Firefox 53.0 release: find out what is new

Martin Brinkmann
Apr 19, 2017
Updated • May 19, 2017
Firefox
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61

The official release date of Firefox 53.0 is April 19th, 2017. Mozilla will release Firefox 53 on that day on its website, and through Firefox's automatic update system.

The new Firefox 53.0 release is important for a number of reasons. First, because it does not support a number of operating systems anymore. Second, because of the dropping of Firefox Aurora from the release cycle. You find details about these changes below.

Only Firefox Stable and Beta systems are updated on this release day. Firefox Stable is updated to 53, and Firefox Beta to 54. Aurora is not updated and removed soon, and Nightly is not updated to stay on version 55 to fill the gap that the removal of Aurora left. Firefox ESR 52.1 and 45.9 are also available.

Executive Summary

  • Windows XP, Windows Vista, 32-bit Mac OS X, and Linux support for processors older than Pentium 4 or AMD Opteron, are no longer supported.
  • Windows XP and Vista users on Firefox 52.x will receive security updates for another year, but no feature updates anymore.
  • Firefox Aurora is removed from the release cycle.
  • Firefox ships with two new compact themes (dark and light).
  • Compositor process enabled on qualifying Windows systems.
  • New legacy add-ons are no longer accepted on AMO.

Firefox 53.0 download and update

firefox 53.0 release

Firefox is configured to check for and download updates automatically. You can run manual checks for updates with a tap on the Alt-key on your keyboard, and the selection of Help > About Firefox from the menu bar.

The About Mozilla Firefox window checks for updates, and either downloads and installs any update it finds automatically, or on user request.

Direct download links for Firefox installation files:

Firefox 53.0 Changes

Firefox Aurora is out

firefox developer editon termination

We talked about the end of Firefox Aurora already here on Ghacks. Mozilla decided to remove the Aurora channel from the release cycle. The organization plans to migrate existing Aurora users to Beta eventually, and move features from Nightly to Beta directly in the future.

A special Developer Edition will be made available, based on Beta but with the same tweaks that the current Developer Edition ships with.

You can read more about the change by following the link above, or by visiting the FAQ page on the Mozilla website.

End of support for several operating systems

Firefox 53 won't support the following operating systems anymore:

  • Windows XP
  • Windows Vista
  • 32-bit versions of Firefox on Mac OS X.
  • Processors older than Pentium 4 or AMD Opteron on Linux.

Mozilla plans to support the last working version for XP and Vista for some time going forward though. Users are migrated automatically to Firefox ESR, the Extended Support Release version of Firefox.

Mozilla plans to support XP and Vista versions of Firefox at least until September 2017. The organization plans to reveal the date supports end at the time, and will base it on the number of users who are still using XP or Vista.

More information is available on the Mozilla Support website, or our article on the subject.

Quantum Compositor on Windows

firefox quantum compositing

Mozilla Firefox 53.0 ships with a new GPU Process (Quantum Compositor) on supported Windows devices which reduces driver related crashes by 17%, Direct3D related crashes by 22%, and Direct3D accelerated video crashes by 11%.

Machines need to match the following requirements:

  • Windows 7 SP1 or up.
  • Multi-process enabled.
  • non-blacklisted graphics card.

That's about 25% of users according to Mozilla. To find out whether that is the case for your device, do the following:

  1. Load about:support in the Firefox address bar.
  2. Check for the entries GPUProcessPid and GPIPRocess under Diagnostics.

Compact Dark and Compact Light themes

compact themes firefox

Firefox 53.0 ships with two new themes that resemble those found in the Developer Edition. Compact Dark and Compact Light are available under Appearance on the about:addons page.

Simply click on the enable button next to one of the themes to activate it. The themes do away with the curved tabs, and change a couple of other interface elements on top of that. Also, Firefox has an official dark theme now that it ships with.

Set default Referrer-Policy

network http referer

Firefox users may set the default Referrer-Policy in Firefox by editing the network.http.referer.userControlPolicy preference. Basically, what the policy does is determine which referrer information should be included in the Referer header.

