Category: News

Mozilla launches Firefox Enterprise and Thunderbird Enterprise

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

For years, Mozilla offered Firefox ESR to businesses and Enterprises. While the organization implemented features aimed specifically at managing Firefox on large fleets of devices, it never offered a specific Firefox version for Enterprises.

This changes today with the introduction of Firefox Enterprise (and Thunderbird Enterprise):

Firefox Enterprise is built for organizations with strict security, governance, and compliance requirements. It pairs the Firefox browser, built on Mozilla’s independent Gecko engine, with a management console organizations can run on their own infrastructure. From that console, IT teams can centrally manage browser policy and access, govern how data moves through the browser and set controls around AI use.

Mozilla says that Firefox Enterprise is giving organizations more control, not only over the browser but also over the infrastructure that is managing it. The highlight features are sovereignty, control and resilience according to the official website.

As far as features are concerned, here are the highlights:

  • Centralized policy control — manage browser behavior across endpoints
  • External connection controls — govern browser callouts and telemetry
  • Native DLP — warn or block sensitive data actions by domain
  • AI controls — allow, restrict or disable AI tools
  • SIEM integration — export browser events and audit activity
  • Lockdown Mode — harden high-risk or restricted browsing
  • Extension governance — allow or block add-ons organization-wide
  • Professional Support included — private triage and defined response times

Firefox Enterprise is rolling out in select European markets first, with France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland in the beginning.

Brave Debloater: Remove potentially unwanted features of Brave Browser

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Brave Debloater is an open-source PowerShell script designed to remove the extra, often unwanted features (bloatware) that come bundled with the Brave Browser, such as crypto wallets, AI chatbots, and sponsored content. It works across Windows, macOS, and Linux.

What Does Brave Debloater Do?

Instead of manually clicking through menus to turn off various features or using policies, Brave Debloater turns off the features in one swift operation instead.

Specifically, it can disable and hide:

  • Crypto & Paid Features: Brave Rewards, BAT prompts, Brave Wallet, and Brave VPN.
  • Add-on Services: Leo AI Chat (sidebar and address bar), Brave News, Brave Talk, Playlist, and Email Aliases.
  • Telemetry & Tracking: Brave’s P3A telemetry, stats ping, Web Discovery, Chromium metrics, and URL-keyed data collection.
  • Clutter (using the “Extreme” preset): Sponsored new tab backgrounds, new tab cards, shopping lists, QR generators, and the Google search side panel.

Is it Safe?

Many Windows debloat scripts aggressively delete system files, patch binaries, or mess with the hosts file, which can break your system or browser. Brave Debloater takes a much safer, standardized approach.

It uses official Enterprise Policies: Rather than modifying individual files of the browser, it tells your operating system to enforce official Chromium/Brave enterprise policies (e.g., writing native registry policies on Windows or JSON policies on Linux). This is the exact same method IT departments use to manage browsers on company computers.

In doing so, it does not weaken security. Furthermore, you can use a preview mode feature. This lists the changes that the script does without applying them.

For recovery, it creates a backup that you can restore at any time. Lastly, any change that it makes is highlighted on brave://policy, a native page of the browser listing all changes enforced by policies on the device.

If you like Brave’s ad-blocking but dislike the crypto integrations, AI tools, and telemetry, Brave Debloater is a safe option to remove unwanted features. While you can make the changes manually as well, doing so would take much longer for most users, but it would mean that you would stay in full control during the entire activity.

Microsoft 365 changes: Family and Premium plan storage cuts and new Pro plan

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Microsoft announced a series of changes for its Microsoft 365 subscription service today. The changes affect family and premium subscribers only at this time and change storage quotas significantly.

For those unaware, a Microsoft 365 subscription includes access to Microsoft Office apps, online storage, Copilot AI access and some other features. The two main plans for many customers are Personal, which gives one person access on up to five devices, and Family, which gives up to 6 people access.

Up until now, Family included 1 TB of storage for each member. Starting October 8, 2026 for new customers, this is reduced to 2 TB shared storage. In other words, users of a Family plan no longer have private storage. When a member buys additional storage, it is added to the shared pool as well.

The same was true for the Premium plan, which supported up to 6 people as well. Instead of 1 TB for each user, Premium subscribers get 2 TB shared now.

