Firefox Send file sharing service launches officially
Firefox Send, a file sharing service by Mozilla, maker of Firefox, is now available officially. Mozilla launched Firefox Send as a Test Pilot project in 2017; the first experiment that launched as a web service with accompanying browser extension.
Firefox Send allowed users to upload files to the service so that they could be shared with others. Files would be encrypted automatically by Firefox Send to protect the data from unauthorized access.
Mozilla retired Test Pilot in early 2019 but many of the projects lived on either as browser extensions or as standalone web services.
Firefox Send
Firefox Send is a free file sharing service that anyone may use; a copy of Firefox is not required to use it. Just point any modern web browser to https://send.firefox.com/ to get started.
You may add files with a total size of up to 1 Gigabyte as an unregistered user for sharing. The file size limit increases to 2.5 Gigabytes for registered users. Firefox account owners may sign in using the account, and anyone else may sign up for a Firefox Account to share up to 2.5 Gigabytes and may also manage uploaded files from other devices and change expiration limits. Creation of an account is free; there is no paid version.
You may drag and drop files that you want to share with others on the Firefox Send site or use the upload button to use the file browser to pick files instead.
All selected files are displayed with their name and file size after selection. Firefox Send displays the total file size and options to add more files to the queue.
Uploaded files expire automatically after a set period or a set number of downloads. The default expires them after one download or after the first 24 hours. You may raise the limits to up to 100 downloads or 7 days. Downloads may expire as early as 5 minutes after a successful upload.
Password protection is the only other option provided. Firefox Send uses end-to-end encryption to protect files; adding a password improves the protection further.
Note that some configuration options require a Firefox Account. You need an account if you want to increase the allowed number of downloads or change the time the uploaded files are available. Password protection works without account, though.
Firefox Send displays a link after the upload that you may copy. Firefox Send users without account may terminate the link at any time if they use the same device and don't leave the page that lets them do so.
You still need to share the link somehow if you want others to download the files.
Closing Words
Firefox Send is a useful service to share files. You may use it to share files with others, or upload files for personal use instead. The use of end-to-end encryption and password protection makes the service very useful for that, and the size limit should be fine for most file sharing purposes.
The service is ad-free and free to use for anyone at the time. Preventing unlimited downloads and downloads that don't expire makes the service unattractive for large scale file sharing purposes.
Sören Hentzschel notes that the first beta version of the Firefox Send Android app may be released as early as next week.
Now You: Do you use online services to share files?
Firefox Containers are awesome.
I recommend using “Multi-Account Containers” in combination with “Temporary Containers” and “First Party Isolation”.
They are a hassle to setup at first but after that they are great.
To make it easier you should first enable “Multi-Account Containers” and save all your relevant Accounts in them. After that you can enable the other two.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/first-party-isolation/
What exactly is the difference between temporary containers and multi-account containers? I don’t see how they can be combined since they seem to achieve the same goal in the same way.
First party isolation is a preference that you can disable manually from about:config so you can save one addon installation. Considering that would already make your browser fingerprint more unique and easier to track, which is the whole point of going through this trouble, is a good idea to look to reduce the number of addons like this one.
Just my observation, not criticizing, thank you for sharing this!
@thebrowser, disabling first party isolation is stupid.
First party isolation protects your privacy.
Read about it here: https://www.ghacks.net/2017/11/22/how-to-enable-first-party-isolation-in-firefox/
BTW, privacy.firstparty.isolate = “true” is the default of the ghack user.js, so you don’t have to worry about leaving a unique “fingerprint”, you’ll have plenty of company (other user.js also borrow heavily from the ghack user.js).
Oops, I didn’t mean disable by toggle it, my bad. But still, what’s the difference between the first two addons? I’m really curious if there’s a benefit in using them separately.
“But still, what’s the difference between the first two addons?”
From what I understand, multi-account containers can provide permanent containers while temporary provides only temporary containers.
Tried and tested it. It just does not work as intended, it’s such a pain to use and configure. Plus it is of course not integrated so if, say, I want less fingerprints with, for instance, User Agent Switcher then I need to configure it for each container which, in the case of Temporary Containers, means every and each domain…
So, at the end, you will definitely be tracked as if you haven’t those extensions.
This concepts should be:
– builtin Firefox
– usable out-of-the-box with decent default values
– invisible to non tech users.
If not, then it just like recommanding Tor and NetBSD to grandma.
Good idea, but many years overdue for me, as I already use 3 different computers for different uses and each of those has at least 2 operating systems and a VM, and I use VPNs and clear/avoid all cookies and block trackers and ads, and I don’t share accounts between systems, and more… Also, I no longer use Firefox, but good info to know, thanks.