  1. Type about:config in the browser's address bar and hit the Enter-key.
  2. Confirm that you will be careful if the warning prompt appears.
  3. Search for network.http.referer.userControlPolicy. Set the value to one of the following supported values:
    • 0: no-referrer -- no referer information is included.
    • 1: same-origin -- referer will only be sent for same-origin requests.
    • 2: strict-origin-when-cross-origin -- full URL when a same-origin request is made, send origin for HTTPS to HTTPS requests, and no header to a less secure destinations.
    • 3: no-referrer-when-downgrade (default) -- Referer is sent from HTTPS to HTTPS, but not from HTTPS to HTTP.

The default is used whenever sites don't specify a Referrer-Policy. (see Bug 1304623)

Permission notifications changes

firefox-doorhanger notifications new design

The design of permission notifications that Firefox displays when websites request access to features such as the location has changed.

The dialog wont go away automatically anymore when you click somewhere on the page or switch tabs.

Other Firefox 53.0 changes

Developer Changes

Firefox 53.0 for Android

Out-of-process media decoding

Firefox 53.0 and newer versions of the Firefox browser for Android will handle media decoding out-of-process for improved performance on multi-core systems. (See Bug 1333323)

  • Right to Left language support (Arabic, Urdu, Hebrew and Persian).
  • Portrait mode supports two column tabs in the new version.
  • You may long-press on search suggestions to remove it from the browsing history.

Firefox 53.0.2

Firefox 53.0.2 was released on May 5th, 2017 to the stable channel. It features the following fixes and changes:

  1. Form validation errors and date picker panel visibility changes (1341190)
  2. The non-standard showDialog argument to window.find is now ignored (1348409)
  3. Security fixes

Firefox 53.0.3

Firefox 53.0.3 was released on May 19th, 2017 to the stable channel. The new version of Firefox ships with two fixes and one change:

  1. Fixed hangs when a proxy with NTLM authentication is used (1360574)
  2. Fixed "excessive resource usage" from the "captive portal detection service" (1359697)
  3. Bump preloaded security information expiration times (1364240)

Security updates / fixes

Security fixes are published after the release of Firefox 53. We will update the article once Mozilla publishes the update.

  • CVE-2017-5433: Use-after-free in SMIL animation functions
  • CVE-2017-5435: Use-after-free during transaction processing in the editor
  • CVE-2017-5436: Out-of-bounds write with malicious font in Graphite 2
  • CVE-2017-5461: Out-of-bounds write in Base64 encoding in NSS
  • CVE-2017-5459: Buffer overflow in WebGL
  • CVE-2017-5466: Origin confusion when reloading isolated data:text/html URL
  • CVE-2017-5434: Use-after-free during focus handling
  • CVE-2017-5432: Use-after-free in text input selection
  • CVE-2017-5460: Use-after-free in frame selection
  • CVE-2017-5438: Use-after-free in nsAutoPtr during XSLT processing
  • CVE-2017-5439: Use-after-free in nsTArray Length() during XSLT processing
  • CVE-2017-5440: Use-after-free in txExecutionState destructor during XSLT processing
  • CVE-2017-5441: Use-after-free with selection during scroll events
  • CVE-2017-5442: Use-after-free during style changes
  • CVE-2017-5464: Memory corruption with accessibility and DOM manipulation
  • CVE-2017-5443: Out-of-bounds write during BinHex decoding
  • CVE-2017-5444: Buffer overflow while parsing application/http-index-format content
  • CVE-2017-5446: Out-of-bounds read when HTTP/2 DATA frames are sent with incorrect data
  • CVE-2017-5447: Out-of-bounds read during glyph processing
  • CVE-2017-5465: Out-of-bounds read in ConvolvePixel
  • CVE-2017-5448: Out-of-bounds write in ClearKeyDecryptor
  • CVE-2017-5437: Vulnerabilities in Libevent library
  • CVE-2017-5454: Sandbox escape allowing file system read access through file picker
  • CVE-2017-5455: Sandbox escape through internal feed reader APIs
  • CVE-2017-5456: Sandbox escape allowing local file system access
  • CVE-2017-5469: Potential Buffer overflow in flex-generated code
  • CVE-2017-5445: Uninitialized values used while parsing application/http-index-format content
  • CVE-2017-5449: Crash during bidirectional unicode manipulation with animation
  • CVE-2017-5450: Addressbar spoofing using javascript: URI on Firefox for Android
  • CVE-2017-5451: Addressbar spoofing with onblur event
  • CVE-2017-5462: DRBG flaw in NSS
  • CVE-2017-5463: Addressbar spoofing through reader view on Firefox for Android
  • CVE-2017-5467: Memory corruption when drawing Skia content
  • CVE-2017-5452: Addressbar spoofing during scrolling with editable content on Firefox for Android
  • CVE-2017-5453: HTML injection into RSS Reader feed preview page through TITLE element
  • CVE-2017-5458: Drag and drop of javascript: URLs can allow for self-XSS
  • CVE-2017-5468: Incorrect ownership model for Private Browsing information
  • CVE-2017-5430: Memory safety bugs fixed in Firefox 53 and Firefox ESR 52.1
  • CVE-2017-5429: Memory safety bugs fixed in Firefox 53, Firefox ESR 45.9, and Firefox ESR 52.1

