battery after 14 hours and 20 minutes. The Chrome device lasted 12 hours and 32 minutes, while the Firefox laptop ran out of steam after just seven hours and 15 minutes.

Today, Mozilla released Firefox 60 for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android, and with it arrives Web Authentication API for desktop browsers. From a report: Firefox 60 supports technology called Web Authentication, or WebAuthn for short, that can be used to grant you access to websites with a physical authentication device like a YubiKey dongle, biometric identity proof using an Android phone's fingerprint reader or the iPhone's Face ID, and some other alternatives to passwords.

Passwords are a particular problem on the web. Fake websites can coax you to type in credentials that then can be used to steal money from your bank account or snoop your email -- a problem called phishing. Even if you pick hard-to-guess passwords, never reuse them on multiple sites and always remember them, passwords still aren't that strong a foundation for security these days. We're still a long way away from a post-password future, but WebAuthn is an important step, if nothing else, in making sites more secure.

Amazon's product page for its new Echo Dot Kids Edition doesn't mention the words "privacy" or "data." Mozilla thinks it should. From a report: The e-commerce company last month introduced the new, child-friendly Echo device, powered by an Alexa voice assistant that was modified for kids ages 5 to 12. The $80 gadget becomes available Wednesday, along with new kid-friendly services called FreeTime on Alexa and FreeTime Unlimited on Alexa. Just ahead of those launches, Mozilla, the nonprofit behind the Firefox web browser and a growing political force in tech, on Monday said it spoke with Amazon directly about about the new device.

It asked Amazon to update the Echo Dot Kids Edition product page with specific information on how it uses children's data collected through the smart speaker. That way, parents shopping for the gadget could easily read Amazon's privacy information without having to dig around for it, Mozilla argued. Mozilla has already posted a petition on its website calling for these changes, but Ashley Boyd, Mozilla's vice president of advocacy, said in a statement Monday night that Mozilla is "heartened" that Amazon listened to its concerns. She added that Mozilla is pausing that petition while it continues to talk with Amazon.