Firefox 125 Adds AV1 Support In Encrypted Media Extensions, Other New Features

[byteabit]

Anux I personally think it goes a bit too far to say that Mozilla is not trustworthy, as I trust them. Otherwise I would not use Firefox and Thunderbird. I just would like to understand whats going on behind the scenes. Maybe I change my mind; so far there is no reason not to trust Mozilla (my opinion, I'm not talking for everyone). It would be alarming if the check was done by sending each of my URL requests to Mozilla or worse, to any other company (like Google???). For now, there is a link posted (above our replies) explaining this. And to be fair you can set it off if you don't want this.

spicfoo Thank you for the link. I will look into and read it later (saved into my ToDo-bookmark-folder). A quick scan for now reveals its a local list, so I'm fine with it: >>"These lists are automatically downloaded and updated every 30 minutes or so when the Phishing and Malware Protection features are enabled."<< I'm just curious if we can look into this file and will dig into this subject later.

Firefox has become another "Chrome".

Wait a minute, why?

[hkupty]

Anux I personally think it goes a bit too far to say that Mozilla is not trustworthy, as I trust them. Otherwise I would not use Firefox and Thunderbird. I just would like to understand whats going on behind the scenes. Maybe I change my mind; so far there is no reason not to trust Mozilla (my opinion, I'm not talking for everyone). It would be alarming if the check was done by sending each of my URL requests to Mozilla or worse, to any other company (like Google???). For now, there is a link posted (above our replies) explaining this. And to be fair you can set it off if you don't want this.

My 2¢: I might not trust Mozilla will make the best decision, so I'm skeptical about it's future. Yet, I prefer it over chrome....

[Anux]

Anux I personally think it goes a bit too far to say that Mozilla is not trustworthy, as I trust them.

Why? Just because they waste money and shove politics in the browser? The standard search engine is google, sending all your requests to them.

It would be alarming if the check was done by sending each of my URL requests to Mozilla or worse, to any other company (like Google???).

Oh boy, are you in for a surprise. The "Safe Browsing Service" is sending metadata to google https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo...ing-protection
There are whole browser forks (librewolf) just to disable all the telemetry and other surveillance stuff from Mozilla. The times they cared about your privacy is long gone.

You can make firefox "save" but that includes a good bit of knowledge or reading. Look for Arkenfox

[byteabit]

The "Safe Browsing Service" is sending metadata to google

Well that's not exactly the same what I said. I am surprised yes, but it depends if the data is anonymized. it says that "Mozilla" is asking (like a middleman, a VPN) if the file is okay. And only sends in some of the metadata. This is not what I was at least asking, if Mozilla redirects my URL requests (including the IP and all data that is being asked) to Google. However I am not happy about the fact that Mozilla gets to know about my requested URL...

So I will probably deactivate this functionality now. So thanks for the notice (and I should really read the document now!).

[ssokolow]

How Safe Browsing keeps your URLs private is detailed here.

TL;DR: The browser SHA256 hashes the URL and then requests the data by sending the first four bytes of the 32-byte hash to guarantee that there are many domains that could match. The data is sent to a proxy server run by Fastly which implements RFC9458: Oblivious HTTP which strips metadata and jumbles together requests from a bunch of different browsers before sending the request to Google over a TLS-encrypted connection. Then, the browser locally compares the full SHA256 hash against the returned results.

[Daktyl198]

I'm surprised Firefox got a new feature. Their management has been so focused on removing features and stealing all of the developer money to give themselves bonuses for sitting on their ass and doing nothing, that I have to praise whoever actually did the work.

Now if only whoever did this could also implement any of the other 10000 features people are asking for, including JXL support instead of letting the management team paid by Google purposely handicap the browser and keep it in 2nd place.

[curfew]

AV1 encrypted media? Can someone explain how it works and where is it useful?

"Encrypted Media Extensions" is a pseudonym for Digital Restrictions Management aka DRM. It's in no way useful, or at least I have never enabled DRM on any of my browsers and never will. It's only useful if you watch videos on Netflix and such through your browser, or maybe still isn't, I don't know if they support open-source operating systems at all.

It has nothing to do with the overall media capabilities in the browser.

TL;DR: Wasted effort.

[Anux]

How Safe Browsing keeps your URLs private is detailed here.

This sounds anonymous after a quick read. If all partys actually don't exchange data it might be save. But when google is involved (they recently got sued for spying on your private tabs) I'm always super cautious. Better safe then sorry. And while 4 byte doesn't sound much it's the whole IPv4 address range, not sure what you can read back from that, probably depends on how many hashes are in the same 4 byte block.

[dlq84]

This sounds anonymous after a quick read. If all partys actually don't exchange data it might be save. But when google is involved (they recently got sued for spying on your private tabs) I'm always super cautious. Better safe then sorry. And while 4 byte doesn't sound much it's the whole IPv4 address range, not sure what you can read back from that, probably depends on how many hashes are in the same 4 byte block.

4 bytes out of a 32 byte Sha256 hash, literally nothing is the answer.

[Anux]

4 bytes out of a 32 byte Sha256 hash, literally nothing is the answer.

Any reasoning or is it just your trust in google?