Additional information / sources

Now Read: The state of Mozilla Firefox

Summary
Firefox 53.0 release: find out what is new
Article Name
Firefox 53.0 release: find out what is new
Description
Mozilla Firefox 53.0 Stable was released on April 19, 2017 to the public through the web browser's automatic update functionality, and on Mozilla's website.
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Ghacks Technology News
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Comments

  1. Jonas said on September 27, 2019 at 7:31 pm
    Reply

    Since I’ve rarely wanted to transfer more than one tab between browsers, I’m not inclined to install another extension just for that — especially one that (according to your description) closed all my tabs in the process. In the past I’ve just copied and pasted the URL, but (even for just one tab) that is a little tedious.

    I just tried an interesting little experiment, with a useful result. (I did this on my Mac, but I’m guessing it would work on other platforms too.) I’m reading this article in Firefox, so I opened a new blank window in Chrome. At the top of both browser windows, at the far-left end of the URL bar, there’s a little icon of the letter “i” in a circle. (If you hover over it in Firefox, it says “Show site information”; in Chrome, hovering it says “View site information” — that’s the icon I’m talking about.)

    I simply dragged the Firefox “i” icon from the top of this page, into the Chrome window — and this page loaded in Chrome! It worked! Then I tried something just a bit trickier, in the other direction — I first (from a bookmark) loaded into Chrome a page from my local web-development server (i.e. not online)… then dragged the “i” icon from the Chrome toolbar into this Firefox window — and it worked then too!

    So, although I have no interest in the OneTab extension, I just learned something useful! I hope other people find this trick useful too. (Later I’ll try it in Safari — maybe it works in every browser?)

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on September 28, 2019 at 8:03 am
      Reply

      Interresting find Jonas, thanks for sharing!

      1. John G. said on August 27, 2023 at 8:13 pm
        Reply

        Your comment doesn’t appear to be one of the real @Martin, because there is no black label rounding the entire title of the comment as before. :S

  2. kero said on January 30, 2020 at 10:08 am
    Reply

    I also used onetab already and didn’t even know they had this feature. Thanks so much.

  3. Legion said on February 17, 2021 at 2:53 pm
    Reply

    Exporting tabs to FF: “The address wasn’t understood. Firefox doesn’t know how to open this address, because one of the following protocols (chrome-extension) isn’t associated with any program or is not allowed in this context.”

    Useless.

  4. DMoRiaM said on August 17, 2023 at 2:52 pm
    Reply

    And the most important information was left out of the article or it don’t even exist in the first place: how to completely disable such functionality.

    1. Tom said on August 23, 2023 at 8:59 am
      Reply

      Your comment doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s an explicit user action to import data from other add-ons. If you don’t want it you just don’t do it.