Existing customer plans are affected as well, but not immediately. The change takes effect when the subscription is renewed after May 2027. Microsoft reveals that existing subscribers may get bonus storage added to their account when the subscription “renews after shared storage rolls out”. It does not mention if it is permanent or how much customers get though.

Last but not least, if storage is exceeded when the transition happens, access to files is not lost immediately. Microsoft says that customers get notifications that explain the available options. These range from deleting online files to buying more storage.

While Microsoft is cutting storage, it is not changing the price of a subscription. Family and Premium continue to cost $12.99 or $19.99 per month.

Microsoft explains on a FAQ page why this is a good thing:

Storage automatically goes where it’s needed.
Members are less likely to run into individual storage limits.
Unused storage can benefit the entire family.
Additional storage purchases can help everyone with the subscription.

What the company fails to mention is that these benefits would also apply if Microsoft would not have reduced the storage of the plans. In fact, it would have even be better for the cases mentioned.

The new Pro plan

Microsoft 365 Pro is a new plan that Microsoft introduced. Subscribers get 5 TB of shared storage and the highest limits when using Copilot AI. This new plan is anything but cheap though. It costs $99.99 per month and includes up to 6 users. However, AI features are limited to the subscription owner according to the description.

Gemini Pro is getting more expensive

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Up until now, if you wanted access to Gemini Pro, a version of Google’s AI that is more powerful than the Flash version, you’d have to subscribe to the AI Plus plan at the very least or get a special deal by buying Google hardware.

For about $5 per month, you would gain access to the Flash and Pro modell. Free users, those with just a Google account, gained access to Flash-Lite only.

This is no longer the case. Google changed rather significantly over the weekend. If you have an AI Plus plan, you no longer get access to Gemini Pro. Access is limited to Flash-Lite and Flash only.

Access to Gemini Pro is limited to the Gemini AI Pro plan. That is a huge step up, considering that Gemini Pro costs about $20 per month.

Free users are also limited to Flash-lite. Previously, they had limited access to Pro, but this is removed as well.

Google says that the changes will take place on October 9, 2026. Affected users, those with an AI Plus subscription, will be informed about the change in an email, according to the company.

Here is the overview:

  • Free: Gemini Flash-lite only
  • Plus ($5): Gemini Flash-lite and Flash only.
  • Pro ($20): Gemini Flash-lite, Flash, and Pro.

This is an attempt to push the pricier computations of the Pro model into the plans that pay more. Whether that is an effort to cut costs, which are likely enormous, or an attempt to get more customers to sign-up for plans that are pricier is unclear.

Firefox 157 launches tomorrow with a new theme and features

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Mozilla plans to release a new major update for its open source web browser tomorrow. Firefox 157 is not another light release that makes changes mostly under the hood, as it introduces the Project Nova design refresh to the community.

When you launch it, you will see bits of the new design right away, even if you run a custom theme in Firefox. The main reason for that is that Nova changes the structure of the browser interface to a degree. It adds rounder tabs, software pop-over-menus and a redesigned address bar.

If the theme is set to default, you may notice a new color palette for it, which may not be to everyone’s liking. You can change it in the settings of the browser under appearance. I went there and switched the Ash theme on immediately to get a less-colorful scheme.

Advanced Firefox users who use userChrome.css to modify the browser may run into problems, as CSS code may need to be updated to play along nicely with the new design and layout of the open source browser.

Nova is the first significant update of Firefox since Proton launched back in 2021. Veteran users of the browser may also remember the Photon and Australis changes of 2017 and 2014.

There is also a new compact option for the interface, which I enabled immediately. You find it by loading about:preferences#appearance and switching to Compact under Window density there.

How to disable Nova in Firefox: There is a workaround to disable Nova for now. All you have to do is open about:config in the address bar, find browser.nova.enabled and set it to False. This disables the redesign. It will be a temporary option though, as Mozilla will likely remove the flag eventually. Another option is to use Firefox ESR for the time being, as it won’t get the update until it gets its next major version update in 2027.

What else is new?

If you look past the redesigned interface, you will find a few new features and many bug fixes. The highlight is support for hardware-accelerated AV1 WebRTC video calls decoding which may improve the performance on supported devices.

There is a new warning for connections that may not be private when opening the shield icon of a site as well.

