Firefox is a great browser. The developers of Firefox do a lot for the web, and without it, we’d all be stuck using Chromium on Linux. However, as time goes on, Firefox has gotten worse with its practices. If you’re tired of the experiments and the business practices Mozilla is up to, there’s LibreWolf.

LibreWolf is a fork of Firefox proper. It is open-source and works on Mac OS, Linux, and Windows. Best of all, it removes all of the shady things Mozilla has been up to. Here’s how you can try out LibreWolf on Linux.

• This Week in Glean: Designing a telemetry collection with Glean

  (“This Week in Glean” is a series of blog posts that the Glean Team at Mozilla is using to try to communicate better about our work. They could be release notes, documentation, hopes, dreams, or whatever: so long as it is inspired by Glean.) All “This Week in Glean” blog posts are listed in the TWiG index).

  Whenever I get a chance to write about Glean, I am usually writing about some aspects of working on Glean. This time around I’m going to turn that on its head by sharing my experience working with Glean as a consumer with metrics to collect, specifically in regards to designing a Nimbus health metrics collection. This post is about sharing what I learned from the experience and what I found to be the most important considerations when designing a telemetry collection.

  I’ve been helping develop Nimbus, Mozilla’s new experimentation platform, for a while now. It is one of many cross-platform tools written in Rust and it exists as part of the Mozilla Application Services collection of components. With Nimbus being used in more and more products we have a need to monitor its “health”, or how well it is performing in the wild. I took on this task of determining what we would need to measure and designing the telemetry and visualizations because I was interested in experiencing Glean from a consumer’s perspective.

• Firefox Add-on Reviews: How to choose the right password manager browser extension

  All good password managers should, of course, effectively secure passwords; and they all basically do the same thing—you create a single, easy-to-remember master password to access your labyrinth of complex logins. Password managers not only spare you the hassle of remembering a maze of logins; they can also offer suggestions to help make your passwords even stronger. Fortunately there’s no shortage of capable password protectors out there. But with so many options, how to choose the one that’ll work best for you?

  Here are some of our favorite password managers. They all offer excellent password protection, but with distinct areas of strength.

• Mozilla Performance Blog: Performance Sheriff Newsletter (September 2021)

  In September there were 174 alerts generated, resulting in 23 regression bugs being filed on average 6.4 days after the regressing change landed.

  Welcome to the September 2021 edition of the performance sheriffing newsletter. Here you’ll find the usual summary of our sheriffing efficiency metrics. If you’re interested (and if you have access) you can view the full dashboard.

Monday, 11 October is the UN's International Day for the Girl Child. The definition of Girl Child varies from country to country. In the law of Albania, the age of consent can be as low as 14 if you can convince (bribe) a judge that a 14 year old girl has achieved sexual maturity. Legal text.

What does it look like when children aged 16 and 17 make software for big corporations to use?

Today we find out

Here is a team photo from Ura Design, one of the Albanian companies using the hackerspace as a front for people trafficking. In the team we see a former Outreachy, Renata Gegaj beside a future Outreachy, Anja Xhakani.

• Reducing the Overhead of Profiling Firefox Sleeping Threads – Mozilla Performance

  Firefox includes its own profiler: Visit profiler.firefox.com to enable it, and the user documentation is available from there.

  The main advantages compared with using a third-party profiler, are that it’s supplied with Firefox, it can capture screenshots, it understands JavaScript stacks, and Firefox is adding “markers” to indicate important events that may be useful to developers.

  Its most visible function is to capture periodic “samples” of function call stacks from a number of threads in each process. Threads are selected during configuration in about:profiling, and can range from a handful of the most important threads, to all known threads.

  This sampling is performed at regular intervals, by going through all selected threads and suspending each one temporarily while a sample of its current stack is captured (this is known as “stack walking”). This costly sampling operation can have a non-negligible impact on how the rest of the Firefox code runs, this is the “overhead” of the Profiler. In order to be able to sample as many threads as possible with the smallest impact, there is ongoing work to reduce this overhead.

• Lots to see in Firefox 93! - Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog

  Firefox 93 comes with lots of lovely updates including AVIF image format support, filling of XFA-based forms in its PDF viewer and protection against insecure downloads by blocking downloads relying on insecure connections.

  Web developers are now able to use static initialization blocks within JavaScript classes, and there are some Shadow DOM and Custom Elements updates. The SHA-256 algorithm is now supported for HTTP Authentication using digests. This allows much more secure authentication than previously available using the MD5 algorithm.

• GCC, Clang[d], LSP client, Kate and variadic macro warnings, a short story

  Kate has had an LSP plugin for sometime now, which uses Clangd. It's a great plugin that brings many code navigation/validation features, akin to those available in Qt Creator and KDevelop.

  So naturally since I got it to work, I've been using it. At some point I found out about the Diagnostics tab in the LSP Client tool view in Kate, which displays useful information; however I also saw that it was plagued by a spam of the following warnings...

• GCC 12 Enables Auto-Vectorization For -O2 Optimization Level - Phoronix

  The change merged today is enabling the auto-vectorizer at the -O2 optimization level rather than only at -O3 and above. The auto-vectorizer is enabled by default with -O2 and using its "very cheap" cost model. The very cheap model enables vectorization if the scalar iteration count is a multiple of four, it is the "cheapest" of these cost models. Meanwhile the default cost model for vectorization at -O3 is "dynamic" for having more checks to try to determine if a vectorized code path will be faster.

• Jon Chiappetta: Reddit Refresher Javascript Bookmark

• Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppGSL 0.3.10: Small Updatex

  A new release 0.3.10 of RcppGSL is now on CRAN. upload](https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2020/06/21#rcppgsl_0.3.8). The RcppGSL package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL by relying on the Rcpp package.

  This release brings a requested configure.ac update (just like RQuantLib yesterday and littler two days ago, along with the at-work tiledb update today). It also adds a small testing improvement. No user-visible changes, no new features. Details follow from the NEWS file.

• Lang team October update

  This week the lang team held its October planning meeting (minutes). We hold these meetings on the first Wednesday of every month.

• This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 411