Firefox Monitor will alert users if any of their accounts have been hacked

Mozilla, the creator of Firefox, announced earlier this year the Firefox Monitor. This service tells users if their online accounts were hacked.

	1 of 2

The Firefox Monitor

All the user need do is provide the Monitor with your email address. The Monitor uses the Have I Been Pwned database to show you if you need to worry and what data has been compromised if any has. Today Mozilla went further by letting you sign up to have alerts when your accounts appear in any known breaches. When it was initially launched the Firefox Monitor was considered an experimental service but now it is being recognized as an official service.

Even if none of your accounts have yet to be hacked you still will find the alert feature of the Monitor useful since the chances are that sooner or later your email address will show up in the database of breaches. When Mozilla first asked what they wanted in Monitor notifications about future breaches was of high importance on most users" lists.

The Monitor alert service is just one of several new data and privacy features that the organization plans to add over the next few months. Mozilla came up with a much revamped and revised Firefox 57 version last November as discussed in a Digital Journal article at the time.

The new version is faster than its rival Chrome.

Firefox announces that it will soon by default block any attempts at cross-site tracking

The move was announced in August and there are three parts to the strategy. First, in version 63 which is in the testing phase Firefox will block all slow-loading trackers. Ads are the biggest offender in this category. These are trackers that take more than five seconds to load.

When Firefox 65 rolls out the browser will strip out all cookies and block all storage access from third party trackers. Mozilla is also working on blocking cryptomining scrips and trackers that fingerprint users. The timing of these changes will depend upon how tests work out.

Nick Nguyen of Mozilla writes: “In the physical world, users wouldn’t expect hundreds of vendors to follow them from store to store, spying on the products they look at or purchase. Users have the same expectations of privacy on the web, and yet in reality, they are tracked wherever they go. Most web browsers fail to help users get the level of privacy they expect and deserve.”

You can try the new features by downloading and installing the unstable Firefox Nightly release. In the privacy settings you can find the new tracker blocking feature under the "Content Blocking". The browser explains how it all works. Safari users may find all this fuss about the new privacy features a bit boring since Apple already announced similar features for the browser last year.

Nguyen writes: “Blocking pop-up ads in the original Firefox release was the right move in 2004, because it didn’t just make Firefox users happier, it gave the advertising platforms of the time a reason to care about their users’ experience. In 2018, we hope that our efforts to empower our users will have the same effect."

Chrome still by far the leading browser

According to statcounter the recent market share of browsers puts Chrome far ahead with 59.67 percent while Safari the Apple browser has 14.5 percent. Third is UC with 6.28 and then FIrefox with 4.93. Opera has 3.5 and obsolete Internet Explorer still has 3.03 percent. Over the last year Chrome has been gaining over other browsers. The new Firefox so far does not seem to have gained many new users. With the privacy complaints about the most recent release of Chrome perhaps Firefox will do better.

Previously published in  Digital Journal

Mozilla, the group behind Firefox, are exploring a voice-activated browser

Mozilla, the free software group behind the browser Firefox is envisioning an entirely different browser that would be activated and operate by voice rather than keyboard, touch pad, mouse, or screen taps.

Scout

The non-profit organization revealed its plans as an agenda item at a meeting of employees. The project will be called Scout. A notice for the meeting said: "Hey Scout, read me the article about polar bears. With the Scout app, we start to explore browsing and consuming content with voice. This talk will discuss the architecture and key components needed for a voice platform, the required capabilities of those components and the challenges of working with the limitations and confines of existing platforms."

The first sentence was said by Mozilla to be an example of a sample command given to the browser. Mozilla also said that with the new browser the company was exploring browsing and consuming content with voice. The key to using voice in this fashion is Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Services such as Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple's Siri are all sounding more human. The new Google Duplex sounds exactly like a human — so much so that it will identify itself as a robot when making calls, as reported in a recent Digital Journal article.

The new voice browser may help Mozilla compete with Chrome

Mozilla's Firefox browser has been losing ground to the leader Chrome. Chrome now accounts for 58 percent of web usage compared to just five percent for Firefox, according to StatsCounter. A new voice browser would very well put Mozilla again in contention in the browser market.

The voice browser would be a boon for the blind or those with vision problems. Mozilla would not comment on Scout as it is an early stage project, but did say that its aim is to foster "an internet that includes all the peoples of the earth — where a person's demographic characteristics do not determine their online access, opportunities or quality of experience."

