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Firefox's New Mini Window Is Every Multitasker's Dream

By: BeauHD
3 November 2026 at 16:05
Mozilla is testing a new Firefox Nightly feature called Mini Window that lets users pop an entire webpage into a small, always-on-top window stripped of most browser controls. "The idea behind the Firefox Mini Window feature is simple: allow users to move a currently open tab (or a section of a tab) into a separate mini window," writes ZDNet's Jack Wallen. "Think of it as moving a tab from one window to what appears like a web app." From the report: At first blush, there's no address bar, controls, scroll bar, or anything else that would normally be associated with Firefox. The Mini Window appears to be a web app, without having to actually create it. However, when I hover my cursor inside the Mini Window, I do see the address bar, the back/forward/reload buttons, and the window close button -- and that's it. The browser gets out of your way, so the only thing I see is the content. On top of that (pun intended), the Mini Window stays on top of other Firefox windows, so I can have that popped-out content always in focus while I work on other things. This feature comes in handy when I'm working with limited display space (say, on a laptop) and need to reference a page while working on another. For multitasking, it comes in very handy. [...] Let's say I'm writing a paper on Linux and need to read a particular article for background information. I could have my document open in the main window, and then open the article in question in a Mini Window. I could then reference the article without having to click back and forth between them -- even when working on a smaller display. Here's another use case I've found: When using MacOS's Stage Manager feature, I only have one window available at a time. The Mini Window bypasses that limitation, so I can have my main browser window focused as well as the page open in the Mini Window. Another handy way I like to use Mini Window is to open a favorite search engine, move it to a Mini Window, and then I have an always-ready search tool at my fingertips. I could also open my favorite AI service and use it in the same way.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Firefox Tries to Bring Back the Internet's 'Good Old Days'

By: BeauHD
26 October 2026 at 17:00
Mozilla launched a new ad campaign for Firefox that leverages early internet nostalgia in a bid to win back users who switched browsers. "Today's internet tracks you, interrupts you, and asks for permissions it already took. But it wasn't always that way, and it's not how it's supposed to work," writes Mozilla CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo in a post on LinkedIn. "It's how a few companies decided it should work, because it pays." "We're making a different bet at Firefox. Remember us? Well, we're still here, and we don't think the internet should be like this..." The ad features viral internet stars from yesteryear, including Tay Zonday of "Chocolate Rain" fame, Gary Brolsma of "Numa Numa", Noah Ritter, better known as the "Apparently Kid", and Laina Morris, the face of the "Overly Attached Girlfriend" meme, among others.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eMudhra kills its certificate business after researchers cracked its private keys in under a second

By: Greg Otto
22 October 2026 at 10:57

Indian certificate authority eMudhra said Thursday it will stop issuing SSL/TLS certificates days after researchers showed that the private keys securing eight of its certificates were so weak they could be reconstructed in under a second.

The announcement closes an incident where major browsers blocked the certificates andΒ  Indian authorities launched an investigation.Β Β 

The company said its board concluded after detailed deliberations that leaving the business was the right decision for eMudhra and its shareholders. Company Chairman V. Srinivasan cited rising costs from data sovereignty and compliance requirements, along with competition from large providers that issue the certificates free of charge. He also said social media amplification of the incident brought scrutiny β€œout of proportion” to the unit’s place in the company.

β€œFor many certifying authorities, SSL/TLS is the whole business,” the company said. β€œFor eMudhra it is one part of a much broader digital solutions portfolio.”

The episode began last week, when a researcher notified Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla that the private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate certificates could be computed from the public certificates because they were generated with too little randomness. Security researcher Scott Helme recovered all eight on his laptop in less than a second, a task he said an AI agent later repeated from a single prompt.

Normally, a private key is a secret number so large that no computer could ever guess it, roughly 77 or 78 digits long for the type of cryptography used in these certificates. Each of the eight eMudhra keys was a whole number below 256, with one simply logged as the number 4. Since a certificate publicly displays the key it was built from, anyone could test every possible value in seconds, and such keys could be used to forge certificates and impersonate websites.

eMudhra attributed the flaw to an error in a key generation ceremony held April 2025, saying the mistake produced a second, weak set of keys that was published to browser trust lists instead of the intended ones. The company said its infrastructure was not compromised, that no data was breached and that none of the eight intermediates had issued end-entity certificates. Whether anyone used the keys in question is not known.

