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LastPass Premium now costs twice as much
LastPass announced a restructuring of its plan pricing and packaging today and the cost of its premium tier is doubling to $24 per year. Some features are also being taken away from the free plan. Those include unlimited sharing and emergency access, both of which are now only available to LastPass Premium and Families subscribers.
Mozilla's new Firefox features improve browsing on iOS and Android
Firefox is adding a few quality-of-life features to its mobile browsers. To celebrate hitting one million downloads in the month since it launched, the minimalistic, privacy-intensive Firefox Focus for Android now lets users download files, supports full-screen video and enables opening the browser right from notifications.
Privacy-minded Firefox Focus browser comes to Android
If you liked the privacy-centric surfing of Mozilla's Firefox Focus browser but wished it were available for your Google-powered phone, you're in luck. Mozilla has released an Android version of Focus that, like its iOS counterpart, blocks ad trackers to both limit nosy marketers and (in some cases) speed up browsing. You can also slap an "erase" button to remove what few traces of your activity are left.
Firefox finally unveils its faster, more memory-efficient browser
The team behind open-source browser Firefox has released a much-awaited version that promises to be faster and less of a memory hog. Version 54 is the first to use "multiple process" tech that has been available for a while now on Chrome, Safari, Edge and other browsers. Now, Firefox tabs running heavy, complex websites will impact other tabs less, making the web run better overall on Windows, Mac and mobile devices.
Russian malware link hid in a comment on Britney Spears' Instagram
Instagram is on its way to hitting a billion users this year and with that kind of popularity comes a lot of traffic. But lurking among all of many, many harmless comments that get posted each day, there's also the occasional post instructing Russian malware how to get in touch with its controllers. Because of course there is.
Google is fixing a Chrome flaw that makes phishing easy
As we've seen in the past, a strong password doesn't automatically make people safe online. Often, a specially-crafted email is all that it takes for someone to hand over their digital life to a malicious third party. Although email services are doing more to filter phishing emails before they reach your inbox, a decades-old unicode technique is making it hard for users to determine whether a destination is legitimate. Fortunately, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer and Safari are immune and Google is just days away from patching the flaw.
Firefox 'performance' tab will curb its RAM hunger
Despite their popularity, both Firefox and Chrome have reputations as resource hogs that chew up big chunks of your RAM. In the case of Firefox, some of this is unfair -- parent Mozilla says part of the problem is that many users are running older machines without a lot of memory in the first place. To help those folks, the developers are working on a new feature called "performance" that will let you fine-tune the browser if you're running a PC that's less than state-of-the-art.
Critical security flaws found in LastPass on Chrome, Firefox (updated)
Last year Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy quickly found some "obvious" security problems in the popular password manager LastPass, and now he's done it again. Last week Ormandy mentioned finding an exploit in one version of its extension for Firefox, before following that up with a new bug that affected both Chrome and Firefox, and finally a third vulnerability that could allow "stealing passwords for any domain."
Netflix launches support for Firefox on Linux
Linux users have a new option if they want to watch Netflix -- the streaming service is now compatible with Firefox for the platform. Before this, only Google Chrome could play videos from the website outright. There was even a time when users had to make sure they're using a version of Chrome with the required Encrypted Media Extension (EME) support. Sure, they could trick the platform into thinking they're on Chrome when they're actually using Firefox. That's easy enough to set up for someone with a Linux PC. But this development means there are no extra steps to take to enjoy Netflix on Mozilla's browser.
Mozilla is bringing modern video games to your browser
Modern 3D video games require a ton of processing power to look good and respond to player input quickly. That's why most of the web-based games you see today are at best stripped down versions of their PC or console counterparts. The team behind the Firefox web browser would like to see that change, however. Mozilla released a version of the browser that includes WebAssembly - a new technology that enables high-resource apps like games, computer-aided design, video and image editing and scientific visualization to run in a browser almost as fast as they do on your local computer. It will also speed up existing web apps that use JavaScript.
Firefox adds the ability to snooze tabs on Test Pilot
It probably happens quite often: you come across an interesting piece, but you're too busy to actually read it. While you can always bookmark a web page, Firefox's latest Test Pilot experiment can help make sure you'll see it again when you do have time for it. The experimental feature called SnoozeTabs dismisses any tab you want and asks you to set the time when you want it to reappear on your browser.
