We’re always working to make Firefox as great as possible on all platforms. Today, we’re adding features to Firefox for iOS to protect your security.
The Firefox Password Manager securely stores and autofills your usernames and passwords across sites you visit. Firefox for iOS now lets you add a 4-digit passcode to the Password Manager to keep your information more secure while helping you browse faster without slowing down to retype login details. With this feature, if your phone somehow ends up out of your hands, your passwords have an extra layer of protection.
On all iOS devices where Touch ID is currently available, you can quickly use your fingerprint to access saved logins.
As always, when you open the latest version of Firefox for iOS, you’ll see all the other updates we’ve added to make it great.
The U.S. Department of Commerce has just created a Board of Advisors for topics related to the Digital Economy. I will participate as one of the two co-chairs, along with Zoë Baird, President and CEO of the Markle Foundation. The Digital Economy Board of Advisors is to provide regular advice to the Secretary of Commerce from leaders in industry, academia, and civil society on the Department’s new Digital Economy Agenda. The Agenda is focused on advancing the Internet and the digital economy across many frontiers, including promoting innovation, a free and open Internet, trust online, and Internet access for all Americans.
The Board of Advisors has been charged with taking a broad, strategic look at the digital economy, including how best to promote innovation and development of new technologies, and the impact of Internet policy issues such as cybersecurity and privacy on the digital economy. I expect the the Board of Advisors will consider whether, when, and how the U.S. government should take direct regulatory and policy action, and when not to do so. The Department of Commerce has a key leadership role within the U.S. government on these issues.
Read more about the Commerce Department’s Digital Agenda here and see the Advisory Board’s announced appointments here.
Security of users is paramount. Technology companies need to do everything in their power to ensure the security of their users and build products and services with strong security measures in place to do that.
At Mozilla, it’s part of our mission to safeguard the Web and to take a stand on issues that threaten the health of the Internet. People need to understand and engage with encryption as a core technology that keeps our everyday transactions and conversations secure. That’s why, just days before the Apple story broke, we launched an awareness campaign to educate users on the importance of encryption.
The Apple vs. FBI case
We’ve supported Apple since we first heard of the FBI request to Apple because this case is about user security and public safety.
The government is requiring Apple to create a flawed version of its software without key security features. The precedent this sets could drastically affect our users and every technology company. This can cause ripple effects across the industry to other technologies and companies. And it would make it more likely that other governments would request the creation of this kind of flawed software. This situation is understandably emotionally-charged, but we don’t have the luxury of saying “just this one time.”
Last week, the FBI said in a brief that Apple purposefully created its products to be warrant-proof and that this fight is a marketing decision for Apple. The view that any company would design products with the goal of being “warrant proof” is ludicrous. Companies like Mozilla decide to create security features to protect users, keep the bad guys away and contribute to public safety, not to make their technology warrant proof. Unfortunately, making something that can be easily hacked by the FBI means making something that can be easily hacked by bad guys too.
Code is Speech
We also think that the FBI’s request raises serious concerns around the First Amendment and free speech. We said so in an amicus brief we filed earlier this month with a coalition of technology companies. For many technology companies their code represents their view on security. For Mozilla, as an open source company, because our code is made publicly available and guided by our Manifesto, it is an essential way we express our views about security and many other issues.
One of the most important things about this case is that it has created mainstream discourse about some very important topics relevant to all our users – encryption, user security and government access to data. Encryption is an essential and ubiquitous security tool and weakening our security tools undermines everyday Internet users’ security.
Denelle Dixon-Thayer, Chief Business & Legal Officer at Mozilla in conversation with Jochai Ben-Avie, Senior Global Policy Manager on the ongoing encryption conversation & the responsibility of tech companies to defend security.
The Web is the platform for game development and we’ll be showing it in action at this year’s Game Developer Conference in San Francisco. Powerful new capabilities continue to emerge and gain mindshare with developers and gamers alike as the open Web games stack reaches ubiquity.
Technologies pioneered by Mozilla, such as WebGL, WebVR and asm.js are all gaining momentum.
Today, WebAssembly, the next evolution of asm.js, is available as an experiment for testing in Firefox Nightly.
Launching this week at GDC, Open Web Games is a site for developers and browser makers to demonstrate modern Web game technologies, stress-test browser implementations and collaborate on maintaining the stability and evolution of the Web games stack over time using a variety of real-world games and demos.
