 A new update just recently dropped for our favorite Foxy web browser, Firefox version 119 was released just a few days ago with some important updates that I think could help this browser become more mainstream which really needs to happen because the most popular web browsers right now that handle a good portion of people's daily internet usage and therefore they have a lot of insight into global internet usage. Those most popular browsers are basically spyware. Well, Firefox and the Mozilla Foundation are one of the few corporate entities in existence that are actually fighting to make the internet a more private place. And speaking of privacy, the first update that's mentioned here in Firefox's blog and that we're going to take a look at is Firefox View. Now, this is something that has actually been in Firefox for a while now but I don't think I've really talked about it too much. It's basically a browser sync feature for Firefox so that you can see all of your open tabs that are on your desktop on your phone as well. So you can see all the tabs that I have open here and then if I switch back to my camera view and show you my Firefox window, I can click see all sync tabs and you'll see that I've got all the same things open up on my phone. So that's really handy and you know, that's pretty much a modern feature of a lot of web browsers. This is something that a lot of Chrome users enjoy, especially if you're a Chrome user on Android because chances are if you're using an Android phone, you probably signed in to a Google account during your phone setup or when you first went to install your apps that you had saved from the Play Store and then when you installed Chrome or in a lot of cases, Google Chrome is already on your phone, it'll sign you in automatically or it's gonna prompt you to sign in when you first open it and then boom. Now all your stuff is syncing between Chrome and on your phone. But with Firefox, you're using a Firefox account or as we can see with this notification at the top of this page here, they're gonna be called Mozilla accounts starting November 1st. But the point is you don't have to involve Google with your internet data with your browser sync. And that's also becoming true for other internet things that we take advantage of every single day. Obviously Firefox and Mozilla, they're making huge advancements on the browser front against Google but we've got other things like private email. Okay, obviously the most private way to have email is to set it up and host it yourself. And that's something that I do think is becoming a bit more common these days but we've seen private email providers or at least email providers that are more private than Google become much more popular over the years like Tutanota and Proton Mail. We've seen cloud providers, people that provide cloud storage that are more private than Gmail become more popular over the years. So there's a lot of companies that are really able to start competing against Google by offering people privacy and people are actually starting to see that as a valuable thing to have in their digital products. And I just think that that's really, really great. Now, I know some of you are going to say that you really don't even need to create an account at all with anybody to sync data across your browsers. You could use something like X browser sync which actually is going to work across all different browsers, different like Firefox, Brave, Edge, et cetera. Or if you were just using the Brave browser then you could do your browser sync with just using a private key instead of having to give Brave your email address to create some kind of account. And I would agree that these are more private ways of doing the browser sync but it's probably going to be a little bit too complicated for some people to set up and for people to keep track of. A lot of people are probably not gonna want to put in the effort of installing another third party application like X browser sync and setting that up. And then in the case of Braves syncing with the private keys, if the explosion in popularity of cryptocurrencies has taught me anything, it's that most people are still very ignorant about how public private key pairs work and are still not very responsible in backing up their private keys and things like that. So I think it's much more likely that an average Joe could get phished for his, private Brave sync key or whatever or might potentially lose it and then lose some browsing history. So I really do think that Firefox view is the best solution for privacy respecting browser syncing for the average Joe and for, I guess you're slightly above average Joe's who have figured out how to install extensions to your Chrome browser as well because Firefox has recently started supporting the importing of extensions from other browsers. So right now there are 72 add-ons, you know, browser add-ons, browser extensions, whatever you want to call them that can be imported from Chromium browsers when switching to Firefox. And so far this is including UBlock Origin, Dark Reader, Tamper Monkey and a whole bunch of various antivirus and VPN add-ons. So a lot of the really important stuff, you know, a lot of the stuff that most of you are probably gonna have installed out there are compatible according to this list. And I'm sure that there's gonna be many more extensions to come. This new Firefox update also saw a number of improvements to tracking protection, total cooking protection and the addition of encrypted client-side hello which is going to encrypt the name of websites you visit. So this is going to significantly improve your online privacy. I mean, this is one thing that I see a lot of people saying that they like to use VPNs for because typically with encrypted connections, TLS, well, I mean, this illustration here pretty much shows you. When you connect to a website, your ISP for example is able to see that you're connecting to example.com. They can't necessarily see what page on example.com you're visiting but they are able to see that you went to example.com. But with this encrypted client-hello, apparently that is no longer the case. It's using public keys to encrypt that information. So this is something that I plan to look into a little bit more, but you know, I pretty much trust what Mozilla is putting here on this blog that it more or less does work the way that they're describing. So I think that that's really, really cool. I mean, it's going to prevent eavesdroppers including your ISP from getting that detail about your browsing habits by default. And finally, another thing that came with this release of Firefox was a fix for a bug that has existed within the browser for 22 years. It's crazy to think that there could be a bug in software that is older than a lot of people that are actually using the software. Now the bug did not actually create any security issues or crashing or anything like that, okay? It was just a purely cosmetic issue but it was still pretty annoying. So we can see a description of the bug here, right? This is from Adam Price, he was the reporter from 22 years ago and you can see his user agent here, right, he's on Mozilla 5.0. And it says, if I mouse over a toolbar link and wait for a second, a little yellow box with the description of the link appears, if I now use command tab or I guess this would also be alt tab on Windows to move Mozilla to the background, the little yellow box stays there in the foreground and the only way to get rid of it is to put Mozilla in the foreground again and move the mouse off the toolbar. So, you know, it's kind of a mildly annoying thing, right, and this is kind of a picture of what that would look like, that little yellow box that he's talking about. So you shift focus away from Firefox and then it's just going to float there on the screen and, you know, possibly get on your nerves. And because it wasn't really considered a severe issue, you know, it's not a security issue, it didn't cause the browser to crash. And I think in some cases with some versions of Firefox, because there's been over a hundred released since this bug was reported, I think sometimes the bug would like accidentally get fixed or the way that the issue was triggered would get changed around, but, you know, the code, the underlying issues were always still there. All of this led to the bug persisting for over two decades, but thankfully Yifan Zhu, who is 23 years old himself, so he was one year old when this bug was first reported by someone using Firefox version 5.0 on their Mac. And ultimately the fix was making the tool tip display be based on Firefox losing focus rather than the mouse leaving the application. You see, this is the beauty of free and open source software. Anybody is able to contribute. And I mean, don't get me wrong, you know, Yifan Zhu, he's not just anybody. He's a first year PhD student in electrical engineering at Stanford University. He's already got his master's in electrical engineering. He's already got his bachelor's in math. And like I said, he's only 23 years old. So he's a very brilliant young man, but still he wouldn't be able to contribute this fix, which was refined a bit by other people in the community. None of that would have happened if the software was closed source. If Mozilla was more like Microsoft and Firefox was proprietary like Edge, Yifan wouldn't be able to fix the bug without I guess gaining employment at Microsoft first, fix the bug and then give us two weeks notice. And he's probably too busy with school right now to do all that. Not to mention the integration of his patch would have probably been slowed down significantly by corporate bureaucracy at a place like Microsoft. So big thank you to this gentleman who helped make the world's best web browser that much better. And if you enjoyed this video, please like and share it to hack the algorithm and get my new shirt, my new Libre shirt on base.win to help support the channel. 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