      1. Christoph said on August 25, 2023 at 9:14 am
        Reply

        This comment actually does make a lot of sense, and I am actually searching for this. Some people do NOT want websites to be (badly) translated, so they never use such a feature. The things is, every time I visit a non-english website this annoying menu pops up, and the button is another element in the URL bar cluster of useless unused features. I do not want to add all languages to a “do not translate” list, instead I want a “hide button” or “disable translations completely” setting.

      2. Christoph said on August 25, 2023 at 9:24 am
        Reply

        This comment actually does make a lot of sense, and I am currently searching for this. Some people do NOT want websites to be (badly) translated, so they never use such a feature. The things is, every time I visit a non-english website this annoying menu pops up, and the button is another element in the URL bar cluster of useless unused features. I do not want to add all languages to a “do not translate” list, instead I want a “hide button” or “disable translations completely” setting.

      3. Christoph said on August 25, 2023 at 9:32 am
        Reply

        my bad. somehow my, and I think DMoRiaM’s comment got mixed into the wrong article. Haha.

    2. Christoph said on August 25, 2023 at 9:34 am
      Reply

      go to about:config and set browser.translations.automaticallyPopup to false.

  5. Sean said on August 17, 2023 at 11:34 pm
    Reply

    Does this hack still work on FF 107 or whatever is most current?

    1. Addlibs said on August 19, 2023 at 9:27 pm
      Reply

      Firefox 118 seems to be officially rolling this out by default: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation

      1. zed said on August 20, 2023 at 11:08 am
        Reply

        Hoping Mozilla won’t remove the option altogether in the future as they already did for other, ahem, unwanted features… Why don’t they listen to their users instead?

      2. owl said on August 21, 2023 at 4:13 am
        Reply

        @zed,

        your reply seems to be Addlibs (according to your RSS reader),
        Addlibs did not intend to comment on this article “OneTab browser extension”, but regarding Firefox’s new built-in fullpage translation “Firefox Translation”.
        Firefox Fullpage Translation
        https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation

  6. dmacleo said on August 20, 2023 at 5:22 pm
    Reply

    what the heck is going on with comments on this site lately?
    first comment on THIS article was 9-2019.

    1. John Wold said on August 21, 2023 at 2:50 am
      Reply

      Looks like the comments database is corrupted.

      Besides old comments appearing in new articles, the same comment appears in multiple articles.

      Also I answered a comment in one article, and the same answer appeared as an answer to a different comment by the same person.

  7. owl said on August 21, 2023 at 4:16 am
    Reply

    @Martin Brinkmann,

    Anyway, please deal with this anomaly ASAP.
    Comments are a mess, irrelevant and chaotic.
    If there is no prospect, Ghacks Technology News should be put on hiatus until the system is fixed.

    1. Frankel said on August 21, 2023 at 11:46 am
      Reply

      It’s the same as before with endless monologues or people telling others why they are wrong.

      1. Guest said on August 23, 2023 at 3:55 pm
        Reply

        Actually, Frankel, it’s you who’s wrong

  8. martins Lutes said on August 22, 2023 at 4:39 pm
    Reply

    This is all techo-BS. What people want is far simpler: a hotkey toggle: images on/images off. Is that really so complex? Seems so. It’s like autoplay videos on/off. In that case you can set it to off but it doesn’t stick. Typical digiocy.

  9. Mystique said on August 23, 2023 at 11:11 am
    Reply

    This isn’t great but it might help people that have moved from chrome to firefox to some extent. I can’t tell you the amount of time I have seen people complain that a certain extension they use on google is not available and the only thing holding them back from moving over when they are actually wrong and the very same developer has a Firefox version also. I would always encourage manually looking as there are always hidden gems.

    In regards to the website I have reached out to Martin personally and to his credit he replied very quickly. He has informed me that they are aware of the problems and are attempting to fix it.

    Martin is no longer involved in the technical management of the site so I imagine if we want to ask someone then our comments would perhaps be better directed towards Softonic.