Mozilla shutters its connected devices division
Mozilla will close its gadgets division, laying off some 50 employees working on products for connected devices (like smart TVs, for example) in the process. While the company wouldn't comment on the specific number of employees affected, it offered the following statement:
Firefox will support Windows XP and Vista until September 2017
Numerous web browsers have already stopped supporting Windows XP and Vista, but not Firefox. To this day, Mozilla's latest software can work with your decade-old PC. However, even that team has its limits -- it's phasing out support for XP and Vista starting next year. Mozilla will start by moving users on these operating systems to the Extended Support Release in March 2017, limiting them to feature updates that can be "several cycles" behind the curve. And while the company plans to unveil a final support end date in the middle of that year, it'll effectively cut the cord in September, when it stops delivering security updates.
Firefox's multi-process mode is coming to more users soon
Over the last few months, the developers of Firefox have been slowly rolling out technology that will bring the browser up to par with competitors when it comes to speed, security and reliability. Others like Chrome, Safari and Edge are already designed using multi-process, to separate tabs, add-ons and even rendering from the main browser. As it stands, Firefox 50 users with extensions approved for multi-process are already using the technology, which the team says has increased responsiveness by 400 percent, and 700 percent while pages are loading.
Most Firefox users are running Windows 7 on dated PCs
Mozilla is helping developers figure out if their game or app will run well for average and not just hardcore users. The Firefox Hardware Report, using data from its anonymized Telemetry app, shows what OS and hardware folks are using, along with popular screen resolutions and other information. "Existing hardware reports (such as those from Valve and Unity) are excellent, but represent a different group of hardware users than the majority of people who use the web," the organization says.
Firefox Focus brings easy private browsing to your iPhone
Many modern smartphone web browsers have private modes. They're rarely turned on by default, however, and you may have to wade through settings just to make sure you're a ghost online. Mozilla wants to try something different: it's launching a browser for iOS that revolves around privacy. Firefox Focus isn't very sophisticated (you don't even get multiple tabs), but it blocks ad, analytics and social trackers by default, with simple sliders used to turn tracking on and off. Also, see that conspicuous "erase" button up top? Hit that and it immediately wipes your current browser history -- all the evidence of your gift shopping goes away in a moment.
Browser add-on caught selling identifiable web histories
When you include the word "trust" in your internet company's name, you're under more pressure than most to respect the privacy of your customers... and one firm is learning that lesson the hard way. Web of Trust Services' browser add-on has left the extension libraries for Chrome, Firefox and Opera after a German broadcaster's investigation revealed that Web of Trust was collecting and selling users' web histories to third parties. While the company said that it was anonymizing data, that didn't hold up under scrutiny. The broadcaster managed to identify over 50 people from sample data, and uncovered everything from active police investigations to the implied sexual orientation of a judge.
Firefox adds a 'Narrate' mode to take your eyes off the screen
Mozilla's latest Firefox adds a couple new and refined features intended to improve the time you spend reading online. While Firefox released an ad-stripping, layout-simplifying Reader Mode way back in 2012, the newest release brings a new "Narrate" feature and additional tweaks for a better reading (or listening) experience.
Google Safe Browsing makes accessing The Pirate Bay harder
Guess what? There's another speedbump to browsing The Pirate Bay. Rather than internet providers blocking access to the URL (currently thepiratebay.org), certain web browsers are flagging torrent download pages with variations on the following message: "The site ahead contains harmful programs Attackers on thepiratebay.org might attempt to trick you into installing programs that harm your browsing experience (for example, by changing your homepage or showing extra ads on sites you visit.)"
Microsoft is still bragging about Edge's battery superiority
Microsoft says it has made the Edge browser on the Windows 10 Anniversary Update even more efficient than the previous version, and is again boasting about its performance compared to rivals. When streaming Netflix, the new tweaks will help your Windows 10 PC last 45 percent longer than with Chrome, and 69 percent longer if you're using Firefox. For general purpose browsing, PCs running Edge last 24 to 43 percent longer than with other browsers, according to Redmond.
