Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland wonders if "gifts for geeks" is the next big consumer demographic: For this year's holiday celebrations, Hallmark made a special Christmas tree ornament, a tiny monitor displaying screens from the classic video game "Oregon Trail." ("Recall the fun of leading a team of oxen and a wagon loaded with provisions from Missouri to the West....") Top sites and major brands are now targeting the "tech" demographic — including programmers, sysadmins and even vintage game enthusiasts — and when Hallmark and Amazon are chasing the same customers as GitHub and Copilot, you know there's been a strange yet meaningful shift in the culture...

While AI was conquering the world, GitHub published its "Ultimate gift guide for the developer in your life" just as soon as doors opened on Black Friday. So if you're wondering, "Should I push to production on New Year's Eve?" GitHub recommends their new "GitHub Copilot Amazeball," which it describes as "GitHub's magical collectible ready to weigh in on your toughest calls !" Copilot isn't involved — questions are randomly matched to the answers printed on the side of a triangle-shaped die floating in water. "[Y]ou'll get answers straight from the repo of destiny with a simple shake," GitHub promises — just like the Magic 8 Ball of yore. "Get your hands on this must-have collectible and enjoy the cosmic guidance — no real context switching required!" And GitHub's "Gift Guide for Developers" also suggests GitHub-branded ugly holiday socks and keyboard keycaps with GitHub's mascots.

But GitHub isn't the only major tech site with a shopping page targeting the geek demographic. Firefox is selling merchandise with its new mascot. Even the Free Software Foundation has its own shop, with Emacs T-shirts, GNU beanies and a stuffed baby gnu ("One of our most sought-after items ... "). Plus an FSF-branded antisurveillance webcam guard.

Maybe Dr. Seuss can write a new book: "How the Geeks Stole Christmas." Because this newfound interest in the geek demographic seems to have spread to the largest sites of all. Google searches on "Gifts for Programmers" now point to a special page on Amazon with suggestions like Linux crossword puzzles. But what coder could resist a book called " Cooking for Programmers? "Each recipe is written as source code in a different programming language," explains the book's description... The book is filled with colorful recipes — thanks to syntax highlighting, which turns the letters red, blue and green. There are also real cooking instructions, but presented as an array of strings, with both ingredients and instructions ultimately logged as messages to the console...

Some programmers might prefer their shirts from FreeWear.org, which donates part of the proceeds from every sale to its corresponding FOSS project or organization. (There are T-shirts for Linux, Gnome and the C programming language — and even one making a joke about how hard it is to exit Vim.)

But maybe it all proves that there's something for everybody. That's the real heartwarming message behind these extra-geeky Christmas gifts — that in the end, tech is, after all, still a community, with its own hallowed traditions and shared celebrations.

It's just that instead of singing Christmas carols, we make jokes about Vim.

An anonymous reader shared this report from 9to5Linux: After the controversial news shared earlier this week by Mozilla's new CEO that Firefox will evolve into "a modern AI browser," the company now revealed it is working on an AI kill switch for the open-source web browser...

What was not made clear [in Tuesday's comments by new Mozilla CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo] is that Firefox will also ship with an AI kill switch that will let users completely disable all the AI features that are included in Firefox. Mozilla shared this important update earlier Thursday to make it clear to everyone that Firefox will still be a trusted web browser.... "...that's how seriously and absolutely we're taking this," said Firefox developer Jake Archibald on Mastodon.

In addition, Jake Archibald said that all the AI features that are or will be included in Firefox will also be opt-in. "I think there are some grey areas in what 'opt-in' means to different people (e.g. is a new toolbar button opt-in?), but the kill switch will absolutely remove all that stuff, and never show it in future. That's unambiguous..."

Mozilla has contacted me shortly after writing the story to confirm that the "AI Kill Switch" will be implemented in Q1 2026."
The article also cites this quote left by Mozilla's new CEO on Reddit:

"Rest assured, Firefox will always remain a browser built around user control. That includes AI. You will have a clear way to turn AI features off. A real kill switch is coming in Q1 of 2026. Choice matters and demonstrating our commitment to choice is how we build and maintain trust."