I’m giving you an A+ for this report.
@Mr. Hand: You go on great lengths to play Minecraft, I give you that.
@Anon
Well, whatever you gave me, it’s retarded blather.
I use ESET EIS Security Suite with a Banking & Payment Protection feature (Protection against KeyStroke Loggers) and the two don’t seem to mix. The Ext installs for regular FF use BUT (ie) Financial sites setup to open in a Green-bordered BPP Window don’t recognize the Containers Ext and an attempt to Install it netted Install failed-Ext appears to be corrupt.
I’m valuing Keystroke Logging over Privacy, so I uninstalled the Ext.
IF anyone knows how to marry the two, much appreciated by a Not-An-IT-Pro.
What about the tracking via Localstorage?
Not good.
Firefox is not supporting removing site localStorage per container – it means that you could remove all localStorage or nothing (for example removing youtube.com localStorage in “Default” container will also remove YouTube settings in “Google YouTube” container).
https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete/wiki/Documentation#enable-localstorage-support
Except the type of problems Danniello wrote about, the local storage is supposed to be separated by containers, like cookies, indexedDB, HTTP data cache, image cache, and any other areas supported by originAttributes, according to this source:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Project/Containers#What_is_.28and_isn.27t.29_separated_between_Containers
History, bookmarks and Security Exceptions for Invalid TLS Certificates are not separated (yet).
Saved passwords, saved search and form data, HSTS flags and OCSP responses are not separated, on purpose.
I’ve tried it. It’s useless for me because the history is not isolated to each containers.
Why do you need history isolation? Web sites don’t have access to your history.
“Web sites don’t have access to your history.”
Actually, there used to be a hack whereby websites could sometimes infer your history regarding other sites you had previously visited. It was an evil derivation of innocent code that some web developers (including me) had implemented: custom CSS code to change the color or style of a visited link, in a different way from the default style that websites back then used for visited links.
Unfortunately for me, after I put a lot of work into my snazzy visited-links styling, the browsers all blocked such custom styling because of the evil tracking hacks (which didn’t even exist at the time I wrote my code). I (and other developers) were furious that the browser companies didn’t implement the fix in a more fine-grained way: they should have just blocked that kind of styling on links to _other websites_, but not to links on the same site, since the site owner can log what pages you visited on his own site anyway.
I’m not aware of any history-sniffing hacks since then, but I wouldn’t bet that it’s not possible in some other way.
@skierpage
read gerdneuman’s comment here
https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/47
That’s what profiles are for. Containers is about site isolation and for using multiple accounts / cookies of a site in the same profile.
@Ashwin, my reccommendation for your next article is DNS-over-HTTPS (Martin covered it, but he hasn’t used it & reported back about a longer-term user experience).
IMO, everyone on Firefox should be using it (Chrome promised a general roll-out of DNS-over-HTTPS, but it hasn’t happened due to “technical issues” according to Google).
You can add ESNI for even better results.
And use a VPN, although, a good VPN cost money every month (whereas, DNS-over-HTTPS is free on Firefox).
Thank you for the suggestion. I’ll add it to my list.
Can I have some containers with all/most addons disabled (i.e. as if they were in safe mode) and other containers with addons enabled?
I get the basics of conatiners but I don’t understand the difference between the containers that now come with Firefox, and the add-ons – why do I need the extension? Is it because I can “reopen in container” but need the add-on/extension to make sure that whenever I open a particular webpage it opens within the container?
Ah – yes – the add-on just does the job automatically each time.
A mix of uBlock and Firefox’s own tracking settings can block the vast majority of the tracking content that is fed to a page, which makes the use of containers a bit redundant unless you are looking to have multiple tabs open with different accounts logged into the same website (or service) – which I have no need for.
That said, I having nothing against the concept of containers, just feel they are something that might have been beneficial years ago rather than now.
What’s more, if you genuinely want to stop the tracking, you could just use a private browsers session.
I’m surprised that container tabs isn’t part of the default installation yet even in the latest FF version which is 81.0 at the time of writing.
I’m using Waterfox Classic which supports XUL/XCOM extensions and is probably regarded as old fashioned by some; yet container tabs are available in prefs without the need to install an addon. Here’s a pix.
https://i.postimg.cc/43zKXb8K/container-tabs.png
I love Firefox Containers. Started using them about a year ago. Then the screen on the laptop I set them all up on died. Setting up a new laptop now and found that they’re not carried over to a new computer, even with Sync enabled. Ugh. Revived the old laptop specifically for the purpose of figuring out how to move them over to a new computer. Haven’t figured it out yet. Beware of this limitation if you use them.