Asif Youssuff

Writing

Oct 16, 2024

Google is Killing uBlock Origin. No Chromium Browser is Safe.

We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the extension will soon...

Oct 13, 2024

Protecting Your Privacy While Eroding Your Democracy: Apple’s and Mozilla’s PPAs (Privacy Preserving Ad Attribution) Considered Harmful

The last few weeks have been interesting if you follow Firefox news. Mark Surman (President, Mozilla Foundation) and Laura Chambers (CEO, Mozilla Corporation) wrote posts saying that “Mozilla is going...

Jun 24, 2024

Mozilla Did a Reddit AMA About Their 2024 Firefox Priorities… See What You Missed

Mozilla did their biggest Reddit AMA yet on Thursday, June 13, with eight members of the Firefox leadership team. With 400 total comments on the post, they covered a lot...

Oct 14, 2023

Firefox 120: Searching Tabs in the Address Bar Will Work Across Containers

I was once told that Firefox users don’t always do enough to celebrate the small wins. Here’s something that I consider to be a big one, but might not be...

Aug 2, 2023

How Firefox Loses When it Tries to Copy Chrome

Prologue You might not know it, but Firefox was once widely considered to be an innovative browser. It wasn’t just an alternative to Internet Explorer (and now Chrome). Firefox introduced...

Jul 10, 2023

The Narwhal Kbins at Dawn: A Reddit UserStyle for Kbin

TL;DR: I made a styled version of Reddit for Kbin instances for people participating in the reddit migration. Inspired mostly by Old Reddit, but it actually has a dark mode!...

Jun 30, 2023

I Was Quoted in The Verge

“We see no reason to reopen as I don’t think we’re the bad guys here,” yoasif, an r/firefox moderator who received the message, tells The Verge in an email. “Reddit...

Jun 20, 2023

Reddit is Removing Mods Whose Teams Let Their Subreddits Post NSFW Content

Update: The Verge has now posted about this: “Moderators incorrectly marking a community as NSFW is a violation of both our Content Policy and Moderator Code of Conduct,” Reddit spokesperson...

Jun 20, 2023

Kawaii Firefox

Trying to archive some of the best posts from r/firefox over the years. Two years ago, mitcheecostelo posted about an “aesthetic firefox icon to replace the default icon!” that his...

Jun 15, 2023

Unofficial Subreddit Migration List (Lemmy, Kbin)

A comprehensive mapping of old subreddits to new communities. With /r/startrek moving to Lemmy, I realized that Redditors are going to need a way to find their old communities on...

May 10, 2023

Nvidia Video Super Resolution Comes to Firefox: How to Test

Firefox developers recently added support for Nvidia’s Virtual Super Resolution (VSR) technology. The idea received 278 votes on Connect Mozilla, so it is clearly interesting for people with the latest...

May 3, 2023

With its API Update, Reddit Should Start Paying its Users (Or They Should Leave)

Reddit is one of the most popular social media sites on the web, with millions of users and communities dedicated to every topic imaginable. The platform is known for its...

Nov 21, 2022

Save as PDF Arrives on Firefox for Android (Beta & Nightly)

One of the earliest Fennec parity items in the new Firefox for Android (Fenix) was the Save as PDF option. Longtime Firefox users missed the feature upon release of Firefox...

Oct 1, 2022

Firefox Switch: A Guide for Beginners

Firefox is experiencing a resurgence since the news of Chromium based browsers weakening ad blocking extensions has hit the public consciousness. You may be one of the people switching to...

Sep 6, 2022

r/firefox Monthly Wrap-Up - August 2022: A new Chief Product Officer

There are a lot of fun things posted on r/firefox, but if you don’t visit often, you might miss some things. This is the fourth post of an ideally monthly...

Aug 10, 2022

r/firefox Monthly Wrap-Up - July 2022

There are a lot of fun things posted on r/firefox every month, but if you don’t visit often, you might miss some things. This is the third post of a...

Jul 19, 2022

MBNA Stops Supporting Firefox in August - Best Alternatives to Their Credit Cards

You’d think businesses would think twice before dropping support for the open web, but MBNA seems to not have learned the lesson that South Korea learned the hard way. I...

Jul 5, 2022

r/firefox Monthly Wrap-Up - May 2022

There are a lot of fun things posted on r/firefox every month, but if you don’t visit often, you might miss some things. This is the second post of a...

Jun 20, 2022

Killing the Page Action API in Firefox’s Manifest V3 is a Mistake

Mozilla has announced that part of the move to Manifest V3 in Firefox will mean that the page_action extension API will be merged into action. Documentation for action shows that...

Jun 1, 2022

r/firefox Monthly Wrap-Up - May 2022: Firefox 100!

There are a lot of fun things posted on r/firefox every month, but if you don’t visit often, you might miss some things. This is the inaugural post of a...

May 17, 2022

Update on my SoFi Experience: My Account was Opened

You may have read my post about the poor customer service experience and product issues that I experienced with SoFi last week. This afternoon, without any warning, I received am...

May 12, 2022

SoFi’s Banking Product and Customer Service Processes are Broken

Note: Since writing this post, SoFi has approved my application and my account was opened. It isn’t often that I experience a customer service interaction so unpleasant that I feel...

Apr 19, 2022

Should Mozilla Introduce a De-AMP Feature? (2018)

In September of 2018, I applied to a mobile product role at Mozilla. Part of the interview process included writing a take-home assignment with a writing prompt about AMP. Given...

Apr 12, 2022

Microsoft Edge is Now Taking Over as Your Default Browser… on Linux

If you are like most deskop Linux users, if you have heard of the various intrusive ways Microsoft has used to “encourage” Windows users to use their Chromium-based browser, Edge,...

Mar 13, 2022

(YouTube) Vanced is Dead: How to Replace it With Firefox (Nightly)

On March 13, 2022, Vanced announced on Twitter that Vanced had been discontinued. Vanced was a modded version of the official YouTube app that added features like ad blocking, sponsor...

Jan 26, 2022

Tested and Reviewed: The Most Wanted Add-ons for Firefox on Android, Part 1

In this post, I review some of the add-ons most requested for Firefox by the Firefox community on reddit. While Firefox for Android currently has 18 add-ons available by default,...

Oct 10, 2021

Firefox Suggest: An Anatomy of a PR Incident

Firefox 93 was released last Tuesday, and early reviews were positive. That didn’t last long though, as reports soon spread on tech media that Firefox was now showing ads in...

Jul 26, 2021

Firefox Privacy or: How I Learned to Stop Hardening and Love Strict Tracking Protection

Firefox is popular in online privacy communities because it is a high quality, open source web browser that is extensively configurable. Unfortunately, those communities often instruct new Firefox users to...

Mar 21, 2021

Supporting Compact Mode in Firefox Proton

Mozilla recently proposed that Firefox remove its compact UI density setting as part of its Proton UI Refresh. Resulting coverage has resulted in consternation among Firefox users. As a member...

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