Firefox 160 is out with “Mini Window” and other improvements

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Mozilla releases a new stable version of its Firefox web browser every two weeks. One benefit of the accelerated release cycle is that new features are put into the hands of users much quicker than before.

While that is welcome to a degree, it remains to be seen if the accelerated pace affects the build quality.

Firefox 160 is a new major version that includes a few noteworthy changes, some of which were revealed by Mozilla last month already.

The standout feature is called Mini Window. It takes a book out of the Picture-in-Picture feature of the browser and generalizes the purpose. Instead of providing controls for media, Mini Window is a small overlay window that can display any web content.

Think of a currency converter tool, a translation tool, AI chat, or anything else that fits into a smaller window on the screen. Not every Firefox users needs it. If you have plenty of monitor space or even a multi-monitor setup, you probably don’t need the feature.

However, if you work on a small display at times, you may not be able to display multiple browser windows on the screen at the same time. That’s were Mini Window comes into play. It sits on top of a regular browser window acting completely independent of it.

You launch a new Mini Window by right-clicking on an open tab in Firefox and selecting Move Tab > Move to Mini Window. The tab is loaded in a separate smaller window, which you can resize and move around as you see fit. Note that you need at least two open tabs in the browser and that there is no pin option at the time. In other words, you can’t move both windows together at the moment, which means that you may need to adjust their location manually when moving one of the windows.

The new stable version includes other changes. Here is an overview of important ones. You can check the release notes for the full list:

  • Picture-in-Picture mode supports changing the playback speed now directly.
  • Web pages saved to PDF make MathML content accessible to assistive technologies now.
  • Websites that repeatedly prompt you to make them the default handler of email and other links can be blocked with a new “never allow” option.
  • Firefox now plays Matroska (MKV) files with FLAC, MP3, or PCM audio.
  • WebGL content on Apple devices may be rendered with improved performance.
  • Security updates.

Will be in Hong Kong and Macau until November 14th

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Just a quick reminder that I will be flying to Hong Kong tomorrow to spend a few days there and in the neighboring Macau (no gambling though).

While I’m not really fond of long flights, many of the regions and cities that I’m interested in are unfortunately far away.

If everything works well, I may eat my first Pastel de Nata and bowl with Dim Sum just after landing on November 4th.

Always wanted to visit Hong Kong. Remember quite a few old movies — like Mad Mission — that play in the city, will certainly be an interesting trip.

Anyway, everything will go back to normal on November 14th.

Reddit to become a locked-down platform

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Things are changing once again at Reddit, and again not for the better. Reddit CEO revealed plans to limit what guests can see when they open the website or use other means of access.

Huffman’s post is terribly vague, except for the benefits that Reddit customers will see when using an account. According to the post, it is to give users “the best version of Reddit” through personalization and to protect the business and meet regulations.

While part of Reddit’s user base may agree that personalization is helpful, guests who accessed the site without issues before may beg to differ. The point is, there is room for personalization without blocking anyone from accessing the site as a guest. This approach takes away choice from visitors of the site and it may very well be another nail in its coffin.

Furthermore, Reddit requires an account already for certain site content. Access to any page with mature content is, for example, blocked and the only two options are to leave it or log in.

What Huffman does not mention is that guest access is not as lucrative as traffic from members of the site. Sure, most of scraping happens without sign-ins according to the post, but there may be options to prevent much of that through other means. Rate-limiting access is one option, for example, or keeping a block list of sorts.

Reddit may be fighting a battle here that it can’t win. By locking down the site for the most part, likely copying a page out of X’s book in offering snippets of published content only, it will annoy a portion of guest users who visit the site.

It is too early to say how many will sign up for an account and how many will put Reddit on their “never visit again” list. Still, with AI rising in popularity and Reddit becoming less of a place that is welcoming to everyone, it is possible that the site won’t do so well anymore in the future.

There is also links from websites to consider. Will Reddit receive less links from sites, because visitors may not really access the content published on Reddit when they follow it?

Mozilla revealed six Firefox features it is working on

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

If you are a Firefox user or keeping an eye on the more-or-less only competition to Chromium-based browsers, then you may be interested in features that are coming to the browser soon.

Mozilla has published an updated roadmap that reveals some of the main features the engineering team is working on: from a mini-window that works similarly to picture-in-picture to offline mode for Android and faster access to controls to clear browsing data.

