The New York Times reports that in Silicon Valley, "a wariness that has been slowly brewing is turning into a regionwide consensus: The benefits of screens as a learning tool are overblown, and the risks for addiction and stunting development seem high." One Facebook engineer doesn't allow his own kids to have any screen time, according to this article shared by schwit1, and even Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired, believes screen time is addictive for children. "On the scale between candy and crack cocaine, it's closer to crack cocaine," Mr. Anderson said of screens. Technologists building these products and writers observing the tech revolution were naive, he said. "We thought we could control it. And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain... I didn't know what we were doing to their brains until I started to observe the symptoms and the consequences... We glimpsed into the chasm of addiction, and there were some lost years, which we feel bad about...."

Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, said earlier this year that he would not let his nephew join social networks. Bill Gates banned cellphones until his children were teenagers, and Melinda Gates wrote that she wished they had waited even longer. Steve Jobs would not let his young children near iPads. But in the last year, a fleet of high-profile Silicon Valley defectors have been sounding alarms in increasingly dire terms about what these gadgets do to the human brain. Suddenly rank-and-file Silicon Valley workers are obsessed. No-tech homes are cropping up across the region. Nannies are being asked to sign no-phone contracts....

John Lilly, a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist with Greylock Partners and the former C.E.O. of Mozilla, said he tries to help his 13-year-old son understand that he is being manipulated by those who built the technology. "I try to tell him somebody wrote code to make you feel this way-- I'm trying to help him understand how things are made, the values that are going into things and what people are doing to create that feeling," Mr. Lilly said. "And he's like, 'I just want to spend my 20 bucks to get my Fortnite skins.'"
What do Slashdot's reader think? Should parents end 'screen time' for children?

Mozilla today launched Firefox 63 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The release brings Enhanced Tracking Protection, performance improvements on Windows and macOS, search shortcuts, and Picture-In-Picture on Android. From a report: Firefox 63 for the desktop is available for download now on Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play. According to Mozilla, Firefox has about 300 million active users. In other words, it's a major platform that web developers must consider. Firefox 63 for desktop brings support for Enhanced Tracking Protection. [...] Firefox 63's Enhanced Tracking Protection blocks cookies and storage access from third-party trackers, which Mozilla says targets the problem of cross-site tracking without breaking sites and impacting revenue streams like the original Tracking Protection. It does this by preventing known trackers from setting third-party cookies -- the primary method of tracking across sites -- but still gives you the option to block all known trackers (under Firefox Options/Preferences).

[...] Search shortcuts essentially pins sites like Google and Amazon on the new tab page. When you click or tap them, you're redirected to Firefox's awesome bar, which automatically fills the corresponding keyword (@google or @amazon in this case) for the search engine. This way, you can type your query, hit enter, and get your search results without having to first load the Google or Amazon homepage. [...] The only major new feature for this Firefox for Android release is a picture-in-picture mode (Android Oreo and up). This means that if you're watching a video in full-screen, when you switch away from Firefox it will move the video into a small floating window, which you can tap to return to the full video player.

Mozilla is reportedly preparing to offer a VPN service for Firefox users to help protect them when surfing the web. According to Trusted Reviews, Mozilla has partnered with the ProtonVPN service, "with a new notification piping-up when the browser detects an unsecured connection, or in a scenario when VPN might be preferable to users." From the report: However, it appears Firefox users will have to pay for the privilege. Austrian site Soeren-hentzschel reports the premium VPN service will be $10 a month, which is what ProtonVPN charges its users. Users will receive a "Firefox Recommends" pop-up when browsing an unsecured wireless network. The pop-up says the VPN service will provide a "private and secure' internet connection. According to the reports, a subset of Firefox 62 users in the United States will begin receiving the pop-up from today. Mozilla will reportedly get a cut of any subscription fee handed over by users to access the VPN service. MSPowerUser points out that this will be the first advertised service that costs money for Firefox users.

The head of the Mozilla Foundation, Mitchell Baker, is warning that companies need to diversify their hiring practices to include more people from backgrounds in philosophy and psychology if they want to tackle the problem of misinformation online. He also "warned that hiring employees who mainly come from Stem -- science, technology, engineering and maths -- will produce a new generation of technologists with the same blindspots as those who are currently in charge, a move that will 'come back to bite us,'" reports the Guardian. From the report: "Stem is a necessity, and educating more people in Stem topics clearly critical," Baker told the Guardian. "Every student of today needs some higher level of literacy across the Stem bases. "But one thing that's happened in 2018 is that we've looked at the platforms, and the thinking behind the platforms, and the lack of focus on impact or result. It crystallized for me that if we have Stem education without the humanities, or without ethics, or without understanding human behavior, then we are intentionally building the next generation of technologists who have not even the framework or the education or vocabulary to think about the relationship of Stem to society or humans or life."

