Home Android Mozilla tightens belt, folds two Firefox services

Mozilla tightens belt, folds two Firefox services

By
Jeanette Box
-
356
70

A year and a half after launching the free file-sharing service Firefox Send, Mozilla canned the concept, part of a retrenchment that began this summer when the organization laid off a quarter of its workforce.

Firefox Notes, another service that got its start from the Test Pilot program, also went under the knife Thursday. Notes will be decommissioned on Android Nov. 1, and Mozilla will not provide security updates to the desktop browser’s add-on after that date.

“As Mozilla tightens and refines its product focus in 2020, today we are announcing the end of life for two legacy services that grew out of the Firefox Test Pilot program,” Mozilla said in an unsigned post to its primary blog.

Although Firefox Send – an end-to-end encrypted service where users upload files for others to download – launched in March 2019, it’s been dark since early July. That was when Mozilla switched off the service because of abuse. Criminals were using Send to transmit malware and carry out phishing attacks, leveraging Firefox’s and tacitly, Mozilla’s, reputations to slip by anti-malware filters. At the time, Mozilla said it had only temporarily pulled Send and would restart it once it had added a “Report abuse” function.

That won’t happen. “In the intervening period, as we weighed the cost of our overall portfolio and strategic focus, we made the decision not to relaunch the service,” Mozilla said of Send.

While Mozilla did not go into more detail on its decision, reports from people who were laid off by the organization last month alleged that among the newly unemployed were people from Mozilla’s threat team, who would presumably have been responsible for investigating the abuse reports of a restarted Send.

Also on the chopping block was Firefox Notes, a July 2017 browser add-on released by Test Pilot, the project that asked users to try out experimental features and functionalities. The browser extension for desktop Firefox and the standalone app for Android gave users a note taker whose encrypted content was synchronized among multiple devices.

Mozilla plans to shut down Notes on Nov. 1. “Three important changes will occur on this date,” Mozilla said in a support document. “The Notes browser extension will no longer receive performance or security updates, and if you uninstall Notes, you will not be able to reinstall it.” At the same time, the Android app will stop working and syncing of all content will cease.

Before the stop date, users should do a final sync and then export their notes’ content as HTML, as shown in this support document.

Copyright © 2020 IDG Communications, Inc.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

70 COMMENTS

  1. 176943 806366Just wanna remark on couple of common things, The website style is perfect, the topic matter is rattling good 584385

  2. 330096 214562Thank you for your fantastic post! It has long been very useful. I hope which you will proceed sharing your wisdom with us. 425056

  3. 295520 487786Hey very good weblog!! Man .. Beautiful .. Wonderful .. I will bookmark your website and take the feeds alsoIm satisfied to seek out numerous useful info here in the post, we need develop much more techniques on this regard, thanks for sharing. 218377

  36. 73861 59979The next time Someone said a weblog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me just as significantly as this. Come on, man, I know it was my choice to read, but When i thought youd have some thing intriguing to say. All I hear is actually a handful of whining about something you can fix in the event you werent too busy searching for attention. 310676

  46. 49260 128203Hey there, Can I copy this post image and implement it on my private internet log? 511966

  51. 866793 212841Im glad to become a visitor in this pure web site, regards for this rare info! 802098

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here