Mozilla has named Anthony Enzor-DeMeo as its new chief executive, promoting the executive who has spent the past year leading the Firefox browser team and who now plans to make AI central to the company's future.

Enzor-DeMeo announced on Tuesday that an "AI Mode" is coming to Firefox next year. The feature will let users choose from multiple AI models rather than being locked into a single provider. Some options will be open-source models, others will be private "Mozilla-hosted cloud options," and the company also plans to integrate models from major AI companies. Mozilla itself will not train its own large language model.

"We're not incentivized to push one model or the other," Enzor-DeMeo told The Verge. Firefox currently has about 200 million monthly users, a fraction of Chrome's roughly 4 billion, though Enzor-DeMeo insists mobile usage is growing at a decent clip.

He takes over from interim CEO Laura Chambers, who led the company through a major antitrust case and what Mozilla describes as "double-digit mobile growth" in Firefox. Chambers is returning to the Mozilla board of directors. The new CEO has outlined three priorities: ensuring all products give users control over AI features including the ability to turn them off, building a business model around transparent monetization, and expanding Firefox into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Mozilla VPN integration is planned for the browser next year.

Choosing your browser "is one of the most important digital decisions you can make, shaping how you experience the web, protect your data, and express yourself online," says the Firefox blog. They've urged readers to "take a stand for independence and control in your digital life."

But they also recently polled 8,000 adults in France, Germany, the UK and the U.S. on "how they navigate choice and control both online and offline" (attending in-person events in Chicago, Berlin, LA, and Munich, San Diego, Stuttgart): The survey, conducted by research agency YouGov, showcases a tension between people's desire to have control over their data and digital privacy, and the reality of the internet today — a reality defined by Big Tech platforms that make it difficult for people to exercise meaningful choice online:


— Only 16% feel in control of their privacy choices (highest in Germany at 21%)

— 24% feel it's "too late" because Big Tech already has too much control or knows too much about them. And 36% said the feeling of Big Tech companies knowing too much about them is frustrating — highest among respondents in the U.S. (43%) and the UK (40%)

— Practices respondents said frustrated them were Big Tech using their data to train AI without their permission (38%) and tracking their data without asking (47%; highest in U.S. — 55% and lowest in France — 39%)


And from our existing research on browser choice, we know more about how defaults that are hard to change and confusing settings can bury alternatives, limiting people's ability to choose for themselves — the real problem that fuels these dynamics.

Taken together our new and existing insights could also explain why, when asked which actions feel like the strongest expressions of their independence online, choosing not to share their data (44%) was among the top three responses in each country (46% in the UK; 45% in the U.S.; 44% in France; 39% in Germany)... We also see a powerful signal in how people think about choosing the communities and platforms they join — for 29% of respondents, this was one of their top three expressions of independence online.
"For Firefox, community has always been at the heart of what we do," says their VP of Global Marketing, "and we'll keep fighting to put real choice and control back in people's hands so the web once again feels like it belongs to the communities that shape it."

At TwitchCon in San Diego Firefox even launched a satirical new online card game with a privacy theme called Data War.

Firefox 146 has been released with native fractional scaling support on Wayland -- finally giving Linux users crisp UI rendering. Other new additions include GPU process improvements on macOS, developer-focused CSS features, and broader access to Firefox Labs. Phoronix reports: Firefox 146 also now makes Firefox Labs available to all users, Firefox on macOS now has a dedicated GPU process by default, dropping Direct2D support on Windows, support for compressed elliptic curve points in WebCrypto, and updated the bundled Skia graphics library. Firefox 146 also has some fun developer enhancements like support for the CSS text-decoration-inset property, the @scope rule now being supported, CSS contrast-color() function being available, and several new experimental web features. The release notes and developer changes can be found at their respective links. Release binaries are available at Mozilla.org.

"Fresh from announcing it is building an AI browsing mode in Firefox and laying the groundwork for agentic interactions in the Firefox 145 release, the corp arm of Mozilla is now flexing its AI muscles in the direction of those more likely to care," writes the blog OMG Ubuntu: If you're a developer building AI agents, you can sign up to get early access to Mozilla's TABS API, a "powerful web content extraction and transformation toolkit designed specifically for AI agent builders"... The TABS API enables devs to create agents to automate web interactions, like clicking, scrolling, searching, and submitting forms "just like a human". Real-time feedback and adaptive behaviours will, Mozilla say, offer "full control of the web, without the complexity."