  10. John G. said on August 23, 2023 at 11:39 am
    Reply

    I don’t understand what is happening here with the comments. The counter shows zero comments and then inside there are some comments from older dates even since years. And mostly of them are non related by the way with the article. So sad what’s going on and nobody is still fixing it. :S

    1. Herman Cost said on August 23, 2023 at 5:35 pm
      Reply

      This site now appears to be mostly be created and run by AI. On the positive side (if there is one), I guess we can assume at some point the AI will be capable of recognizing and fixing corrupted files and the like.

  11. Andy Prough said on August 23, 2023 at 6:05 pm
    Reply

    “Import Chrome extensions” …. (by installing comparable Firefox extensions) … (for a small number of extensions).”

    What a bunch of bogus PR spin. Someone who liked uBlock Origin on Chrome could already install it just fine on Firefox with a couple of mouse clicks. This just adds extra unnecessarily complicated steps to something that was already dead simple, all in order for Mozilla to claim fake one-to-one compatability that doesn’t actually exist.

  12. Ray said on August 23, 2023 at 9:57 pm
    Reply

    It would be interesting if Firefox could install Chrome Addons directly from the Chrome Web Store. Although there would probably be some incompatibility, perhaps there’s a shim to translate some Chrome-specific WebExtension APIs over to Firefox. Microsoft Edge can install extensions directly from the Chrome Web Store, but Edge is using the same Blink web engine as Chrome so that makes things easy.

    Don’t really care about importing as I never use that feature.

  13. Rex said on August 24, 2023 at 11:50 am
    Reply

    Just retire Gecko and join the Blink bandwagon already, Mozilla. Then you can guarantee 100% Chrome extension compatibility! /s
    Not like your browser is getting much attention let alone budget compared to your other woke social justice initiatives.

  14. Anja said on August 24, 2023 at 2:36 pm
    Reply

    Hello,

    does anyone know if the STG has issues with the sidebar at the moment? I just added it and can not find any option to use it in the sidebar. I am also using an add-on for tree style tab…this might be the source of the problem?

    Greetings, Anja

  15. Pete willams said on August 25, 2023 at 1:41 am
    Reply

    tried typing- about:config -in the search bar -( I want to enable javascript) but it simply will NOT open!

  16. Anonymous said on August 27, 2023 at 4:51 pm
    Reply

    I tried Firefox Translate, but it doesn’t do Chinese or Japanese, and that’s a deal-breaker for me. I uninstalled it and am sticking with the Google Translate extension.

  17. ECJ said on August 27, 2023 at 7:07 pm
    Reply

    “…Vivaldi and Brave use self-hosted solutions, which still require connections, but offer better privacy than an integration of Google Translate or other third-party translation services would offer.”

    While I like Brave as a browser, their translation “solution” just plain sucks. I’d rather have the data sent to Google or Bing, than have a translate feature that just doesn’t work properly. Not only is it not possible to select just a section of text to translate, but to make it worst, most of the time translating the whole page in Brave is either really unbearably slow, or more often than not, it just won’t translate the page at all and displays a “This page couldn’t be translated” error. It’s pretty pointless if their users need to keep using something else to translate pages and have to give up their privacy anyway.

    The native translate feature in Firefox sounds like a much better solution than what Brave use.

  18. Merlin said on August 27, 2023 at 8:05 pm
    Reply

    Great news, thanx FF devs! Hopefully, more languages will be available in the future. So happy!

  19. TelV said on August 28, 2023 at 1:18 pm
    Reply

    Floorp comes with its own built-in translator. It’s been like that ever since the first release in fact.
    https://floorp.app/download

  20. Mystique said on August 29, 2023 at 1:39 pm
    Reply

    Article title: Firefox 117: native language translations, last Firefox 102 update and security fixes
    https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/29/firefox-117-native-language-translations-last-firefox-102-update-and-security-fixes/

    I think for now every time I comment on an article I am going to put the title of the article and/or the URL of said article because I am seeing my own comments which are from another Firefox related article but not exactly this one.

