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- MCP server with stdio transport for local use
- Search episodes, transcripts, hosts, and series
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Episode: 2985
Title: HPR2985: Firefox Update
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2985/hpr2985.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 14:19:20
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 2985 for Friday, 10 January 2020.
Today's show is entitled Firefox Update.
And as part of the series' Privacy and Security, it is the 170th anniversary show of Ahuka
and is about 17 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summer is
some recent updates to Firefox that had useful features.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode.
And what we want to talk about today is Firefox.
Now, Firefox has been carving out a spot on the internet as a privacy-respecting alternative to Google Chrome.
As I write this, they have published a web page under the title 2019 Firefox Flashback.
Interesting.
This is making fun of Google's many offers to show you what you did all year because, of course, that is how Google operates.
They keep all of the data, but give you a chance every once in a while to look at it.
Facebook does much the same.
But what is Firefox doing here?
Well, if you click on the page and I have a link in the show notes for it, the text that comes up reads,
we actually have no idea what you did online this year, and it's going to stay that way.
It's kind of our whole thing.
There's a picture of a red panda below, though, if you want to scroll down for it.
In the meantime, this seems like an opportunity to mention that we've made a privacy promise.
Take less, keep it safe, no secrets, learn more about what privacy means to us.
And let's click through to another page, and if you click through, it basically repeats those three principles.
Take less, keep it safe, no secrets.
Okay, that's nice.
And I've always found Firefox more privacy respecting than Google.
But then I got my latest updated version of Firefox.
I went from 70.0.0.1 to 71.0.
And it showed me a page called What's New With Firefox, which started off by talking about creating a sync account with them.
So what is this about?
I know Chrome is constantly pushing me to log into a Chrome account, which I resist, and why is Firefox any better?
I decided it was worth taking a look.
So the first thing they say is no account required, but you might want one.
Okay, and they go on to say, the Firefox browser collects so little data about you, we don't even require your email address.
But when you use it to create a Firefox account, we can protect your privacy across more of your online life.
Now, under that, they list five items.
Firefox Monitor, about which they say, have at least one company looking out for your data instead of leaking it.
Firefox Lockwise, never forget, reset, or travel without your passwords again.
Facebook Container, get a container to keep Facebook out of your business, pocket, trade, clickbait, and fake news for quality content, and then finally, Firefox Send.
Send huge files to anyone you want with self-destructing links.
Well, okay, now on to what all of this means.
First, what we need to understand is that there is an inescapable tension between privacy and convenience.
Google has been successful with many users because it is so convenient to use.
It uses what it learns about you to customize your search results to show the things it believes you are most likely to be looking for, as an example.
It adds to this data by providing you with very convenient email.
A lot of people appreciate the convenience and don't care too much about Google having all of this data.
So, for Firefox, competing with Google means that it has to offer some degree of convenience, and that does require collecting some data, and they're quite open about it.
To read more about what they collect, there is a privacy policy page, again, link in the show notes.
And the one I'm looking at right now is dated October 31st, 2019, so it's fairly current.
And the claim they make there is, we strive to collect only what we need to improve Firefox for everyone.
I think they're making a good, responsible disclosure.
If you go to the page, they go into some detail about what data they collect.
I'm not going to repeat all of it here.
You can look it up for yourself if you're so inclined.
Again, I have put a link in the show notes.
Most of my shows, there's links in the show notes for the things that I talk about.
The point is that any usable browser is probably collecting some kinds of information, so you need to find a trade-off you can accept.
Now, as to the account, there is more detailed information at a page on mozilla.org, again, link in the show notes.
And they go on to say there are three things required to set up an account.
An email address, that's basically your username, although they use the address, a password, and your age.
Now, I think the age part is because of laws limiting the ages at which you can legally protect information, so as to protect young children.
Here in the United States, for instance, we have the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, and I imagine European Union has some similar laws as do many other countries.
But that's all that is necessary.
Optional data, again, optional, includes a picture, a display name, a secondary email, and two-step authentication.
I'm a big fan of two-step authentication, so if you want to have good security, take a minute to set that up.
Now, what do you get for doing this?
The ability to have things like your bookmarks, open tabs, and so on follow you from device to device when you sign in.
That is where the convenience part of the trade-off comes.
Now, you don't need to do any of this, but having it can make your life easier.
And if you are a multiple-device person, in my case, I have several desktops, a couple of laptops, and a phone.
Well, it can be quite handy.
So, I set up my account as advertised, which then took me to a screen where I could sign in to different Firefox products.
Now, note, this is called Firefox Sync.
So, to get the maximum benefit you need to go to each of your devices, open Firefox and log in to your account.
And here's what they will sync between your different devices by default.
Bookmarks, history, open tabs, logins and passwords, addresses, add-ons, preferences.
But note that there is also a change button that lets you remove any of these that you don't want Firefox to sync.
So, you have reasonably granular control over this process.
Now, as to the products, first one, Firefox Monitor.
And as you might think from the name, this is a monitoring service.