Mozilla did say: "We use our internal All Hands conference to come together so we can plan and build for the future. We look forward to discussing these efforts publicly when they are further developed."

Mozilla

Mozilla, now stylized as moz://a, is a free software group. It was founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports its products. It promotes free software and open standards but with some minor exceptions. Mozilla is funded by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary Mozilla Corporation.

Mozilla is best known for its Firefox browser. It also has the e-mail client Thunderbird. There is also a Firefox mobile operating system, the Bugzilla bug tracking system, a layout engine and other products.

Previously published in Digital Journal

New Firefox 57 Quantum browser may challenge champion Chrome

Mozilla released its new Firefox Quantum browser. The new Firefox 57 is much faster than an earlier Firefox browser, twice as fast. Mozilla promised the new browser would deliver a big bang and it does.

	1 of 2
In a speed test, the new Firefox 57 beat out Google Chrome the most popular browser at present.

Mozilla wants to keep the web open and competitive

Mozilla famously undermined the dominance Microsoft's Internet Explorer had over the browser field back in 2004. However its fortunes have sagged of late and Chrome has become dominant in the browser market. On phones and tablets Firefox has largely been sidelined.

David Smith an analyst at Gartner said: "Their mission is a good one and does keep pressure up to keep the web open." Gartner recommended that surfers use multiple modern browsers.

Mozilla wants to continue Firefox improvements

Mozilla undertook a complete overhaul of Firefox spending more than a year to achieve the new release. Firefox 57 represents an attempt to start fresh. This time around it will need to change to challenge the dominance of Chrome.

Mark Mayo senior vice president of Mozilla said: "We pulled ourselves up to and in some cases ahead of Chrome. We doubled the performance of Firefox this year. The tentative goal is can we double it again in 2018."

Firefox has a long way to go to catch Chrome

Once a person finds a browser that works for them, it may be difficult to persuade them to change. Microsoft, first with Internet Explorer and now with Edge, produces the default browser shipped with most computers with Windows operating systems. This was a huge advantage to Internet Explorer but Firefox was able to overcome this. Perhaps it can again as Chrome does not have that advantage.

According to a Cnet article Firefox has only a six percent share of the browser market while Chrome has 55 percent versus 15 percent for Apple's Safari.

If one just considers personal computers, Firefox still has just 13 percent to Chrome's 64 percent.

Trial versions released earlier have had a favorable response. Mayo said:"It's the biggest jump in sustained upswing in sentiment since I've been here." However, it remains to be seen whether this optimism is justified

Project Quantum overhauling FIrefox

Some improvements were released over the summer and perhaps helped stem the defections from Firefox. The Photon project changes tabs to rectangles and brings a new "page actions" menu within the address bar eliminating the need for a separate box to begin searches.

Another large part called Webender is due in early 2018.

Mayo said of the major overhaul: "Everything major we wanted to get in made it. ... It's almost certainly the biggest refactoring ever done in software engineering, at least in public. Seventy-five percent of the code base had to be touched. Almost five million lines of code were impacted."

There is also a new tool for taking screenshots and sharing them through Firefox.

The new Firefox is also described in another recent Digital Journal article. There may be some problems integrating the new Firefox with older extensions which will not be supported.

Yahoo search engine replaced by Google in U.S. and Canada

In spite of Google being a competitor with Chrome, Firefox has made Google the default search engine in the U.S. and Canada.

Denelle Dixon, Mozilla's Chief Business and Legal Officer said: "We exercised our contractual right to terminate our agreement with Yahoo based on a number of factors including doing what's best for our brand, our effort to provide quality web search, and the broader content experience for our users."

Outlook for the future

The new Quantum Render project should arrive with Firefox 59. This has just entered the testing stage. Render derives from Mozilla's experimental browser project called Servo.

The new Firefox architecture loads the part of websites you want first. Ads are a lower priority according to Mayo. There are many little speed boosts so that websites such as Facebook load faster.

Mayo touts Mozilla as the little guy taking on the giants: "What we've shown is you don't need to be one of the Frightful Five (Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook) to build software. People like that story. They want to believe it. At some level, everyone likes the David versus Goliath, little guy versus big guy thing."

The little guy needs to show a lot of browser users that there are good reasons to leave the Google giant Chrome.

To find out for yourself if Mayo's hype is justified, you can download the new Firefox 57 Quantum here.