    In regards to this website Martin does not have administrative access to the back end of the website. It would fall on softonic international to fix it now which seems to be of very low priority.

    This might be the straw that broke the camels back for ghacks which is a shame because it had many good comments and articles that go way back. Moving away from it would suck.

    Maybe try contacting them here to see if you can get any action.
    https://hello.softonic.com/contact/

  21. Quinton Blakely said on August 30, 2023 at 3:31 pm
    Reply

    Can you help me please.

  22. Brian said on September 1, 2023 at 12:15 am
    Reply

    Latest version, they pust their VPN (powered by Mullvad) yet again. Instead of writing version changes. sigh. https://imgur.com/g6N20bN

  23. Shiva said on September 1, 2023 at 10:01 am
    Reply

    Luckily I had a recent backup available. Firefox was no longer giving me access to profiles when I reinstalled version 116.03 and was asking me to create a new profile. It asked me to upgrade last night and to my surprise all theJS scripts were gone.
    https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/issues/265

  24. Firewall said on September 1, 2023 at 3:58 pm
    Reply

    Firewall: “Deny [Firefox] outgoing connections to domain nextdns.io”

  25. Firewall said on September 1, 2023 at 9:56 pm
    Reply

    Firewall: “Deny [plugin-container] outgoing connections to domain cloudflare-dns.com (including mozilla.cloudflare-dns.com)”

  26. Zibtek said on September 13, 2023 at 8:46 am
    Reply

    It’s exciting to hear that Mozilla is actively working on a design refresh for their Firefox web browser, internally referred to as Photon. The last major redesign, known as Proton, was introduced in Firefox 57 back in November 2017. Since then, Mozilla has made some interface changes, including the controversial address bar overhaul in Firefox 75 Stable.

    While specific details about the design refresh are currently limited, Mozilla has created a meta bug on Bugzilla to track the changes. Although no mockups or screenshots have been shared yet, the bug names provide some insights into the elements that will receive a refresh, such as the address bar, tabs bar, main menu, infobars, doorhangers, context menus, and modals.

    The new design is scheduled to be released in Firefox 89, which was initially planned for a mid-2021 release, specifically May 18, 2021. However, as development work is still ongoing, there is a possibility of a delayed release.

    1. TelV said on September 13, 2023 at 11:58 am
      Reply

      @ Zibtek,

      I’m already using Photon on Floorp which is a fork of Firefox. Here’s a pix of what it looks like:
      https://i.postimg.cc/8PsK7DjV/floorp-photon.png I enabled the menu bar at the top, but you can turn it off if you don’t like it.

      Floorp is a Japanese browser based on FF102. I’ve been using it as my default browser ever since ‘owl’ pointed it out on the Ghacks site last year (or was it this year, can’t remember exactly when). In any event it contains many more enhancements than the vanilla version of Firefox. It also comes with searXNG search engine in the list of search engines provided which saves having to install it yourself.

      Floorp download: https://floorp.app/en/

  27. owl said on September 13, 2023 at 9:03 am
    Reply

    My comment is regarding the following,
    Article title:
    Mozilla patches critical WebP security issue in Firefox and Thunderbird
    >> ghacks.net/2023/09/13/mozilla-patches-critical-webp-security-issue-in-firefox-and-thunderbird/#respond

    Indeed, today, those patch versions were applied through automatic updates.
    However, since I had disabled the “WebP” function, I was not interested in that topic (Google, etc.).

    Regarding Thunderbird:
    Today finally,
    My Thunderbird 102.14.0 (en-US) was updated with “Thunderbird 102.15.1 (x64)” through the automatic update feature.
    By the way,
    Naturally, it will not be automatically updated to 115 (Supernova).