Firefox Suggest’s rollout continues with multiple European countries now supported. The feature displays information in the browser’s address bar, which you can disable in the settings of the browser in the Search category.

As far as other changes are concerned; Amazon Search is removed, but still available in the search preferences. The updated sidebar is now available for everyone and you can still disable it by setting sidebar.revamp to False, but this will only remain an option until the end of 2027. YouTube users, who change the playback speed constantly may notice performance improvements while playing videos in the browser.

Exempt sites from memory clean-ups in Brave Browser to avoid service interruptions

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Most modern web browsers support memory automatization to reduce the memory consumption by changing the status of loaded websites to inactive, if they have not been used for a period of time.

The main idea is to make sure that the browser does not use an ever increasing amount of memory on a device.

Brave Browser calls this feature Memory Saver and it is set to balanced by default. Balanced means, that the browser balances memory saving and the time before websites are set to inactive. The browser reloads the inactive website when its tab is selected by the user.

While the feature is helpful in taming memory use, it may interfere with sites that require constant activity. Maybe it is a live ticker, an auction site, or a chat site.

The most recent version of Brave Browser introduces an exclude list. You may use it to add sites to a list of exemptions. Any site put here is never set to inactive in the browser.

Using it is simple:

  1. Load brave://settings/system in the browser’s address bar.
  2. Find “Always keep these sites active” on the page that opens.
  3. Click on the “add” button to add a new site.
  4. Select any current site or add a site manually instead.
  5. Confirm the change with a click on the “add” button in the add-sites-interface.

Once you have added at least one site, you see it listed under the menu item. You may edit or remove each individually with a click on the three-dots icon next to the site name.

Google Search testing another AI push

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

When you use Google Search currently, there is a good chance that you get an AI overview at the top of the search results page. It lists some text and a “show more” button to expand the full AI generated content. The organic results are shown below the fold already, which has led to a organic traffic decline for many sites. For Google, it is an opportunity to keep searchers on its own website, which increases revenue.

Google is now testing a change on its search results pages that has the potential to be even more damaging to websites around the world, reports Seroundtatble. The change expands the display of the AI reply on the results page. Users do not have to click on the “show more” button anymore to display the entire reply, as it is displayed automatically.

According to several Google employees, the automatic expansion is only happening “for topics where our systems determine it to be most useful”. Users who started to scroll already will notice that the expansion of AI content has stopped, according to the company.

This in turn means that the organic results are pushed down even further on the search results page, which may lead to even less traffic.

Google confirmed the test but it is unclear at this point whether it is going to make it the standard going forward. If I had to guess, I’d put a large sum on Google making it the new default for certain searches at the beginning before it gets expanded further.

It is clear that Google is pushing AI on Search and other company products. It has made and is making large investments in AI infrastructure and these are not paying for themselves.

For publishers, being listed in Google Search is becoming less and less of an attractive option to attract users and increase revenue at the same time.

Some have begun to block AI from indexing their websites, but unless other content discovery services are taking over, many may see a decline in the coming years or vanish entirely from the Internet.

Brave Accounts and Email Aliases launch

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Brave Software, maker of Brave Browser, announced the launch of Brave Accounts yesterday. While the main idea of introducing native accounts is similar to how other browsers handle user accounts, that is, allowing users to sync data and use other services associated with the account, Brave Software uses technology that is vastly different.

Instead of sending hashes or encrypted passwords to remote servers, Brave Software says that passwords never leave the browser in the first place. It is “never transmitted”, which eliminates the need to trust a company securely storing password data in the first place.

Brave writes:

Here’s the short version: when you sign in to a service built on Brave Accounts, your password itself is never sent to our servers: not encrypted, not hashed, nor “briefly held in memory and then discarded”. The password is never transmitted, so you don’t have to “trust” that we are keeping it safe for you. We don’t know it at sign-up, we don’t know it at login, and if someone were to steal our entire password database tomorrow, with high probability they still wouldn’t know it.

Brave uses OPAQUE, “an augmented password-authenticated key exchange” for that. The underlying idea is that it allows the client — the browser in this case — to prove that the password is known without revealing it.

Technically the system relies on an Oblivious Pseudorandom Function.

This means that: you blind your password with a random value and send the blinded version of it; the server applies a secret key it holds and sends the result back; then, your device unblinds it. The output is a value derived from both your password and our server-side secret (the secret key), but the server learned nothing about your password, and you learned nothing about the key.