As TABS is not powered by a Mozilla-backed LLM you'll need to connect it to your choice of third-party LLM for any relevant processing... Developers get 1,000 requests monthly on the free tier, which seems reasonable for prototyping personal projects. Complex agentic workloads may require more. Though pricing is yet to be locked in, the TABS API website suggests it'll cost ~$5 per 1000 requests. Paid plans will offer additional features too, like lower latency and, somewhat ironically, CAPTCHA solving so AI can 'prove' it's not a robot on pages gated to prevent automated activities.

Google, OpenAI, and other major AI vendors offer their own agentic APIs. Mozilla is pitching up late, but it plans to play differently. It touts a "strong focus on data minimisation and security", with scraped data treated ephemerally — i.e., not kept. As a distinction, that matters. AI agents can be given complex online tasks that involve all sorts of personal or sensitive data being fetched and worked with.... If you're minded to make one, perhaps without a motivation to asset-strip the common good, Mozilla's TABS API look like a solid place to start.

Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: A 21 year old bug report requesting support of the XDG Base Directory specification is finally being addressed by Firefox. The Firefox 147 release should respect this XDG specification around where files should be positioned within Linux users' home directory.

The XDG Base Directory specification lays out where application data files, configuration files, cached assets, and other files and file formats should be positioned within a user's home directory and the XDG environment variables for accessing those locations. To date Firefox has just positioned all files under ~/.mozilla rather than the likes of ~/.config and ~/.local/share.

Mozilla is officially ending its partnership with Onerep after more than a year of controversy over the company's founder secretly running people-search and data-broker sites. Monitor Plus will be discontinued by December 2025, existing subscribers will receive prorated refunds, and Mozilla says it will focus on privacy tools it fully controls. KrebsOnSecurity reports: In a statement published Tuesday, Mozilla said it will soon discontinue Monitor Plus, which offered data broker site scans and automated personal data removal from Onerep. "We will continue to offer our free Monitor data breach service, which is integrated into Firefox's credential manager, and we are focused on integrating more of our privacy and security experiences in Firefox, including our VPN, for free," the advisory reads.

Mozilla said current Monitor Plus subscribers will retain full access through the wind-down period, which ends on Dec. 17, 2025. After that, those subscribers will automatically receive a prorated refund for the unused portion of their subscription. "We explored several options to keep Monitor Plus going, but our high standards for vendors, and the realities of the data broker ecosystem made it challenging to consistently deliver the level of value and reliability we expect for our users," Mozilla statement reads.

Tech entrepreneur/blogger Anil Dash has been critical of AI browsers like ChatGPT Atlas. (He's written that Atlas "substitutes its own AI-generated content for the web, but it looks like it's showing you the web," while its prompt-based/command-line interface resembles a clunky text adventure, and it's true purpose seems to be ingesting more training data.)

And at the Mozilla Festival in Spain, "Virtually everyone shared some version of what I'd articulated as the majority view on AI, which is approximately that LLMs can be interesting as a technology, but that Big Tech, and especially Big AI, are decidedly awful and people are very motivated to stop them from committing their worst harms upon the vulnerable."

But... Another reality that people were a little more quiet in acknowledging, and sometimes reluctant to engage with out loud, is the reality that hundreds of millions of people are using the major AI tools every day... I don't know why today's Firefox users, even if they're the most rabid anti-AI zealots in the world, don't say, "well, even if I hate AI, I want to make sure Firefox is good at protecting the privacy of AI users so I can recommend it to my friends and family who use AI"...

My personal wishlist would be pretty simple:

* Just give people the "shut off all AI features" button. It's a tiny percentage of people who want it, but they're never going to shut up about it, and they're convinced they're the whole world and they can't distinguish between being mad at big companies and being mad at a technology so give them a toggle switch and write up a blog post explaining how extraordinarily expensive it is to maintain a configuration option over the lifespan of a global product.