"Stem is a necessity, and educating more people in Stem topics clearly critical," Baker told the Guardian. "Every student of today needs some higher level of literacy across the Stem bases. "But one thing that's happened in 2018 is that we've looked at the platforms, and the thinking behind the platforms, and the lack of focus on impact or result. It crystallized for me that if we have Stem education without the humanities, or without ethics, or without understanding human behavior, then we are intentionally building the next generation of technologists who have not even the framework or the education or vocabulary to think about the relationship of Stem to society or humans or life."

Starting with Firefox 64, RSS/Atom feed support will be handled via add-ons, rather than in-product. Mozilla's Gijs Kruitbosch writes: After considering the maintenance, performance and security costs of the feed preview and subscription features in Firefox, we've concluded that it is no longer sustainable to keep feed support in the core of the product. While we still believe in RSS and support the goals of open, interoperable formats on the Web, we strongly believe that the best way to meet the needs of RSS and its users is via WebExtensions.

With that in mind, we have decided to remove the built-in feed preview feature, subscription UI, and the "live bookmarks" support from the core of Firefox, now that improved replacements for those features are available via add-ons.

By virtue of being baked into the core of Firefox, these features have long had outsized maintenance and security costs relative to their usage. Making sure these features are as well-tested, modern and secure as the rest of Firefox would take a surprising amount of engineering work, and unfortunately the usage of these features does not justify such an investment: feed previews and live bookmarks are both used in around 0.01% of sessions.

Today, Mozilla, along with Omidyar Network, Schmidt Futures, and Craig Newmark Philanthropies, is launching a competition for professors and educators to effectively integrate ethics into computer science education at the undergraduate level. From a report: The context, called the Responsible Computer Science Challenge, will award up to $3.5 million over the next two years to proposals focused on how to make ethics relevant to young technologists. "You can't take an ethics course from 50 or even 25 years ago and drop it in the middle of a computer science program and expect it to grab people or be particularly applicable," Mitchell Baker, the founder and chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation, said. "We are looking to encourage ways of teaching ethics that make sense in a computer science program, that make sense today, and that make sense in understanding questions of data."

Firefox has joined Google's WebP party, another endorsement for the internet giant's effort to speed up the web with a better image format. From a report: Google revealed WebP eight years ago and since then has built it into its Chrome web browser, Android phone software and many of its online properties in an effort to put websites on a diet and cut network data usage. But Google had trouble encouraging rival browser makers to embrace it. Mozilla initially rejected WebP as not offering enough of an improvement over more widely used image formats, JPEG and PNG. It seriously evaluated WebP but chose to try to squeeze more out of JPEG. But now Mozilla -- like Microsoft with its Edge browser earlier this week -- has had a change of heart. "Mozilla is moving forward with implementing support for WebP," the nonprofit organization said. WebP will work in versions of Firefox based on its Gecko browser engine, Firefox for personal computers and Android but not for iOS.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of VideoLan and developer of VLC media player, made the following announced Monday: AV1 is a new video codec by the Alliance for Open Media, composed of most of the important Web companies (Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft,...). AV1 has the potential to be up to 20% better than the HEVC codec, but the patents license is totally free, while HEVC patents licenses are insanely high and very confusing.

The reference decoder for AV1 is great, but it's a research codebase, so it has a lot to improve. Therefore, the VideoLAN, VLC and FFmpeg communities have started to work on a new decoder, sponsored by the Alliance of Open Media. The goal of this new decoder is: be small, be as fast as possible, be very cross-platform, correctly threaded, libre and (actually) Open Source. Without further due, the code: https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d Recommended: A talk during VDD 2018 conference about dav1d.

Mozilla announced today a new recovery option for Firefox Accounts, the user system included inside the Firefox browser. ZDNet: Starting today, users can generate a one-time recover key that will be associated with their account, and which they can use to regain access to Firefox data if they ever forget their passwords. Firefox Accounts is included with all recent versions of the Firefox browser.

Most users are familiar with it because of Firefox Sync, the system that synchronizes Firefox data such as passwords, browsing history, open tabs, bookmarks, installed add-ons, and general browser options between multiple Firefox instances. But while Sync does the actual synchronization, Firefox Accounts is at the core of Sync and is the system that manages the identities of Firefox users. Sync works by taking a user's Firefox account password and encrypting the user's browser data on the local computer.