Previously published in Digital Journal

New Firefox 57 due in November to challenge Chrome for top browser

 Mozilla Firefox or just Firefox was at one time the first choice of browser users back in December of 2009, challenging the dominance of Microsoft's venerable Internet Explorer.

Firefox's usage peaked at the end of 2009 with 32 percent of the browser market. It has now declined as its competitor Chrome kept rising and now dominates the market. Depending on who is doing the measuring, Firefox now has between 5.65 percent and 14 percent of worldwide usage as a desktop browser. Firefox runs not only on Windows but on Mac OS and Linux distributions as well.

Although Firefox was created as "Phoenix" by the Mozilla community it was first released as "Firefox" in November of 2004. Firefox is thought of as the spiritual successor of Netscape Navigator as the Mozilla community was created by Netscape in 1998 before they were taken over by AOL. In certain areas Firefox is still dominant. In Cuba it has 85.93 percent of the market. In Eritrea it has 79.3 percent of the market. Even in Germany it still enjoys 37.01 percent of the market.

Yet Firefox has fallen far behind as Chrome has long dominated with about 54 percent of the market now especially if one includes not just computers but phones and tablets. According to StatCounter Firefox has a mere 6 percent of the market. It obviously is not penetrating into the mobile field successfully.

Mozilla is now developing Firefox 57 a massive overhaul of the browser. As a cnet article describes the opening of a meeting revealing the new browser the traditional logo is gone: Gone was the blazing-orange fox snuggling a blue globe, the image that’s represented Mozilla’s scrappy browser since 2003. Instead, Firefox Senior Vice President Mark Mayo opened the event with a drawing of a fox in menacing mecha armor, named Mark 57 — the same way ever-improving Iron Man suits are named.

The new overhaul is due on November 14th ready for battle it is claimed. Mozilla hopes the new version will lure back those Firefox users who switched to Chrome since it came out in 2008. Of course, Microsoft would like to lure some Chrome users back to its new Edge browser. There are even annoying pop-up ads on Windows 10 touting its speed as compared to Chrome.

CEO of Mozilla Chris Beard claimed: “It’s going to add up to be a big bang. We’re going to win back a lot of people.” Yet Firefox 57 will have an uphill battle as Mozilla itself lost its co-founder, technical leader, and former CEO Brendan Eich who left Mozilla after a fight over gay marriage. Eich donated to a California organization opposed to gay marriage. Eich has a new browser Brave. The founder of Opera, also launched a new browser Vivaldi after leaving Opera when it changed hands.

Firefox's innovations and popularity have helped keep other browsers competitive. Mitchell Baker Mozilla's executive chair-woman and co-founder said: “There are people who make hardware, people who make software, people who make websites. They want to give you an experience that you like enough to pay for and to keep coming back, but they’re about running their business. They represent themselves. We like the browser because we can represent you.”

While a non-profit organization Mozilla is considering a possible membership plan that would make money. It is also counting on software beyond the browser, and financial growth. Mozilla wants a future where everyone is not dependent on Apples' app store, Google's search results, Facebook's news feed, and Amazon's Prime video streaming. Personally, I only use one of those four.

Some of the technical advances came through a special project called Quantum: One part, Stylo, accelerates formatting operations. Quantum Flow squashes dozens of small slowdown bugs. Quantum Compositor speeds website display. And Firefox 57 also will lay the groundwork for WebRender, which uses a computing device’s graphics chip to draw webpages on the screen faster.

Developers of Firefox 57 had speed as their top priority. In a browser test called Speedometer, Firefox performance has already jumped significantly apparently significantly enough to stem the steady stream of defections from Firefox to other browsers. The new browser will have a different look as well. Nick Nguyen, vice president of Firefox product said: “If Quantum is how we make Firefox faster, Photon is how users will know about it... a sleek and modern user experience, buttery-smooth animations and crisp interface elements for all resolutions.”

Some are skeptical about Mozilla's ability to take on Chrome. At the job recruiting service Glassdoor only 42 percent would recommend employment at Mozilla to their friends. The approval rating for CEO Beard who has been there for 3 years is just 28 percent. Even Trump fares better. However, Beard claims that Firefox is stable and poised for growth.

Mozilla has been active on such issues as net neutrality which it promotes and lobbies for. It has a team of 8 people who spend all their time lobbying politicians. Mozilla mounted a petition of more than 42,000 signatures defending net neutrality. Mozilla is also lobbying against government efforts to weaken privacy-protection encryption. It even spoke out against Trump's immigration ban efforts.