Here is an overview of the six features that Mozilla highlighted:

  • Mini window lets users detach a small window to display a tab or part of a page in a floating window. The idea is similar to Picture-in-Picture mode: have some information visible all the time while using the main Firefox window at the same time.
  • Offline mode for Android allows users to save articles. The saved articles can be read then even when there is no connectivity.
  • Listen to pages. Firefox will soon be able to read content on desktop and on Android.
  • Turn speech into text. Furthermore, speech recognition is coming to desktop Firefox. Websites may use voice input and captions without sending audio to remote servers. Transcriptions will also work offline, provided the speech recognition model has been downloaded.
  • VPN may work different on sites. Instead of setting up the free browser proxy once and have its settings apply to all sites, Firefox users may customize the functionality on a per-site basis. Mozilla has not revealed how that works or what type of customizations the feature will offer.
  • Direct access to clearing data. The clear browsing data button of the private browsing window comes to the regular window. It enables you to clear data quickly without having to go anywhere.

What is your take on these new features? Something there for you? Feel free to leave a comment down below.

Firefox 159.0 is out: the two-week development cycle begins to show

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Mozilla released Firefox 159.0 a moment ago. The new stable version of the open source browser introduces just a few new features, fixes bugs and also security issues.

Mozilla highlights two new features in the official release notes. The first adds the /watch command to Smart Window, the optional AI feature of the Firefox browser. This enables watching webpages for changes. The second change enables the native macOS share picker on devices running the operating system.

Other than that, Mozilla lists mostly fixes for issues in the release notes. Notable is a fix for excessive memory use in Firefox for Linux on devices with AMD graphics when “viewing map or place results on sites such as ChatGPT”.

Furthermore, the issue that Firefox failed to load certain sites due to “falling back to HTTP/2 when the site rejected an HTTP/3 request” has been fixed as well.

Lastly, there is also a fix for rapid memory usage “when sites such as the Zoom web app were left open in a minimized window”.

The fixed security issues have an aggregate rating of high, the second highest after critical. Plenty of fixes this time, but no mentioning of exploits in the wild. Still, I recommend upgrading as soon as possible. Updates for the supported Firefox ESR releases fix security issues as well.

The two-week development cycle reduces the number of new major features in browsers such as Firefox or Google Chrome further. It is not a major problem, as the benefits of shipping new versions seem to outweigh this for the developers.

However, users who liked to browse new releases to see what is new will likely be disappointed more often.

Windows 11 26H2 is now available for nearly everyone, but you shouldn’t rush it

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

It took about a month to go from first availability to a widespread rollout. Microsoft confirmed that the new version of Windows 11 has reached general availability and should therefore be available to most users.

Microsoft says that users may find the update with a click on the “check for updates” button in Settings > Windows Update. If the Windows 11 version that is installed at the time on the device is eligible, version 26H2 should be returned.

You need to press the download & install option then to install the new version. Since it is just a smaller update, a single restart does the trick. All devices running Windows 11, version 24H2 or later should update very quickly.

What about new features? Microsoft confirms that all the recent features of versions 24H2 and 25H2 are also included in the latest feature release.

Furthermore, Microsoft claims that all known issues are either mitigated or resolved at the time of writing.

With that out of the way, Windows users should not feel a need to rush and install the update. It is still just a month after release and it does not come with a plethora of exciting new features that make life better or more secure.

My advice is to wait at least another month or two before taking the plunge. Yes, there is a great chance that nothing will break when you finally install the update, but since there is not much to gain from installing it in first place, it is probably better for most users to play it safe.

It is also a good idea to create a backup of the system before installing the update. It may be small, but even small updates may cause big issues and a third-party update that is independent from Windows’ own capabilities is always a good idea.

Google may use content from Drive, Gmail and Photos for personalized ads: how to prevent it

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

The rise of artificial intelligence is also bringing along with it new opportunities for advertising and marketing companies.

Google has updated its privacy policy recently according to a report by Android Authority that allows it to use content from Google Drive, Gmail or Photos for personalized advertisement.

Up until now, Google did not use the content for showing personalized ads when customers interacted with AI services and tools.

The updated policy adds an exception to the general rule. Google writes:

We don’t show you personalized ads based on your content from Drive, Gmail, or Google Photos, unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads.

In other words, if you allow Google services to access content from Google Drive, Gmail or Google Photos, personalized advertisement may use that content for showing ads to you. Google reaffirms customers that advertisers won’t get direct access to a customer’s file, photos, names, email addresses and other personal data.

While that means that customers have to allow Google to connect the services in first place, prompts to do just may be shown in regular intervals to users who use Gemini and other Google services.

You can verify if you have given Google permission for access already and can also revoke it. Downside to revoking is that certain Google services may no longer use the information for personalized suggestions or answers.

  1. Load the main Google account website: https://myaccount.google.com/
  2. Switch to Data & privacy.
    1. If you see that Personalize Search is set to Off, you have nothing to worry about.
  3. Otherwise, select Personalization settings under Personalization & activity.
  4. Choose Manage Personalized Recommendations in Search Services.
  5. Find Connected Content apps under Additional Personal Intelligence.
  6. Disconnect Google Workspace and Google Photos there.