* Market Firefox as "The best AI browser for people who hate Big AI". Regular users have no idea how creepy the Big AI companies are — they've just heard their local news talk about how AI is the inevitable future. If Mozilla can warn me how to protect my privacy from ChatGPT, then it can also mention that ChatGPT tells children how to self-harm, and should be aggressive in engaging with the community on how to build tools that help mitigate those kinds of harms — how do we catalyze that innovation?

* Remind people that there isn't "a Firefox" — everyone is Firefox. Whether it's Zen, or your custom build of Firefox with your favorite extensions and skins, it's all part of the same story. Got a local LLM that runs entirely as a Firefox extension? Great! That should be one of the many Firefoxes, too. Right now, so much of the drama and heightened emotions and tension are coming from people's (well... dudes') egos about there being One True Firefox, and wanting to be the one who controls what's in that version, as an expression of one set of values. This isn't some blood-feud fork, there can just be a lot of different choices for different situations. Make it all work.

Mozilla announced on Thursday that it is building an AI Window for Firefox, a new opt-in browsing mode that will let users interact with an AI assistant and chatbot. The feature will become one of three browsing experiences in Firefox alongside the existing classic and private windows. Users will be able to select which AI model they want to use in the AI Window, according to a post on the Mozilla Connect forum.

The company opened a waitlist for users who want to receive updates and be among the first to test the feature. Mozilla described the AI Window as an "intelligent and user-controlled space" that it is developing in the open through community feedback. Users who try the feature and decide against it can switch it off entirely.

BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla has released Firefox 145.0, and the standout change in this version is the official end of support for 32-bit Linux systems. Users on 32-bit distributions will no longer receive updates and are being encouraged to switch to the 64-bit build to continue getting security patches and new features. While most major Linux distributions have already moved past 32-bit support, this shift will still impact older hardware users and lightweight community projects that have held on to 32-bit for the sake of performance or preservation.

The rest of the update introduces features such as built-in PDF comments, improved fingerprinting resistance for private browsing, tab group previews, password management in the sidebar, and minor UI refinements. Firefox also now compresses local translation models with Zstandard to reduce storage needs. But the end of 32-bit Linux support is the change that will leave the biggest mark, signaling another step toward a web ecosystem firmly centered on 64-bit computing.

"The Firefox brand is getting a refresh and you get the first look," says a new web page at Firefox.com. "Kit's our new mascot and your new companion through an internet that's private, open and actually yours."

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli believes the new mascot "is meant to communicate that message in a warmer, more relatable way."

And Firefox is already selling shirts with Kit over the pocket (as well as stickers)...

For more than a decade, the nonprofit Common Crawl "has been scraping billions of webpages to build a massive archive of the internet," notes the Atlantic, making it freely available for research. "In recent years, however, this archive has been put to a controversial purpose: AI companies including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Nvidia, Meta, and Amazon have used it to train large language models.

"In the process, my reporting has found, Common Crawl has opened a back door for AI companies to train their models with paywalled articles from major news websites. And the foundation appears to be lying to publishers about this — as well as masking the actual contents of its archives..." Common Crawl's website states that it scrapes the internet for "freely available content" without "going behind any 'paywalls.'" Yet the organization has taken articles from major news websites that people normally have to pay for — allowing AI companies to train their LLMs on high-quality journalism for free. Meanwhile, Common Crawl's executive director, Rich Skrenta, has publicly made the case that AI models should be able to access anything on the internet. "The robots are people too," he told me, and should therefore be allowed to "read the books" for free. Multiple news publishers have requested that Common Crawl remove their articles to prevent exactly this use. Common Crawl says it complies with these requests. But my research shows that it does not.

I've discovered that pages downloaded by Common Crawl have appeared in the training data of thousands of AI models. As Stefan Baack, a researcher formerly at Mozilla, has written, "Generative AI in its current form would probably not be possible without Common Crawl." In 2020, OpenAI used Common Crawl's archives to train GPT-3. OpenAI claimed that the program could generate "news articles which human evaluators have difficulty distinguishing from articles written by humans," and in 2022, an iteration on that model, GPT-3.5, became the basis for ChatGPT, kicking off the ongoing generative-AI boom. Many different AI companies are now using publishers' articles to train models that summarize and paraphrase the news, and are deploying those models in ways that steal readers from writers and publishers.