While the new Firefox is aimed at challenging Chrome there are many other competitors who may also come up with their own challenges to the leader. Microsoft is vigorously promoting Edge. Safari is still the browser of choice for Mac users. Opera has been around for ages and though its usage at present is only a small percentage it is under new management and has had some good reviews as has the new Vivaldi. As the appended video shows, the Firefox 57 is a bit behind Chrome 57 already, at least it is released later.

Chrome leads by far in global browser usage

The Chrome browser dominates over all others in terms of its usage on the Internet. However, the measurement of usage is complicated and there can be some measures that overestimate the usage of a browser and others that underestimate usage.

The problems involved in measurement are discussed in this Wikipedia article. The figures given by this site are for desktops only this year so far: Chrome, 58.91 percent; Internet Explorer, 18.19 percent; Firefox, 11.91 percent; Microsoft's new Edge, 5.6 percent; Apple's Safari, 3.52 percent; Opera 1.22 percent. There are a few others under one percent. Microsoft is having trouble pushing its new browser Edge as many users prefer to stay with the older Internet Explorer even though its usage is going down over time. Edge can be used only on Windows whereas other browsers such as Chrome, Opera, and Firefox can be used on other operating systems.

Statcounter share figures for July this year for browsers in all devices shows: Chrome, 54.3 percent; Safari, 14.15 percent; UC browser, 8.57 percent; Firefox, 5.73 percent; Opera 3.98 percent; Internet Explorer, 3.74 percent; Samsung Internet, 3.53 percent; Android, 2.47 percent; Edge 1.74 percent and others 1.7 percent. The UC browser has many users in Asia and Africa. It has had problems with security but apparently many have been solved. It will work with Windows but is more often on mobile devices.

The usage for desktop browsers of July of this year for three different measuring sources are as follows. NetMarketShare gives Chrome, 59.57 percent of the market far ahead of anyone else. Next is Microsoft's venerable Internet Explorer(IE) still at 16.5 percent. Firefox had 12.32 percent. Apple's Safari had 3.66 percent while the new Microsoft Edge had 5.65 percent far behind IE. Many businesses are staying with IE and Microsoft is still providing updates etc.

StatCounter has rather different results for July this year. Chrome is still in first place with 63.48 percent of the market above that claimed by NetMarketShare. Internet Explorer is far lower at just 9.03 percent. Firefox is rated at 13.82 percent well above IE. Apple's Safari has 5.04 percent more than Microsoft's new Edge at only 3.95 percent. Others is fairly substantial at 4.68 percent and would include Opera.

W3Counter also has somewhat different figures. It gives Chrome the highest rating of all at 64 percent. IE receives its lowest rating at just 5.4 percent. Firefox too receives its lowest rating at a mere 6.9 percent of the market. Safari gets its highest rating of 13.6 percent while the new Edge also fares its worst at just 2.6 percent. Others were 3.2 percent. In spite of the differences between the 3 raters, all agree that Chrome is the undisputed leader.

When it comes to operating system use globally by desktops, Windows continues to dominate with 84.48 percent of the market in July of 2017. Apple's OS X comes next with 11.3 percent, Linux had 1.79 percent, Chrome OS just 0.46 percent and 1.97 percent were unknown. In spite of the dominance of Windows operating systems, many users prefer other browsers than IE and Edge that come with Windows systems. As the appended video shows there are at least half a dozen different browsers worth considering with several of them not even registering on the statistics for browser use. They are all free so it is worth trying them out to see if they meet your needs.

Long-surviving Opera browser deserves a better market share

From time to time I look at statistics related to my blogs. Today I looked at browser percentage of page views on one of my blogs. Opera was over 40 percent. Over a longer period it runs at about one or two percent.