Cookie Banners are here to stay, but there will be exceptions

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

So called cookie banners are nearly everywhere on today’s Internet. What started out as a rule to give users more control over cookies turned into an annoyance pretty quickly.

With banners on many sites, users started to spend a lot of time reacting to these banners to get them away. Extensions were created that would do away with the banners automatically and other workarounds were created to lighten the burden.

Talks about changing the legislation in the European Union started some time ago. The initial idea was to introduce controls in browsers. Users would have to set their preference there and the browsers would do the rest.

This proposal seems to be off the table. The new solution wants to increase the number of exceptions. The main idea is that certain cookies can be set without permission of the user visiting the site. This includes service delivery, audience measurement and device security according to the new draft.

Sites would no longer have to display cookie banners to the user for getting permission to set these types of cookies. The rules remain for other types, including advertisement that relies on tracking.

Ideally, if the change passes, website visitors would see less cookie banners than they see right now. The change is a massive undertaking, as scripts, extensions, plugins and code need to be rewritten to comply with the new rules.

However, it may still take a while before — if — the change becomes the new status quo. For now, on of the better options to deal with cookie banners is to use extensions or browsers that try to disallow everything that is necessary or get rid of the banners entirely, which would automatically mean that the user has not given the site any permission to set cookies.

Google Chrome may now warn users before visiting “suspicious” websites

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Google announced that it is improving Chrome’s Enhanced Protection feature. The new “suspicious” website warning may pop up on sites that exhibit “deceptive patterns commonly associated with known malicious sites” Google writes on its security blog.

The feature follows the downloads warning system that Google implemented in Chrome in 2024. It differentiated between suspicious and dangerous downloads.

A dangerous rating for a download is the result of a “high confidence verdict” and means that there is a high risk of harm.

Suspicious on the other hand means that Chrome’s security feature has a lower confidence in the verdict and that there is “unknown risk of user harm” associated with the download.

Translated for websites, a suspicious rating means that a site could contain harmful elements whereas a dangerous rating means that there is a higher risk of it containing harmful content.

When Enhanced Protection detects a suspicious website, it displays a prompt in the upper left corner of the browser window saying “this site doesn’t seem right”. The site is grayed out and users have several options to deal with the warning, including adding the site to an allow-list and going back to a safer location.

Dangerous sites, those that Chrome determines pose a high risk to users, show the usual “dangerous site” full screen warning instead.

Is it a useful feature? It depends on how well its rating system works and also on the experience level of the user. It may serve inexperienced users well while experienced users usually know what they are doing and have other protections, like content blockers, installed that improve security significantly.

How to enable this right now

Google is rolling out the feature over time to all Chrome users. If you do not want to wait, or prefer to disable the feature if it landed already, you can do so in the following way:

  • Load chrome://flags/#suspicious-site-warnings in the browser’s address bar.
  • Set the flag to True to enable suspicious site warnings or to False to disable the feature.
  • Restart Google Chrome.

ClickFix Protection

Google is also rolling out another security improvement. ClickFix describes malicious attacks that try to get users to run commands on their computer, usually by pasting and running them.

Google says that Chrome is now detecting suspicious commands a user copies. The command is submitted to Safe Browsing for analysis and a warning is shown if the analysis concluded that the script is dangerous.

Some Windows users can’t sign in to some of their Xbox games currently

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Reports suggest that some players on Windows 11 PCs can’t sign in to their Xbox accounts in certain games anymore. The issue started to appear for affected users after installation of recent updates for the operating system.

A thread on the Microsoft Learn website exemplifies the issue. The user writes:

No matter what I do, I get the above error trying to sign in to Microsoft Solitaire & Casual Games. I have a subscription. I’m signed on to XBOX with my browser, but the game won’t sign in and I have to play as Guest without all my settings & how far I’ve gotten with various games in that collection. HELP! Bots are useless and I’m spending too much time reading instead of playing. What a waste of my time. I’m getting charged for that game whether I can play it or not.

My machine installed a Windows Update before this started happening. I played yesterday for a while, so it’s not my computer, dangit. How can I be logged in with my browser, but not inside the game. I supposedly cleared cache, tried to reset, and reinstalled XBOX Live and the game.

Considering that this post got 21 comments and that there are more than 90 posts with the same question on the website already, it appears that the issue is widespread.

Games like Microsoft Solitaire, Microsoft Mahjong and even Gears of War 4 are listed as affected by the users.

Microsoft has not acknowledged the issue at this point. There is no entry in the list of known issues for recent versions of Windows 11 and no Microsoft representative has posted a reply on the forum.

One user suggested that the issue is caused by an Xbox Live Service connection issue. The official status page for Xbox Services does not list any issues, however.

At least two users said that they rolled back to a previous state of their Windows 11 system and that they experienced the issue still. While not confirmed, it is probably best to wait for an official statement by Microsoft before making rushed changes to an otherwise fine running system.