Common Crawl maintains that it is doing nothing wrong. I spoke with Skrenta twice while reporting this story. During the second conversation, I asked him about the foundation archiving news articles even after publishers have asked it to stop. Skrenta told me that these publishers are making a mistake by excluding themselves from "Search 2.0" — referring to the generative-AI products now widely being used to find information online — and said that, anyway, it is the publishers that made their work available in the first place. "You shouldn't have put your content on the internet if you didn't want it to be on the internet," he said. Common Crawl doesn't log in to the websites it scrapes, but its scraper is immune to some of the paywall mechanisms used by news publishers. For example, on many news websites, you can briefly see the full text of any article before your web browser executes the paywall code that checks whether you're a subscriber and hides the content if you're not. Common Crawl's scraper never executes that code, so it gets the full articles.

Thus, by my estimate, the foundation's archives contain millions of articles from news organizations around the world, including The Economist, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Atlantic.... A search for nytimes.com in any crawl from 2013 through 2022 shows a "no captures" result, when in fact there are articles from NYTimes.com in most of these crawls.
"In the past year, Common Crawl's CCBot has become the scraper most widely blocked by the top 1,000 websites," the article points out...

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from Linuxiac: The Japanese branch of Mozilla's Support Mozilla (SUMO) community — responsible for localizing and maintaining Japanese-language support documentation for Firefox and other Mozilla products (consisting of Japanese native speakers) — has officially disbanded after more than two decades of voluntary work...

SUMO, short for Support Mozilla, is the umbrella project for Mozilla's user support platform, support.mozilla.org, that brings together volunteers and contributors worldwide who translate, maintain, and update documentation, tutorials, and troubleshooting guides for Firefox, Thunderbird, and other Mozilla products... According to marsf, the long-time locale leader of the Japanese SUMO team, the decision to disband was triggered by the recent introduction of an automated translation system known as Sumobot. Deployed on October 22, the bot began editing and approving Japanese Knowledge Base articles without community oversight.
The article notes marsf's complaints in a post to the SUMO discussion forum, including the fact that the new automated system automatically approved machine-translated content with only a 72-hour window for human review. As a result, more than 300 Knowledge Base articles were overwritten on the production server, which marsf called "mass destruction of our work."

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Mozilla is testing a new Firefox feature that delivers direct results inside the address bar instead of forcing users through a search results page. The company says the feature will use a privacy framework called Oblivious HTTP, encrypting queries so that no single party can see both what you type and who you are. Some results could be sponsored, but Mozilla insists neither it nor advertisers will know user identities. The system is starting in the U.S. and may expand later if performance and privacy benchmarks are met. Further reading: Mozilla to Require Data-Collection Disclosure in All New Firefox Extensions

"Mozilla is introducing a new privacy framework for Firefox extensions that will require developers to disclose whether their add-ons collect or transmit user data..." reports the blog Linuxiac: The policy takes effect on November 3, 2025, and applies to all new Firefox extensions submitted to addons.mozilla.org. According to Mozilla's announcement, extension developers must now include a new key in their manifest.json files. This key specifies whether an extension gathers any personal data. Even extensions that collect nothing must explicitly state "none" in this field to confirm that no data is being collected or shared.

This information will be visible to users at multiple points: during the installation prompt, on the extension's listing page on addons.mozilla.org, and in the Permissions and Data section of Firefox's about:addons page. In practice, this means users will be able to see at a glance whether a new extension collects any data before they install it.

Mozilla is testing a free, built-in VPN for Firefox that routes traffic through Mozilla-managed servers directly in the browser. The Register reports: According to a staff post on Mozilla Connect, the company's idea-sharing platform, Firefox VPN is still an experimental feature in the early stages of development, but users will be selected at random to test it "over the next few months." Moz describes the feature as one that will sit beside the search bar on Firefox, routing web traffic through a Mozilla-managed VPN server, concealing the user's real IP address while adding a layer of encryption to their communications. Firefox VPN is a different project entirely from Mozilla VPN, a separate, paid-for product. The Firefox version will be free to use and confined to the browser itself, while Mozilla VPN can be used by up to five devices at a time.