There are three advantages to using this method instead of the traditional password-hash checking according to Brave Software:

  • Passwords are never transmitted.
  • Attackers can’t use password dictionaries in their attacks.
  • The export key can be used for other tasks, such as end-to-end encryption.

Email Aliases

One of the first features to make use of the new account system is email aliases. It allows Brave users to keep their personal email addresses private by creating aliases.

Sites communicate only with the alias, which forwards messages to your “real” email address.

After you create a new Brave account, you get the option to use email aliases right in settings or while signing up for a new account on any website.

The main new address seems to be bravealias.com, which should work for the time being on most sites. Eventually, some sites will start to block and it would be a good idea to get additional options regarding the alias domain that one can pick for the alias.

All users get five free email aliases once they have set up a Brave account. Brave Software plans to introduce a paid upgrade option in the future, but has not revealed any details on that at the time of writing. It is very likely that it will feature higher limits, if any, and maybe also other alias options.

Patch

Firefox 154.0 is out with improved protections, local backups and translations

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Mozilla released a new version of its open source Firefox web browser a moment ago. Firefox 154.0 is the latest stable version. Also released are Firefox 153.1 ESR, Firefox 140.14 ESR (reaching end of support in September) and Firefox 115.39.0 ESR (for old operating systems).

The new stable version comes with several new features and improvements to existing features. The usual bug fixes and security updates are also included.

As far as new features are concerned, there are several important ones. First, the open source browser’s local network access protection includes WebSocket connections now. Means, when a remote website asks for permission to use WebSocket, Firefox will display a permission prompt first. The user needs to allow this explicitly so that the website can open a WebSocket.

There is also a change to how Firefox handles sites and cookies for some sites. The release gives users more control, as it is now possible to exempt sites from the browser’s cookie and site data cleaner without exempting it from tracking protection and other cookie restrictions at the same time.

The local translations feature got two new options. It supports translations in iframes now and Firefox’s full-page translations feature now runs on all page loads, which Mozilla says improves the experience for offering translations.

Second, the browser’s backup feature for profiles is now also available on macOS, meaning that all three desktop operating systems are covered. IT is a built-in feature to create a backup of a Firefox profile to make restores easier. Should not bother long-time Firefox users who back up the profiles manually using external means, but may help users who never bothered or knew about this option in the first place.

Lastly, there is a change to hard reloading a website using Shift and clicking on the refresh button. This will now also clear and update favicons, the little icons you see in front of the site address on the main Firefox toolbar.

Firefox users who watch videos in the browser benefit from seeking improvements. Mozilla claims that this is much faster now. I don’t use Firefox for that, but if you do, feel free to share your experience in the comments below.

You may also notice that Firefox View is no longer visible by default. Mozilla is hiding it by default for new profiles and for profiles where it has not been used in a while. It is still accessible via List all tabs > View all tabs, and can also be added back using the customize menu on the new tab page.

As far as security fixes are concerned, there are quite a few. The aggregate rating is high and Mozilla makes no mentions of exploits in the wild. Still, good idea to update asap.

Firefox will continue to support uBlock Origin, says Mozilla

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

While companies like Google and Microsoft have dropped support for classic MV2 extensions already or are about to end support, some developers announced plans to continue supporting some or even all classic extensions.

Of all the major browsers, it is only Firefox that continues to support MV2 extensions. Mozilla has just reiterated that this is the case stating “Firefox support for uBlock Origin is not going anywhere.” on X.

As far as Chromium-based browsers are concerned, Brave plans to continue support for some extensions only, including uBlock Origin. Opera Software also claims to continue supporting MV2 extensions.

There are a few lesser known browsers, Thorium and Supermium, which pledged to continue their support for all MV2 extensions.

The background story

Google announced plans to switch Chromium, the open source part of Google Chrome and most browsers, to a new rules system. Called Manifest V3, or MV3, it was designed to replace the classic extensions system.

Google would not be Google if it would not have tried to pull a stunt on the browsing community by removing capabilities and replacing them half-heartedly. The outcry was big enough for Google to make some concessions, but the result was still a new system that lacked some of the capabilities of the old.

One of the types of extensions hit hardest by the changes were content blockers; exactly the extensions that threatened Google’s main source of revenue.