It's been a while since I had anything good to say about Mozilla but I think this qualifies as pretty positive.
A recent Mozilla Wiki entry reveals that Mozilla plans to add contextual identities to the Firefox web browser which allow users of the browser to separate certain data types from each other.
This would benefit Firefox users in several ways, for instance by allowing them to sign in to web services at the same time or by using custom identities for select websites only to block the service from tracking users across the Internet.
While this can be done with multiple Firefox profiles as well, one benefit of contextual identities is that they run under a single profile.
What this means is that you can switch between contexts in the same browsing session and window which cannot be done using profiles.
Certain add-ons such as Cookie Swap or Multifox support that as well, but they limit their functionality to cookies while Mozilla's implementation plans to go beyond that to cover other use cases.
I was going to throw a little bit of snark down here but I think I'll just go ahead and be happy and let you lot do the cynical thing today.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @11:13PM
Too bad for them that I'm already using Pale Moon.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @11:15PM
Comodo IceDragon [comodo.com]
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @11:37PM
You don't belong here, Windows user.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday September 01 2015, @11:57PM
Have you read the terms and conditions as well as their distribution agreement? Screw that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @12:04AM
What's the issue?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @12:19AM
Even though Pale Moon is open source and the source is supplied under the Mozilla Public License, redistribution of the Pale Moon binaries is limited by certain conditions under a proprietary license by Moonchild Productions, as permitted under 3.2b of the MPL v2.0. This has been required because of, among other things, the increasing number of rogue/altered copies and people taking advantage of the free availability of the browser to monetize upon, which is against Pale Moon's principles of free software.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by NickFortune on Wednesday September 02 2015, @09:48AM
Seems to be the same trademark restrictions the Mozilla have (and which caused the iceweasel fork).
Not a big deal, really. Certainly nothing that would keep me using Firefox :)
http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7818 [palemoon.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Gravis on Wednesday September 02 2015, @01:20AM
from: https://www.comodo.com/repository/privacy-policy.php [comodo.com]
Product Download
Downloading a product will often require the input of personal information. This information will be used by Comodo or its affiliates to contact the customer about Comodo's products and services, including product updates and associated promotional material. This information may also be used as collated general demographic information to improve Comodo's products and services.
do you really want to some jackasses calling and emailing you?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @01:23AM
No I don't. That's why I leave the completely optional email box blank when I run Comodo Setup, and they have never ever contacted me.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @12:17AM
I think Pale Moon has the same problems as Firefox where security like that is concerned though. I'm not sure since I haven't used it in a while; I actually went back to standard old Firefox and just deal with the problems as they come.
Anyway, the problem is that even if you have the browser set to delete all of your history when you close it, a ton of sekret info still gets stored in those *.sqlite files in the profile directory.
I solved it the same way I solved the KDE history logging issues: mount my home directory from RAM (tmpfs) every time I boot, copy over clean .kde4 and .mozilla directories (and other things), and symlink nonvolatile stuff like my ~/src directories. Fresh home directory every time I boot, with no record keeping and no need to worry about Firefox's history-saving bugs.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @11:13PM
[Now what starts with the letter C?
Cookie starts with C
Let's think of other things
That starts with C
Oh, who cares about the other things?]
C is for cookie, that's good enough for me
C is for cookie, that's good enough for me
C is for cookie, that's good enough for me
Oh, cookie, cookie, cookie starts with C
C is for cookie, that's good enough for me
C is for cookie, that's good enough for me
C is for cookie, that's good enough for me
Oh, cookie, cookie, cookie starts with C
[Hey you know what?
A round cookie with one bite out of it
Looks like a C
A round donut with one bite out of it
Also looks like a C
But it is not as good as a cookie
Oh and the moon sometimes looks like a C
But you can't eat that, so ... ]
C is for cookie, that's good enough for me, yeah!
C is for cookie, that's good enough for me
C is for cookie, that's good enough for me
Oh, cookie, cookie, cookie starts with C, yeah!
Cookie, cookie, cookie starts with C, oh boy!
Cookie, cookie, cookie starts with C!