Next generation Web technologies such as WebGL 2, SIMD.js and Shared Array Buffer are also now available for anyone to explore in Firefox Nightly.
To advance WebVR, Mozilla recently announced version 1.0 of the WebVR API proposal.
Mozilla is investing in helping developers move titles based on plugins to Web technologies through the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) and direct engineering support.
Over the last year the industry has continued to demonstrate its support for the open Web stack:
Unity, one of the largest and best-regarded game engines in the industry, showed that the Web stack is ready for prime time by removing the ‘Preview’ label from their amazing WebGL exporter which takes advantage of WebGL and asm.js.
Autodesk, a leader in 3D design and animation tools, is showing a tech preview of Web export support with its Stingray game engine.
Indy mobile developers like EVERYDAYiPLAY are expanding their revenue streams by building for the Web with games like Heroes of Paragon. They report Daily Average Revenue per User (DARPU) numbers that are much better for the Web version of their game than the Android Play store and are very competitive, relative to iOS.
Major browsers have adopted more of the key APIs needed to enable the next generation of Web games. The industry’s top brands are coming out with growing support for the Web, making it easier than ever for developers to create for and succeed on the Web platform.
For more information:
If you’re at GDC, come see us at booth 936 on the Lower Level of the South Hall.
If you’re a member of the press and have a question, please email press@mozilla.com and we’ll help you out.
To learn more about what Mozilla is doing at GDC, read articles from developers or learn how to get involved, please visit games.mozilla.org.
Amnesty International today announced a new #360Syria “virtual tour” website showing the devastation brought by Syrian government barrel bombing of the besieged city of Aleppo. The website demonstration, called “Fear of the Sky” (www.360Syria.com), is built using Mozilla A-Frame technology.
Websites like #360Syria, that allow viewers to take a virtual tour of the devastated city of Aleppo, are a significant new use case for WebVR. Technology gives people a voice where otherwise there is none. It brings a new level of visibility and greater levels of empathy to real-life situations.
The #360Syria website comprises specially-created 360-degree photography, narration, sound recordings, 3-D data graphics and videos gathered by Amnesty-trained Syrian media activists. The site was created in partnership with San Francisco design and technology company Junior (www.junior.io).
A-Frame is an open source framework that simplifies WebVR development and enables easy creation of WebVR experiences with HTML. Because A-Frame is built around building blocks that can be extended and combined into limitless combinations, it provides a high degree of creative freedom.It is designed and maintained by MozVR (Mozilla’s virtual reality research team) and optimizes for a smooth learning curve between ease-of-use for developers who are new to virtual reality technology and increased flexibility for advanced developers.
At Mozilla one of our goals is to bring high-performance, responsive virtual reality technology to the open Web. We launched A-Frame, an open source library for creating virtual reality Web experiences, so that Web developers could create virtual reality websites from a single line of HTML code and bypass complex 3D APIs like WebGL.
Our hope is that A-Frame provides a constructive contribution to a growing pantheon of WebVR development tools, helping to grow the number of VR Web developers and experiences.
So far, we’ve explored encryption’s role in helping protect users’ personal, intimate information. We’ve created an animated short that uses plain language to explain how encryption works. And we’ve expressed our support for Apple in its ongoing case against the FBI.
Today, we’re spotlighting how encryption can support not only our personal security, but also how it can play a role in promoting values like free expression that most of us hold dear.
Recently, Mozilla spoke with Trevor Timm, Executive Director of Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports and defends journalism dedicated to transparency and accountability. “Increasingly, encryption is playing a huge role in upholding free expression rights,” Trevor says. You can learn more by watching our interview below:
I hope you’ll take a moment, hear Trevor, and share this video with friends and family. Broadening public understanding of encryption is the first step toward protecting it. We’ve learned that an informed public is one of the open Internet movement’s most powerful tools.
Mozilla is also supporting encryption by placing a technologist, in collaboration with the Ford Foundation, at the Freedom Of The Press Foundation. It’s part of our Open Web Fellows program — if you are interested in this program, apply by March 20.
Thanks for being involved and for joining the discussion about encryption. It’s an important moment for all of us to be talking about these issues.