You log in with your Firefox Sync credentials, and it reports back with how many email addresses are being monitored.
How many times those addresses showed up in breaches of other sites, and whether or not the password was also obtained.
Well, I created my account with one of my email addresses, so it only showed one being monitored, and that one was involved in three breaches.
The worst, of course, was the Adobe Breach from 2013, which exposed my password as well, and which, of course, has since been changed.
But there were a couple of 2019 breaches. For each, you can click through to get more information, and what I did, the source of the data, was not surprisingly the Have I Been Poned website.
In addition, I received an email with the same information.
So, useful. At the bottom of the page, there's a place to enter additional email addresses, so I did.
This triggers the sending of an authentication email to the added address, which means I cannot monitor someone else's address unless they have given me access to it.
They send you the email. There is a button inside a link that you click that verifies the address, and then you get an email back telling you about any breaches that this new address has been involved in.
Now, all in all, this adds some convenience. You know, obviously you could get all of the same information by going to the Have I Been Poned website.
But I think what Firefox does here is it lets you collect multiple email addresses in a single place and get automatic emails and things like that.
You know, that's valuable. Okay. So, good on Firefox. Good on the Mozilla folks for that one.
Firefox lock wise. This is a password manager that is built into Firefox.
So, it's a competitor to applications like one pass and last pass, though at this point, it is still pretty much a work in progress.
Now, as someone who is happily using a paid family account for last pass, I won't be switching anytime soon.
If you don't already have a password manager, though, using this is at least an improvement.
Password managers are the key to having long and strong passwords that provide essential security, so you should really be using one of some kind.
And since this comes free with your sync account, it's a great way to get started.
And then, you know, once you get used to doing it, you might want to take a look at one of the others.
The thing I like about last pass and the family account is that my wife and I can very easily share data back and forth, and that's something I want to do.
Now, Facebook Container. This is a add-on or extension to Firefox to help you avoid being tracked all over the web by Facebook.
Facebook has this neat little trick of putting a cookie into your browser that is going to report back to them on any other website you visit with that browser.
They shouldn't be able to do that.
That should get them onto Santa's naughty list, but stopping them is a little bit difficult.
So, with the Facebook Container add-on, what it will do is it will first log you out of all Facebook pages.
Then, when you open Facebook again, you'll be in a Container, which is a tab that is isolated from other tabs.
So, if you visit some other site in some other tab of the browser, Facebook won't know anything about it.
Now, anything you do within Facebook, of course they're going to know.
So, if you click a like button, if you follow something, if you comment on something in Facebook, any of those kinds of things,
well, you know, they're going to know about that.
And if you're at some other website and there's a Facebook like button at the bottom and you click on it, they're going to get that.
So, you know, it doesn't eliminate all of the flow of information, but at least stops that sneaky one.
You have control over the actions you take, at least.
So, I think this Facebook Container is very useful, and I think a lot of people might want to take a look at that.
Okay, the next product, they mentioned something called Pocket.
Now, the Pocket was an independent product.
I remember getting it when I first got an Android phone. I found it was handy.
And it got bought up, apparently, by Mozilla, and they've integrated it nicely into the browser.
And the idea of Pocket is that it lets you save web pages to read later.
And that can be handy.
You know, sometimes you're in the middle of working on a project of some kind, and you run across webpage or a reference to a webpage, and you think,
oh, I really want to check that out, but I don't have time right now.
Well, that's exactly what Pocket was designed to do.
You can click a, there's a little button in the address bar of the browser, and you click it, and Pocket pops up, and it says, you know, we'll save this address for you.
And you can also give it a one or two tags to help you find it later.
And then when you want to read it later, you go to the library icon on the bookmark bar, and one of the things is, you know, you can see a list of all of the things you've saved to Pocket.
Now, you have to have an account on Pocket.
You can get a free one.
They offer premium accounts.
You know, my guess is most people will be fine with the free account, even though it will have some ads, but, you know, you can decide for yourself if you're interested in this, whether you want to spend money to get rid of ads.
There's a few other things, but, you know, most of what you want, you can get with the free account.
Last of the products they mentioned is Firefox Send, which I think can be very handy.
You can upload a file of anywhere between one and two and a half gigabytes, and in return, you get a link you can send to a recipient.
The file is encrypted. You can password protect it. You can set how long before the link expires.
And so the obvious use case is sending a file that is too large for email.
Either you don't have a site of your own to upload it to, or you don't want to take all the time of doing the encryption and all of that.
This is actually very similar to some stuff I've done in a corporate environment where you need to send sensitive data across the firewall to someone on the outside.
And legally, you can get in a huge trouble if you don't take the appropriate steps to protect that data.
So here in the United States, the health data is covered under something called HIPAA, where financial data might be covered under some of the consumer protection laws and things like that.
So you have to be pretty careful with this kind of stuff.
So this looks like a very useful sort of thing.
And so with that, what I want to do is sign off, and as usual, remind everyone to support FreeSoftware. Bye-bye.
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