Chrome and Firefox blocked the certificates within hours of the report, Apple blocked them Monday and Microsoft on Tuesday. Mozilla removed the company’s root certificate from its trusted list, and Google said it will remove that root from Chrome in an update expected next week while it reviews eMudhra’s remaining root certificate. Go, Node.js, Python’s certifi bundle and several Linux distributions also shipped updates.

CERT-In, the country’s computer emergency response team, said it did not see any malicious use of the keys as of Wednesday.

The company said its other businesses, including digital signature and enterprise security services, continue to operate normally, and acknowledged reputational risks it cannot quantify.

Shares of ​the company fell 40% in the two days after the vulnerability was disclosed.

The post eMudhra kills its certificate business after researchers cracked its private keys in under a second appeared first on CyberScoop.

Firefox 158 Now Available With JPEG-XL Support By Default

By: BeauHD
12 October 2026 at 19:00
Firefox 158 is now available with JPEG XL image support enabled by default, making .jxl images a standard part of the browser rather than an experimental feature. The release also adds JPEG XL to Firefox's default image Accept header, improves Smart Window form filling, and brings new CSS typed-arithmetic support for developers. Phoronix reports: At long last, Firefox 158 is ready to go with JPEG-XL image support as an alternative to the likes of WebP, JPEG, PNG, and GIF. The default HTTP Accept header for image requests also now supports "image/jxl" for the JPEG-XL image format. Prior releases of Firefox had JPEG-XL gated by an experimental option. Firefox 158 also now supports filling forms faster in Smart Window when clicking into a form field or selecting Fill from sources. On the developer side, CSS typed arithmetic are now supported to use functions like calc() to divide two values of the same data type even if of different units. Developer changes and release binaries can be found at their respective links.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Firefox Touts Lower CPU Use for Large JPEGs, Faster PDF Viewer Startup (and AI Controls)

16 September 2026 at 09:04
Firefox 156 is the second release since Mozilla moved to a twice-monthly release schedule, and the blog OMG Ubuntu notes it has faster start-up times for its built-in PDF viewer and also lower CPU usage when viewing large JPEG images: In Firefox 156, the browser now uses libjpeg-turbo's IDCT scaling to reduce images during decoding, rather than loading a full-size image into memory and then shrinking it. Benchmarks from the bug report show up to 20x less memory used during very large image loading, and decoding is up to twice as fast. Since these speeds were quite fast already, there's no perceptible difference to users. Behind the scenes, it's more efficient. Firefox's built-in PDF viewer starts up to 45% faster in this release. The browser now loads the background PDF.js worker sooner, rather than launching it only when needed. Sponsored suggestions in the address bar are live for users in France, Germany and Italy (Ouais!, Juhu!, etc). These are already available in some other locales. Don't want them? Disable them via Settings > Search > Firefox Suggest > Suggestions from Sponsors. Besides that, the rest of this release is primarily bug fixes β€” worthwhile and welcome as always. And in about two weeks Firefox 157 will be released, reports PC World. "That update should add support for JPEG XL (JXL), a modern image format that offers the same quality as JPEG at a significantly smaller size. Although JPEG XL was launched in 2021, Safari is the only browser to support it yet. For a short period, Chrome also supported it, but that ended in 2022." Also, a recent Firefox blog post emphasized that it supports whatever level of AI engagement "is right for you... Because the only person telling you how much AI you need should be you." Opting out of upcoming and current AI features on your browser should not require endless navigation through multiple Settings pages. That's why Firefox offers an AI controls section within its General Settings panel. A single, easily located place where you can block current and future AI features and related pop-ups with the swipe of a toggle... For the many people who sit in the middle of the AI usage spectrum, we made sure you can opt in and out of specific features in line with your preferences. Capabilities like AI translations, image alt text in Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, and key points in link previews can all be individually switched on and off, ensuring you can enjoy such offerings on a case by case basis as it suits your needs... Smart Window is Firefox's most integrated AI experience, but that doesn't mean it compromises our commitment to choice, privacy, and transparency. Our newest window type, which we've been polishing and testing in beta, uses only the context you share with it to help you move work forward and across the finish line. When permitted by you, its built-in, AI-powered assistant can work directly with your open tabs and browsing history to connect the dots. This means comparing information, generating recommendations, summarizing pages, and planning projects without having to feed every crumb of context from your previous and current browsing activity each time you enter a new prompt. And if you want to block Google's AI Overviews, there's over 100 extensions to choose from.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Firefox 153.0.3 out