(Cookie Monster eats the cookie)
Umm-umm-umm-umm-umm
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday September 02 2015, @01:39AM
In every browser there is a way to delete cookies after every session. In most browsers (at least Pale Moon and Dragon and Opera) you can block third party cookies, if not within the settings, then by use of add-ons. If you can't remember all your passwords you belong to way too many sites that require log-in.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 5, Informative) by MrNemesis on Wednesday September 02 2015, @06:15AM
Even better than blocking third party cookies and deleting cookies at the end of a session is deleting cookies from non-whitelisted domains as soon as you close the last tab [mozilla.org].
"To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @01:57PM
If you're remembering passwords instead of managing them, your length and complexity is almost certainly lacking, xkcd notwithstanding. Who are you to say how many different sites people chat/shop/share content at (or how many accounts per site they have)? That kind of practice strongly encourages the Internet oligopoly situation we have with amazon, Google, Facebook, etc, and beyond that doesn't really begin to aid security except by random accident.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @11:27PM
For once a mozilla improvement that most will agree is an actual improvement!
I hope they make it smart enough to automatically switch containers based on website - so when I go to twitter it automatically kicks off my twitter container, go to espn and it automatically kicks off my espn container. Even nicer would be if it could auto-create/auto-destroy containers as I browse sort of like the way the self-destructing cookies add-on works.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @11:45PM
I agree with submitter. Mod me up for agreeing with the crowd. Mod me up.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday September 01 2015, @11:46PM
Can't, I ran out of mod points.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @11:54PM
> I agree with submitter. Mod me up for agreeing with the crowd. Mod me up.
Well, he did ask for snark and you provided, so ... points?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Wednesday September 02 2015, @12:35AM
So as I understand it, the basic idea is to blend multiple profiles into a single profile, yet cause that to behave like multiple profiles. It isn't clear to me the mechanism put in place to do this, but it seems like a big risk would be a user accidentally leaking data from one profile to the other, for example, by typing a porn search term into a profile set up for recipes and not noticing until the recipe profile is polluted. Or vice versa. Of course the same can be true when swapping profiles, but I would think it sort of obvious where you are by the types of bookmarks in the toolbar.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @01:24AM
> Of course the same can be true when swapping profiles, but I would think it sort of obvious where you are by the types of bookmarks in the toolbar.
I have over ten different profiles and bookmarks on the toolbar is not enough to keep it sorted. I use an extension that lets me put arbitrary text in the titlebar - so my facebook profile says FACEBOOK, my ebay profile says EBAY, my banking profile says MONEY, etc I also install radically different themes in each profile so that there is a glaringly obvious color-scheme difference. I've been thinking about setting some higher-security profiles to reject/ignore URLs that aren't whitelisted for that profile - I assume there must be an extension to that, haven't really looked though.
The example shown in the story isn't as drastic - puts a tag at the end of the URL bar with different text and the container's name. Speaking from experience, that definitely won't be sufficient for anyone making heavy use of these containers.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Wednesday September 02 2015, @01:47AM
Presumably, they'll do it based upon login and website. Which would probably be a lot easier to code and a lot less likely to have things accidentally leaking due to user error.
I'm not sure how they'll handle things like using a FB log in on 3rd party sites though.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tibman on Wednesday September 02 2015, @01:22PM
They have a new "Forget" button you can use. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/forget-button-quickly-delete-your-browsing-history [mozilla.org]
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by mtrycz on Wednesday September 02 2015, @08:39AM
People hating on Mozilla are just a bunch of ungrateful pricks.
Thank you for your attention.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2015, @12:07PM
Well yes and no. They've done a great job in the past but recently they've made some less than stellar choices, e.g. including the DRM in the browser. They're capable of doing stupid things, just like the rest of us. And when they do, they should get the flak for it.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by urza9814 on Wednesday September 02 2015, @01:49PM
Mozilla is the only major browser vendor that doesn't also own an advertising network. And it's pretty evident from the features they've been coming up with lately. Protect the users while slightly sabotaging the competition's revenue stream. Well played indeed :)