Would be pretty idiotic to not close it, otherwise opening a bookmark would always require a second click to close the popup.

Anyways, you can go to about:config and set browser.bookmarks.openInTabClosesMenu to false - afterwards you can hold Ctrl (or just click the middle mouse button) while clicking a bookmark from such popup and the popup should stay open.

Doesn’t really sound like a company that I would want to do any business with then.

But if you’re using the built-in auto-updater (like people tend to do on Windows and macOS), then it happens automatically in the background, unless you tell the auto-updater to not update automatically.

Definitely does not work that way on my Windows 10 installation. When update is available, Firefox will have a “Restart to install updates” in menu button notification - but the files are not replaced on disk until you actually close (or restart) Firefox and thus Firefox continues to work normally.

What can happen though is that if you run another instance (ie. another profile) of Firefox while the first one has “staged” the update then that another instance can trigger the files to actually be replaced on disk but you would very deliberately do that.

Firefox shouldn’t force you to restart and update like that unless something else, such as your package manager, has already replaced the executable files on your disk. In such a scenario Firefox doesn’t have any option except to inform you to restart it (well I guess it could choose to crash). But the mechanism that forced the update is the package manager.

Felix Mikolasch, data protection lawyer at noyb: “Mozilla has just bought into the narrative that the advertising industry has a right to track users by turning Firefox into an ad measurement tool. While Mozilla may have had good intentions, it is very unlikely that ‘privacy preserving attribution’ will replace cookies and other tracking tools. It is just a new, additional means of tracking users.”

Sigh… I cannot for the life of me figure how anyone could think that enabling PPA (even by default) means that advertising industry has somehow right to track folks. Like dude, the entire point of PPA is that advertisers could then get to know if/when their adverts are working without tracking people.

The argument that “It is just a new, additional means of tracking users” also doesn’t really make sense - even if we assume that this is new means of tracking. I mean, sure it technically is new addition, but it’s like infinity+1 is still infinity - it doesn’t make a difference. The magnitude of this one datapoint is about the same as addition of any new web api (I mean there are lots that shouldn’t exist - looking at you chromium… but that’s besides the point).

File a complaint over use of third-party cookies and actual tracking if you want to be useful - this complaint just makes you look like an idiot.

Also, Servo was originally more or less a testbed for new rendering pathway (webrender) which, when ready, was then integrated into Firefox.

True, and I agree - for this feature to be effective the site-specific rules need to be maintained properly.

All I’m saying is that it leaving some query parameters unremoved is not indicative of the feature not working. If you want to add more query parameters to the removed list then feel free to open a bug about it.

That feature removes parameters that are known to be used for tracking. It does not remove all query parameters willy-nilly. For example on youtube it should remove si, feature and kw parameters as well as a set of parameters on a list that applies to all websites. However, pp parameter is not in that to-be-removed list.

As an example v parameter is for video id on youtube, it would be kinda silly if that was removed, so the feature kinda has to do some site specific action.

Reader mode can show images as well though. I mean, it isn’t always successful in doing so - probably because there’s about a million different ways a random website could show an image - but reader mode can show images that it thinks are part of the actual content.

I’m not seeing any such issue with Nightly on my Fedora system.

Indeed. Also, the auto-open PiP is super nice feature I’ve been using a lot.

Yeah… It’s a bit hard to balance things like this though, I’ve seen lot’s of folks complain about how their Firefox is apparently “broken” because it now suddenly has this empty margin around web-content seemingly wasting space for no reason - and then it turns out that they have deliberately turned this very feature on. And that is even if the feature is completely hidden - I wonder how many more complaints there would be if options like this are made more accessible.

The letterboxing feature has been in Firefox since 2019 - starting from Firefox 67 I think. The preference for it might have been hidden though so maybe it’s just relatively unknown feature - I don’t know if or how visible LibreWolf makes makes it for the user. But regardless, any modern Firefox variant probably has that capability.

Sounds like you are talking about Firefox’s letterboxing feature which you can enable/disable independently from full fingerprinting resistance.

Well the feature development is certainly progressing - here is the tracking bug for it.

You can nowadays just test it in normal nightly without special build - it’s extremely incomplete, but you can test it if you wish. It’s tied to revorked sidebar which you need to enable in about:config.

Absolutely not. If anything, public officials would be the one group whose messaging I would understand being scanned so that the people can sort of keep them on check. But again, implementing such possibility that would still weaken security of everyone else as well so of course it should not actually be done.

Yeah, history is extremely valuable feature. I think I would rather get rid of bookmarks and maybe even tabs rather than history.

In that case the issue is likely that files on disk are being modified by whatever mechanism your IT uses to push updates to devices. If the program files are modified while Firefox is running then you will unavoidably get this prompt.

I suppose the best you can do is to ask your IT folks to not update programs that are currently running.

I have no clue about hacking macOS