4 August 2026 at 13:42
The latest release of Firefox 153.0.3 includes several enhancements: Smart Window includes: The suggestion list now shows more results, making it easier to find history and switch to open tabs. (Bug 2019042) The assistant can now answer questions directly using web search results from Exa, instead of handing off to a search engine. (Bug 2046183,Β Bug […]

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, March 2026 Edition

10 March 2026 at 20:32

Microsoft Corp. today pushed security updates to fix at least 77 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. There are no pressing β€œzero-day” flaws this month (compared to February’s five zero-day treat), but as usual some patches may deserve more rapid attention from organizations using Windows. Here are a few highlights from this month’s Patch Tuesday.

Image: Shutterstock, @nwz.

Two of the bugs Microsoft patched today were publicly disclosed previously. CVE-2026-21262 is a weakness that allows an attacker to elevate their privileges on SQL Server 2016 and later editions.

β€œThis isn’t just any elevation of privilege vulnerability, either; the advisory notes that an authorized attacker can elevate privileges to sysadmin over a network,” Rapid7’s Adam Barnett said. β€œThe CVSS v3 base score of 8.8 is just below the threshold for critical severity, since low-level privileges are required. It would be a courageous defender who shrugged and deferred the patches for this one.”

The other publicly disclosed flaw is CVE-2026-26127, a vulnerability in applications running on .NET. Barnett said the immediate impact of exploitation is likely limited to denial of service by triggering a crash, with the potential for other types of attacks during a service reboot.

It would hardly be a proper Patch Tuesday without at least one critical Microsoft Office exploit, and this month doesn’t disappoint. CVE-2026-26113 and CVE-2026-26110 are both remote code execution flaws that can be triggered just by viewing a booby-trapped message in the Preview Pane.

Satnam Narang at Tenable notes that just over half (55%) of all Patch Tuesday CVEs this month are privilege escalation bugs, and of those, a half dozen were rated β€œexploitation more likely” β€” across Windows Graphics Component, Windows Accessibility Infrastructure, Windows Kernel, Windows SMB Server and Winlogon. These include:

–CVE-2026-24291: Incorrect permission assignments within the Windows Accessibility Infrastructure to reach SYSTEM (CVSS 7.8)
–CVE-2026-24294: Improper authentication in the core SMB component (CVSS 7.8)
–CVE-2026-24289: High-severity memory corruption and race condition flaw (CVSS 7.8)
–CVE-2026-25187: Winlogon process weakness discovered by Google Project Zero (CVSS 7.8).

Ben McCarthy, lead cyber security engineer at Immersive, called attention to CVE-2026-21536, a critical remote code execution bug in a component called the Microsoft Devices Pricing Program. Microsoft has already resolved the issue on their end, and fixing it requires no action on the part of Windows users. But McCarthy says it’s notable as one of the first vulnerabilities identified by an AI agent and officially recognized with a CVE attributed to the Windows operating system. It was discovered by XBOW, a fully autonomous AI penetration testing agent.

XBOW has consistently ranked at or near the top of the Hacker One bug bounty leaderboard for the past year. McCarthy said CVE-2026-21536 demonstrates how AI agents can identify critical 9.8-rated vulnerabilities without access to source code.

β€œAlthough Microsoft has already patched and mitigated the vulnerability, it highlights a shift toward AI-driven discovery of complex vulnerabilities at increasing speed,” McCarthy said. β€œThis development suggests AI-assisted vulnerability research will play a growing role in the security landscape.”

Microsoft earlier provided patches to address nine browser vulnerabilities, which are not included in the Patch Tuesday count above. In addition, Microsoft issued a crucial out-of-band (emergency) update on March 2 for Windows Server 2022 to address a certificate renewal issue with passwordless authentication technology Windows Hello for Business.

Separately, Adobe shipped updates to fix 80 vulnerabilities β€” some of them critical in severity β€” in a variety of products, including Acrobat and Adobe Commerce. Mozilla Firefox v. 148.0.2 resolves three high severity CVEs.

For a complete breakdown of all the patches Microsoft released today, check out the SANS Internet Storm Center’s Patch Tuesday post. Windows enterprise admins who wish to stay abreast of any news about problematic updates, AskWoody.com is always worth a visit. Please feel free to drop a comment below if you experience any issues apply this month’s patches.

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