    Anyway,
    it is clear from Bugzilla that the bug fixes related to migration from 102 to 115 are not complete, so existing users of “102” should refrain from manually updating to 115.
    >> ghacks.net/2023/09/08/thunderbird-102-to-115-upgrades-are-now-enabled/#comment-4573569

    Betterbird has been released 115.2.1-bb11 (12 September 2023) . Betterbird make Thunderbird a faithful upstream.
    Betterbird: Release Notes
    >> betterbird.eu/releasenotes/?locale=en-US&version=115.2.1&channel=default&os=WINNT&buildid=20230911203543

    1. owl said on September 13, 2023 at 9:31 am
      Reply

      @Martin Brinkmann,

      I posted in response to an article published on 2023/09/13.
      Article title: Mozilla patches critical WebP security issue in Firefox and Thunderbird. >> ghacks.net/2023/09/13/mozilla-patches-critical-webp-security-issue-in-firefox-and-thunderbird/
      However, the link was to an unrelated article published on 2019/09/27.
      >> ghacks.net/2019/09/27/how-to-import-tabs-from-chrome-to-firefox-and-vice-versa/

      This kind of “disorder of Articles and Comments” has been going on for another month.
      Is this an obvious (by Softonic, which operates and manages ghacks.net) act of sabotage against Martin and Ashwin?
      It’s really frustrating!

  28. Anonymous said on September 13, 2023 at 11:09 am
    Reply

    [ My comment is on “Mozilla patches critical WebP security issue in Firefox and Thunderbird” https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/13/mozilla-patches-critical-webp-security-issue-in-firefox-and-thunderbird/ though not directly related to that article ]

    What happened to gHacks? When the site was bought out, Martin assured us it wouldn’t go downhill and he’d maintain editorial control, but the AI-written articles are ruining the quality of the site. I’ve been tempted to drop the site from my RSS reader because of this. Is there an RSS feed with only the human-written articles? Individual feeds for each author isn’t a good solution.

  29. Mystique said on September 13, 2023 at 1:38 pm
    Reply

    Article Title: Mozilla patches critical WebP security issue in Firefox and Thunderbird
    Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/13/mozilla-patches-critical-webp-security-issue-in-firefox-and-thunderbird/

    If anyone was unaware you should download the extension “Don’t Accept WebP” regardless of the patch. WebP is absolute trash that is unnecessary and clearly an issue. I would rather my images be in their native format and not some recompiled trash such as WebP.

    I have absolutely no love for the parent company of this website.

    1. bruh said on September 13, 2023 at 6:33 pm
      Reply

      I agree, this is so atrocious – most of the time you can even tell by the URL what format the original image was in – this “reconvert-on-the-fly” nonsense is terrible – but especially so when you’re converting a lossy format, which should be avoided as often as possible.

      Sometimes you can edit the image URL to get it to send the right image, unfortunately “don’t accept WebP” doesn’t always work – but that’s why they offer a built in conversion, I suppose.

    2. TelV said on September 13, 2023 at 6:46 pm
      Reply

      @ Mystique,

      Thanks for the tip (about the addon). I wasn’t aware that Webp was a vulnerability.

  30. News filter for ghacks said on September 13, 2023 at 8:44 pm
    Reply

    I read only Martin Brinkmann’s, Mike Turcotte’s, and Ashwin’s articles. Add uBlock Origin news filter for ghacks:

    ! 2023-09-13 https://www.ghacks.net/
    ghacks.net##.hentry,.home-posts:not(:has-text(/Martin Brinkmann|Mike Turcotte|Ashwin/))

    1. Anonymous said on September 14, 2023 at 7:50 am
      Reply

      @ https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/13/mozilla-patches-critical-webp-security-issue-in-firefox-and-thunderbird/#comment-4573641

      I tried your uBlock filter on Brave snap packaga for Ubuntu, but it doesn’t work, do I need to restart the browser?

      I have noticed uBO doesn’t fully work on Brave, for instance the Element Picker can’t pick anything while the Zapper do, but not 100%, Nuke Anything works much better, but it’s only temporarily.

  31. bruh said on September 19, 2023 at 5:53 pm
    Reply

    “important address bar change” alright calm down… lol

    I have gotten rid of the stupid shield and the “not secure” box, and have it set up so that it always displays the full URL (I think…?).