Firefox Hello Beta is a communication tool that lets you share tabs you’re browsing in Firefox with others and chat over video or text, free and without needing an account or login. Firefox Hello Beta in Windows, Mac and Linux helps you discuss and make decisions about anything online by sharing the website you’re browsing in your conversation. This makes it easier and faster to do things like to shop online together with friends, plan a vacation with the family or collaborate on work with a colleague.
When you click the Firefox Hello icon in Firefox and invite someone to your conversation, Hello will instantly share the tab you’re viewing with them when they join.
Firefox Hello on Windows, Mac and Linux is developed with our partner Telefónica and we’re always working on adding features, including the ability to pause sharing and more.
We hope you enjoy using the updated Firefox Hello Beta and we look forward to sharing more updates about new features we’re testing on our Future Releases Blog.
Tuesday March 8 2016 is International Women’s Day (IWD). While Mozilla celebrates the progress to date we also realize there is a great deal of critical work still needed. The Internet can play an enormous role in improving the lives and opportunities of women, girls and their families. This is why I am honored to participate in the United Nations’ first High Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment, which was launched this January. I am eager to emphasize the positive effects of technology and the Open Internet as part of the Panel’s work. I am also intent on representing voices from around the globe in this discussion, and have begun collecting input to do this.
You can learn more about work in these topics and read my thoughts on how the Internet can empower women in a post on my blog.
Mozilla today is joining a coalition of technology companies, including Google, Nest Labs, Facebook, WhatsApp, Evernote, Snapchat and Microsoft, in filing an amicus brief in support of Apple’s position in its ongoing dispute with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In our brief we are urging the district court not to force Apple to undo its own security protections to break into an iPhone.
Ultimately, companies like Mozilla are constantly striving to build more secure products. We make decisions every single day intended to protect our users. But those decisions affect all our users, which means Mozilla cannot weaken security for one user without effectively weakening it for everybody else. And it also means we cannot stand by as other companies are required to do so.
We are filing the amicus brief to help the court understand why it is dangerous to force technology companies to actively undermine their own security features. Opposing the FBI order is about taking a stand for public safety. It is the responsibility of technology companies to build as strong a product as possible to protect all users. We’ve already seen what weak security can do. We think users want more security, not less security. Tech companies should aspire to build “unhackable” products. With this precedent, we could all be told not to build secure products in the first place.
Security is critical to the continued evolution and growth of the Internet. It’s part of our mission to safeguard the Web, we consider it part of our job to take a stand on issues that threaten the health of the Internet.
The Internet of Things is changing the world around us, with new use cases, experiences and technologies emerging every day. As we continue to experiment in this space, we wanted to take a moment to share more details around our approach, process and current projects we’re testing.
We are focused on a gated innovation process that includes time to brainstorm solutions to real life problems and evaluate the market opportunity for these ideas. Additionally, we are aligning ourselves with users when it comes to simplicity, ease-of-use and engaging experiences, while ensuring everything is built with the Mozilla values of openness, transparency, privacy and user control at the core.
We have identified a shortlist of experiments as our first group of projects in need of community participation to help us develop, test and evaluate. We’re excited to say that our first round of projects cover a wide range of potential solutions, as you can see below:
Project Link: Your personal user agent that understands your preferences for how you want to interact with the world of devices in your home, and automate your connected world for you. All of this still done conveniently and securely, but completely under your control.
Project Sensor Web: The easiest path from sensors to open data for contributors to collaboratively build a detailed understanding of their living environments. We are launching a pilot project to build a crowdsourced pm2.5 sensor network.
Project Smart Home: A middle ground between “in a box” solutions like Apple Homekit and DIY solutions like Raspberry Pi. Combining modular, affordable hardware with easy-to-use rules, Smart Home empowers people to solve unique everyday problems in new and creative ways.
Project Vaani: An IoT enabler package to developers, device makers and users who want to add a voice interface to their devices in a flexible and customizable way. We will prototype interactions at home in near term, and in future, showcase the ability to access services from the open Web.
We cannot do this without our dedicated and passionate community of developers and volunteers serving in an array of roles, as they are critical at ensuring each project has the best opportunity at making an impact. If you are interested in participating as a developer or tester, please click here to get involved.
We look forward to giving you updates on these projects as we continue to innovate with you all, out in the open.
in Firefox and invite someone to your conversation, Hello will instantly share the tab you’re viewing with them when they join.