Earlier this year, Mozilla announced Firefox Monitor, a service that will inform you if your online accounts were hacked in a recent data breach. It's now available to general public. A report adds: For the new security-focused tool, Mozilla partnered with Troy Hunt, the renowned security expert behind Have I Been Pwned? (HIBP), which is a database of data breaches that allows anyone to discover whether one of their online accounts has been compromised. The first iteration of Firefox Monitor is, for all intents and purposes, a clone of HIBP. After you enter your email address and hit the scan button, you're told which online services have leaked your personal details (if any). You can also sign up to be notified of any future data breaches involving one or more of your email addresses.

RoccamOccam writes: WebRender, an experimental GPU-based renderer for web content, written in Rust, is now enabled by default for Firefox Nightly users on desktop Windows 10 with Nvidia GPUs. The announcement was made on the mailing list.

Lin Clark provides an excellent overview of WebRender and, states, "with WebRender, we want apps to run at a silky smooth 60 frames per second (FPS) or better no matter how big the display is or how much of the page is changing from frame to frame. And it works. Pages that chug along at 15 FPS in Chrome or today's Firefox run at 60 FPS with WebRender.

In describing the WebRender approach Clark, asks, "what if we removed this boundary between painting and compositing and just went back to painting every pixel on every frame? This may sound like a ridiculous idea, but it actually has some precedent. Modern day video games repaint every pixel, and they maintain 60 frames per second more reliably than browsers do. And they do it in an unexpected way instead of creating these invalidation rectangles and layers to minimize what they need to paint, they just repaint the whole screen."

Back in 2014, Mozilla partnered with Bing to translate webpages via Firefox in a similar fashion to Chrome's implementation of Google Translate. The company also added support for Yandex Translate in Firefox 41 in mid-2015, but it went all dark soon after and very few updates were issued. Now, Mozilla is finally starting to add support for Google Translate to the translation engine built into Firefox. gHacks reports: While the feature is not fully functional yet, it is an indicator that Mozilla has not forgotten the translate feature completely. Users who enable the translate functionality in Firefox on about:config will notice that Google is the selected translation engine. Google Translate cannot be used currently in Firefox; the browser throws an error message when you hit the translate button in the UI. Bing and Yandex don't seem to work either at this point in time even though Firefox seems to try and translate the page. The "there has been an error translating this page" error is thrown eventually as well. Google Translate requires API access keys and that is usually only available if companies or users pay for the key. It is unclear if Mozilla plans to make a deal with Google or if users will be required to use their own API keys for the functionality. The latter would surely be very limiting.

The Tor Browser has rolled out a new interface with the release of v8. From a report: The Tor Browser has always been based on the Firefox codebase, but it lagged behind a few releases. Mozilla rolled out a major overhaul of the Firefox codebase in November 2017, with the release of Firefox 57, the first release in the Firefox Quantum series. Firefox Quantum came with a new page rendering engine, a new add-ons API, and a new user interface called the Photon UI. Because these were major, code-breaking changes, it took the smaller Tor team some time to integrate all of them into the Tor Browser codebase and make sure everything worked as intended. The new Tor Browser 8, released yesterday, is now in sync with the most recent version of Firefox, the Quantum release, and also supports all of its features. This means the Tor Browser now uses the same modern Photon UI that current Firefox versions use, it supports the same speed-optimized page rendering engine and has also dropped support for the old XUL-based add-ons system for the new WebExtensions API system used by Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, and the rest of the Chromium browsers.

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today released Firefox 62 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The release builds on Firefox Quantum, which the company calls "by far the biggest update since Firefox 1.0 in 2004." Version 62 brings variable fonts, automatic dark theme on macOS, and better scrolling on Android. Firefox 62 for the desktop is available for download now on Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play. The latest iOS version is available on Apple's App Store.

Google first released its Chrome browser 10 years ago today. Marketed as a "fresh take on the browser," Chrome debuted with a web comic from Google to mark the company's first web browser. From a report: It was originally launched as a Windows-only beta app before making its way to Linux and macOS more than a year later in 2009. Chrome debuted at a time when developers and internet users were growing frustrated with Internet Explorer, and Firefox had been steadily building momentum. Google used components from Apple's WebKit rendering engine and Mozilla's Firefox to help bring Chrome to life, and it made all of Chrome's source code available openly as its Chromium project. Chrome focused on web standards and respected HTML5, and it even passed both the Acid1 and Acid2 tests at the time of its release. This was a significant step as Microsoft was struggling to adhere to open web standards with its Internet Explorer browser.