    In a perfect world, it should just always show the full url, no icons, or emojis, or anything like that.

    “Users may want to know why Firefox is no longer displaying https:// in the address bar” I’ll bet nobody will notice anything – apart from a select few autists like myself who customise everything and don’t like change.

    1. Tom Hawack said on September 19, 2023 at 6:57 pm
      Reply

      “Users may want to know why Firefox is no longer displaying https:// in the address bar”

      Why, I don’t know either (a breeze of madness or is it of love in the air), but there’s an about:config to handle that as well (Firefox) :

      // display all parts of the url in the location bar (do not trim)
      pref(“browser.urlbar.trimURLs”, false); // Dfault=true

      Things, too many, too often are decided in spite of common sens.

  32. Anonymous said on September 19, 2023 at 7:48 pm
    Reply

    Firefox is always copying whatever Chromium does… it is like they are a Chromium browser without the name and having trouble rendering many websites. In fact, it is like they are getting 400million just for existing and adopt anything Google releases or does, like web extensions, widevine, safe browsing and then visual changes like this.

    I like how some people think there is a choice, and the choice is better than the leader… while still failing at basic stuff.

  33. Anonymous said on September 19, 2023 at 7:52 pm
    Reply

    What’s the point of these useless changes? Just show the full address with the protocol at all times and be done with it…

  34. Grand Prosecutor Jihana said on September 19, 2023 at 8:55 pm
    Reply

    I set the User Agent address bar to always show the entire URI in a unmasked format.

    Martin, as of 19 September 2023, the gHacks comments system is still severely mangled. Data subjects have considerable rights conferred on them; where those decisions are likely to affect them.

    1. Grand Prosecutor Jihana said on September 21, 2023 at 4:54 pm
      Reply

      Let’s start again. “I set the User Agent address bar to always show the entire URI in [an] unmasked format.”

      Hallowed be the memory of the Lost Souls.

  35. Anonymous said on September 19, 2023 at 9:40 pm
    Reply

    “HTTPS doesn’t mean safe:
    Many people assume that an HTTPS connection means that the site is secure. In fact, HTTPS is increasingly being used by malicious sites, especially phishing ones.”

    [https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/https-does-not-mean-safe/20725/]

  36. Anonymous said on September 19, 2023 at 9:41 pm
    Reply

    HTTPS doesn’t mean safe
    Many people assume that an HTTPS connection means that the site is secure. In fact, HTTPS is increasingly being used by malicious sites, especially phishing ones.

  37. x said on September 19, 2023 at 9:42 pm
    Reply

    HTTPS doesn’t mean safe
    Many people assume that an HTTPS connection means that the site is secure. In fact, HTTPS is increasingly being used by malicious sites, especially phishing ones.

  38. Tachy said on September 20, 2023 at 4:11 am
    Reply

    website still wacked huh?

  39. Anonymous said on September 21, 2023 at 2:06 am
    Reply

    Article: Firefox 119 will launch with an important address bar change
    https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/19/firefox-119-will-launch-with-an-important-address-bar-change/

    Just one thing regarding the URL bar as it looks like now in latest Firefox, the relatively new feature where some extensions would add their icon inside the URL bar, how bad can it get?

    https://imgur.com/uIlWI58
    https://postimg.cc/YvYnpzGh
    https://ibb.co/QQT584N
    ps. uploaded same pic to several links just to make sure some will work.

    (For those who can’t see the pic it’s a snapshot showing a URL bar full of extensions, and also Firefox own built in icons that would appear inside the URL bar depending in some cases on which type of website is being viewed, there’s no space left for the actual thing the URL bar is supposed to view, namely the URL address itself)

    Yes, I have several extensions on the toolbar, but the menu bar is pretty full and I want to keep some on the toolbar too, and usually Firefox would also push excessive extensions behind a drop-down menu for access to them as well, but as it looks like now the URL bar is given too little space priority, or is there a way to restrict to a minimum URL bar size?

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