The Moz staffer on the product team who announced the feature said of the upcoming beta test: "We'll start simple, then gradually add new capabilities while learning how it impacts browsing, usage, and overall satisfaction. "Our long-term vision is ambitious: to build the best VPN-integrated browser on the market." In response to feedback, the staffer noted that while it will be a desktop browser feature first, "mobile is definitely a natural next step."

"California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the 'California Opt Me Out Act', which will require web browsers to include an easy, universal way for users to opt out of data collection and sales," reports the blog 9to5Mac: [The law] requires browsers to provide a clear, one-click mechanism for Californians to opt out of data sharing across websites. The bill reads: "A business shall not develop or maintain a browser that does not include functionality configurable by a consumer that enables the browser to send an opt-out preference signal to businesses with which the consumer interacts through the browser...." Californians will need patience, though, as the law doesn't take effect until January 1, 2027.
Americans in some states — including California, Texas, Colorado, New Jersey and Maryland — "have the option to make those opt-out demands automatic whenever they surf the web," reports the Washington Post. "But they can only do so if they use small browsers that voluntarily offer that option, such as DuckDuckGo, Firefox and Brave. What's new in California's law is that all browsers must give people the same option." That means soon in California, just using Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari and Microsoft's Edge can command companies not to sell your data or pass it along for ad targeting... It's an imperfect but potent and simple way to flex privacy rights — and becomes even more powerful with another simple privacy measure in California. Starting on January 1, California residents can fill out an online form once to completely and repeatedly wipe their data from hundreds of data brokers that package your personal information for sale.
But their article also suggests other ways readers can "try a one-click privacy option now."

• "[S]ome national companies respect one-click privacy opt-out requests from everyone... This happens automatically if you use DuckDuckGo and Brave. You need to change a setting with Firefox."

• "Download Privacy Badger: The software from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a consumer privacy advocacy group, works in the background to order websites not to sell information they're collecting about you."

• "Use Permission Slip from Consumer Reports. Give the app basic information, and it will help you do much of the legwork to tell companies not to sell your information or to delete it, if you have the right to do so."

Mozilla Firefox's new "Shake to Summarize" feature earned a spot on TIME's Best Inventions of 2025, allowing users to shake their phone to instantly summarize long web pages. Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, general manager of Firefox, calls it a "testament to the incredible work of our UX, design, product, and engineering teams who brought this innovation to life." Neowin reports: Shake to summarize works exactly how you suspect: you physically shake your phone to generate a summary of a long article. This can be quite handy if you are trying to get the gist of a long read without scrolling through the whole thing. Other ways to activate the feature include tapping the thunderbolt icon in the address bar and selecting "Summarize Page" from the three-dot menu.

For now, the feature is limited to iOS users in the US with their system set to English, but Mozilla promises an Android version is in the works. If you have an iPhone 15 Pro or newer running iOS 26, Apple Intelligence generates the summaries on the device. For older iPhones or those on earlier iOS versions, the page text is sent to Mozilla's servers for processing. You can view the full list of TIME's "Special Mentions" here.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the blog Linuxiac: In a somewhat unexpected move, Cloudflare has announced its sponsorship of the Ladybird browser, an independent (still-in-development) open-source initiative aimed at developing a modern, standalone web browser engine.

It's a project launched by GitHub's co-founder and former CEO, Chris Wanstrath, and tech visionary Andreas Kling. It's written in C++, and designed to be fast, standards-compliant, and free of external dependencies. Its main selling point? Unlike most alternative browsers today, Ladybird doesn't sit on top of Chromium or WebKit. Instead, it's building a completely new rendering engine from scratch, which is a rare thing in today's web landscape. For reference, the vast majority of web traffic currently runs through engines developed by either Google (Blink/Chromium), Apple (WebKit), or Mozilla (Gecko).

The sponsorship means the Ladybird team will have more resources to accelerate development. This includes paying developers to work on crucial features, such as JavaScript support, rendering improvements, and compatibility with modern web applications. Cloudflare stated that its support is part of a broader initiative to keep the web open, where competition and multiple implementations can drive enhanced security, performance, and innovation.
The article adds that Cloudflare also chose to sponsor Omarchy, a tool that runs on Arch and sets up and configures a Hyprland tiling window manager, along with a curated set of defaults and developer tools including Neovim, Docker, and Git.