The statistic does not mean much. Maybe one person using Opera simply read a number of pages, but it piqued my curiosity about the Opera browser and led to my decision to write a short article on it. As compared to other browsers Opera is at present in fifth place on desktops with Chrome being the most popular according to most surveys, with venerable Internet Explorer in second, closely followed by Firefox, the Apple operating system in fourth and then Opera.
 As this article points out calculating the share of the market for each browser is difficult to estimate. Methods used give different results. However, the four different estimates shown here are not that different, except for one company that has Internet Explorer much more popular than any of the other three companies that made estimates. Three out of four estimates have Chrome as the top browser with the highest measurement being almost half 48.7 percent market share earlier in June this year. Opera's share estimate ranges from 1 to 3.2 percent. Opera itself claims to have more than 350 million users globally. However, many of these users are on mobile, 276 million of them as of August this year. Opera not only will operate on many mobile devices but will operate on Apple and Linux operating systems.
 The popularity of browsers varies from one country to the next. In Belarus, Opera is actually the most popular browser. Opera is the second oldest web browser and was launched in 1996 by Norwegian techies in competition with the big guns then — Internet Explorer by Microsoft and Netscape. Explorer later became dominant as it was bundled with computers that run Windows. Safari was bundled with Apple computers. The Chrome browser has the advantage of being integrated with Google. Finally Firefox was popular because it is open source and has a huge array of community-made add-ons. Opera could offer only special features and speed.
 The attraction of Opera in Belarus is that it has special features that allowed users to strip out images and other items that used up a lot of bandwidth. The state monopoly service provider charged hefty fees for use of the Internet. Opera allowed users to save money. Opera was also a leader in encryption another feature attractive to users in Belarus. The situation in Belarus has vastly improved in terms of cost. In 2009 a 1 Mbps connection cost about $45 dollars a month and the average salary was about $342 a month. This year the cost for the same plan is about $7 and the monthly salary average is $470, but Opera continues to be the most popular browser even though there is less concern about cost. Probably this shows that people use web browsers they are used to.
 In my own experience, I used Internet Explorer for years simply because it was the browser that came with computers I purchased. From time to time I would hear of people who used Firefox claiming it was much better. However, why bother changing when what you are using and comfortable with is working. I finally did try Firefox and then Chrome. I now use Firefox and its totally open source clone Ice Weasel on all my computers. I just found it easier to use the same browser no matter what computer I am on. Years ago I did try Opera but did not adopt it because it had compatibility issues with a few websites. However, perhaps I will try out Opera again.
 The review of Opera here is quite positive. Another article claims that Opera should have a larger market share and explains why it does not:
 On paper, Opera should have a massive market share – It’s updated regularly, fast, secure, customizable, introduces lots of new features first, and looks great. It’s also an absolute pleasure to use. So why does it only have a market share of 2.4%? To me, it looks like a matter of branding. Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome are products from Microsoft, Apple and Google respectively, and Firefox has built up a great reputation over a long time. Opera, however, does not have a massive corporation behind it, nor does it have Firefox’s levels of marketing. No matter what the reason really is, you shouldn’t let Opera’s low market share discourage you from giving it a shot.

Internet Explorer still number one but in decline

 Many analysts think that eventually Mozilla's Firefox browser might one day overtake the long time leader Internet Explorer. However according to data from Stats Counter Chrome is now in second place but another company's data still have Firefox in the second position. Both companies show Internet Explorer in decline. The article with graphs can be found here
    The Stats Counter figures show Internet Explorer (IE) declining from 46 % to begin 2011 to 38.65 per cent at the end. This is barely 11 per cent above Google Chrome. Chrome went from 15.68 per cent at the start of 2011 to 27.27 at the end. Firefox also declined from 30.68 per cent to 25.27 per cent.
    The numbers at NetMarketShare were rather different. According to their figures IE went from 56 per cent to 47.76 per cent. Firefox went from 22.75 per cent to 20.09 per cent. Chrome as in Stats Counter figures showed a sharp increase from 10.7 per cent to 17.58 per cent.
   Given the trends in both sets of figures it would seem that Chrome could threaten IE's long held first place position. We have three computers. On two we use Chrome and on one IE. I have tried to use Firefox on this Acer computer with Vista and it refused to install properly every time I downloaded it. People I know who use it say that it is an excellent browser. IE is on an old laptop computer with XP that I just bought and use  to play stuff on the TV from the Internet. It seems improved from earlier versions that led me to adopt  Chrome.
  Statistics are kept on my blogs about the browsers used by people who visit. IE is almost always at the top and Firefox next. Chrome is usually third but at times Opera takes third place. The Apple Safari system is usually behind Opera. Several people also use the museum piece Netscape which has long been abandoned by everyone else! Perhaps odd people read my blogs!
    In operating systems according to my blog statistics Microsoft Windows systems run at about 90 per cent with Linux next and then the Apple system. More mobile phone and tablet systems are appearing such as Android.