Another significant part of Chrome's first release was the idea of "sandboxing" individual browser tabs so that if one crashed it wouldn't affect the others. This helped improve the speed and stability of Chrome in general, alongside Google's V8 JavaScript engine that the company constantly tweaked to try and push the web forwards. After a decade of Chrome, this browser now dominates as the primary way most people browse the web. Chrome has secured more than 60 percent of browser market share on desktop, and Google's Chrome engineers continue to improve it with new features and push the latest web standards. To mark the milestone, Google said it would make a surprise announcement on Tuesday -- some improvements coming to Chrome.

Google's curvy tab Material Design update for Chrome will arrive in version 69 of the browser due out in September. From a report: Google flags the upcoming changes in its Enterprise release notes for Chrome 69, which gives a brief mention under browser interface changes to a "new design across all operating systems." Chrome 69, penciled in for stable release on September 4, will also get native Windows 10 notifications, which have been rolling out to users over the past month. Chrome 69 will also progress the long-running project to deprecate Flash Player, which Adobe has announced will reach end of life in 2020. Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple have similar deprecation timelines for Flash on their desktop browsers. Once ubiquitous, Flash content is now hardly used at all by Chrome users, though Google won't fully remove support until Chrome 87 in 2020. At present, if a user enables Flash for a particular site, they don't need to approve it if they visit the site again. However, in Chrome 69, every time users restart Chrome, they'll need to give permission for sites to use Flash.

Mozilla announced today plans to remove all Firefox legacy add-ons from the official Mozilla add-ons portal in early October. From a report: The move comes after Mozilla updated the Firefox core to use a new add-ons system based on the Chrome-compatible WebExtensions API. This new add-ons API replaced Firefox's old XUL-based add-ons API in November 2017, with the release of Firefox 57. All Firefox legacy add-ons stopped working in Firefox 57, but Mozilla continued to support them in the Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) 52 branch. Support for Firefox ESR 52 will end on September 5, in two weeks, meaning there won't be any official Firefox version that supports legacy add-ons anymore.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A group of 22 state attorneys general and the District of Columbia late Monday asked a U.S. appeals court to reinstate the Obama administration's 2015 landmark net neutrality rules and reject the Trump administration's efforts to preempt states from imposing their own rules guaranteeing an open internet. The states argue the FCC reversal will harm consumers. The states also suggested the FCC failed to identify any "valid authority" for preempting state and local laws that would protect net neutrality. The FCC failed to offer a "meaningful defense of its decision to uncritically accept industry promises that are untethered to any enforcement mechanism," the states said.

The state attorney generals suing represent states with 165 million people -- more than half the United States population -- and include California, Illinois, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The states argue the FCC action could harm public safety, citing electrical grids as an example. They argue "the absence of open internet rules jeopardizes the ability to reduce load in times of extreme energy grid stress. Consequently, the order threatens the reliability of the electric grid." Several internet companies also filed a legal challenge to overturn the FCC ruling, including Mozilla, Vimeo, Etsy, and numerous media and technology advocacy groups, reports Reuters. The group of 22 state attorneys general first filed their lawsuit in January after the Trump administration voted to repeal the net neutrality rules in December.

Long-time Slashdot reader tdailey spotted a new version of Pale Moon, a customised version of Firefox optimized for speed and efficiency. Beta News reports it's the first major update since November of 2016:

There are virtually no visual or obvious changes in this new major build, but the under-the-hood changes are both extensive and necessary.... Despite all the updates, Moonchild is keen to stress certain things haven't changed -- unlike Firefox, for example, Pale Moon continues to support NPAPI plugins, complete themes and a fully customizable user interface. There is also no DRM built into the browser, although third-party plugins such as Silverlight are supported. It will also continue to work with certain "legacy" plugins of the type abandoned by Firefox.
Pale Moon strips out what one reviewer calls "little-used components" of Firefox, including parental controls and accessbility features, as well as crash reports and support for Internet Explorer's ActiveX and ActiveX scripting technology.

"Proving that open source leads to great development, Pale Moon takes the already decent Firefox web browser and makes it even better and a faster."

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla has removed 23 Firefox add-ons from its add-on store that snooped on users and sent data to remote servers, a Mozilla engineer told Bleeping Computer Friday. The list of blocked add-ons includes "Web Security," a security-centric Firefox add-on with over 220,000 users, which was at the center of a controversy this week after it was caught sending users' browsing histories to a server located in Germany. "The mentioned add-on has been taken down, together with others after I conducted a thorough audit of [the] add-ons," Rob Wu, a Mozilla Browser Engineer and Add-on review, told Bleeping Computer via email. "These add-ons are no longer available at AMO and [have been] disabled in the browsers of users who installed them," Wu said.