UbuntuHandbook

Firefox 135.0 Released! Extend AI ChatBot Support for All Users

Last updated: February 5, 2025 — Leave a comment

Mozilla Firefox announced new 135.0 release on Tuesday. See what’s new in this monthly release.

The new release enhanced some features to make them work for all users. AI Chatbot, the experimental feature that’s introduced since Firefox 130, now is available to all users.

Just go to Settings -> Firefox Labs, then select AI between Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, Le Chat Mistral, then you may chat with AI in sidebar after login.

Firefox AI Chatbot made available to all users

Besides AI, the new browser release also extended the credit card autofill feature to all users globally, made the refreshed New Tab layout to users in all countries where Stories are available.

And, the built-in translations now support translating Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. While Russian is now available as a target language to translated into.

New Tab layout now works in all countries support Stories

Firefox 135 includes safeguards to prevent sites from abusing the history API by generating excessive history entries. Which however make navigating back and forward buttons difficult by cluttering the history.

Other changes in the new browser release include:

New “Close current tab” option in Ctrl+Q quit confirm dialog.
Enforce certificate transparency, requiring web servers to provide sufficient proof.
Roll out the CRLite certificate revocation checking mechanism.
Remove “Do Not Track” checkbox, user may use “Tell websites not to sell or share my data” setting instead.
Rename “Copy Clean Link” menu item to “Copy Without Site Tracking”.
Use XZ instead of BZ2 for smaller Linux binaries.
And, various security fixes.

The release also includes some web development changes. It introduced a new console command $$$ allows to search the page including within shadow roots. It added support for the WebAuthn getClientCapabilities() method, and a post-quantum key exchange mechanism (mlkem768x25519) for HTTP/3.

How to Get Firefox 135.0

The release note and official packages are available at the link below:

Firefox 135.0 Release Note

For Ubuntu 22.04+ users with default Firefox Snap package, it will automatically update to the latest, though user may manually check updates via command:

sudo snap refresh firefox

For native DEB package, user can choose either the official apt repository or MozillaTeam PPA, and here’s a step by step tutorial talking about it.

In News Firefox, web

How to Block IPs in Nginx / WordPress Login Page

Last updated: January 30, 2025 — Leave a comment

This is a step by step beginner’s guide shows how to configure Nginx to block certain IPs or IP range from accessing your website, and block all others while only you (and specified IPs) can access the wordpress login pages.

This site was under attack a few days ago. Someone made tens of thousands of constant requests that slowed down the server response. And, here’s what I did to manually block attacker’s IPs and restrict access to the login page.
Continue Reading…

In Howtos web

Midori Browser 11.5 Added Headless Mode & New App Icon

Last updated: January 8, 2025 — Leave a comment

Midori web browser announced new 11.5 release recently with some exciting new features.

Midori was a popular lightweight web browser that was default in elementary OS and Bodhi Linux. It’s now a free open-source Firefox derived browser developed by Astian Foundation, and licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL).

The browser released new 11.5 recently, changed its app icon from a green lizard to new flat design logo that IMO feels better.

In News web

Firefox 134.0 is out! Touchpad Hold Gestures & HEVC Video Acceleration

Last updated: January 7, 2025 — Leave a comment

A new monthly release of Mozilla Firefox web browser, version 134.0, is out today! Though, it’s not yet officially announced at the moment of writing.

According to the Mozilla Github releases page, the new Firefox release added support for touchpad hold gestures for Linux.

Meaning kinetic scrolling (aka momentum scrolling or inertia scrolling), the continuous scrolling after lifted fingers from touchpad, can be interrupted by placing two fingers on the touchpad.

In News Firefox, web

Install or Upgrade to PHP 8.4 in Ubuntu 24.04 | 22.04

Last updated: November 28, 2024 — Leave a comment

PHP, the popular scripting language for web development, announced new 8.4 release last week. Here’s how to install or upgrade to Php 8.4 in Ubuntu 22.04 or Ubuntu 24.04 to work with Apache2 or Nginx web server.

PHP 8.4 introduced a number of new features such as property hooks, asymmetric visibility, lazy objects, an object API for BCMath, new array functions, and new JIT implementation based on IR Framework. See the release page for more.

In Howtos Apache, Nginx, PHP, web

How to Open Certain URL Links in Specific Web Browsers

Last updated: October 15, 2024 — Leave a comment

This tutorial shows how to configure Ubuntu or other Linux to redirect certain URLs or domains to specific web browser, while leaving all others open in the default browser.

When clicking an URL in email reader, chat app, and other apps, it by default opens the linked page in system default web browser. However, some users may prefer to open certain websites in non-default browser. For example, use Google Chrome for watching YouTube, while using Firefox as default.

In Howtos web

Firefox 128.0 Adds Translation support for Selected Text

Last updated: July 10, 2024 — Leave a comment

Firefox web browser announced new 128.0 release one day ago on Tuesday.

This is a new monthly release that introduces some handy new features. They include context menu option to translate a selection of text. Rather than translate full web page, user can now highlight single or a selection of text, then use right-click and select to translate the text.

In News Firefox, web

How to Install Chromium (Deb Edition) in Ubuntu 24.04 | 22.04

Last updated: May 5, 2024 — 2 Comments

This tutorial shows how to install the most recent Chromium web browser as native .deb package in Ubuntu 24.04 and Ubuntu 22.04.

Like Firefox and Thunderbird, the popular Chromium web browser in Ubuntu repository is a Snap package that runs in sandbox environment.

For those who don’t like Flatpak and Snap packages, there are few other sources to install the Chromium browser via native Deb package.

Debian and Linux Mint repositories are the trustworthy repositories that I used to use, which however either has few different dependency libraries or lacks of arm64/armhf platform support.

So, in my opinion an Ubuntu PPA can be the better choice for beginners. It’s easy to install and maintain, though less trustworthy since Chromium does not have an official PPA.

Chromium Browser (.deb package)

In Howtos chromium browser, web

How to Install & Update Brave Browser in Ubuntu 24.04

Last updated: April 17, 2024 — 1 Comment

This tutorial shows how to install Brave web browser in Ubuntu in 3 different ways: Snap, Deb, and Flatpak packages.

Brave is a free open-source web browser based on Chromium. It is a privacy-focused browser, which automatically blocks most ads and website trackers in the default settings.

The web browser is available for Linux in three different package formats that support amd64 (Intel/AMD) and arm64 (e.g., Raspberry Pi) platforms. They are:

Snap – universal Linux package format runs in sandbox environment.
Deb – native package format for Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint.
Flatpak – another universal Linux package format runs in sandbox environment.

In Howtos brave web browser, web

Firefox 124.0 Released! Caret Browsing in PDF Viewer & Qwant to All Languages in France

Last updated: March 20, 2024 — Leave a comment

Mozilla announced a new monthly release of its Firefox web browser on March 19.

In the new release, the caret browsing mode, keyboard navigating just like in text editor, also works in the built-in PDF viewer.

The Qwant search engine has been expanded to all languages in the France region along with Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland.

In MacOS, Firefox now uses the macOS fullscreen API for better user experience for fullscreen spaces, menubar and the Dock. In Windows, it populates the taskbar jump list more efficiently, for a smoother overall browsing experience.