Firefox 142.0 released

[Posted August 19, 2025 by corbet]

Version 142.0 of the firefox browser has been released. Changes include a new link preview feature (with optional "AI-generated key points"), and a "flexible exception list" for the strict tracking protection feature that allows relaxing specific protections on sites that otherwise will not work properly.

Summary irresponsibly on by default

Posted Aug 20, 2025 7:34 UTC (Wed) by fishface60 (subscriber, #88700) [Link] (5 responses)

It seems recklessly irresponsible to turn this summary feature on by default.

Even if were to do the processing locally, apart from the waste of energy for speculatively following links that exposes the existence of the client, allowing tracking, and some links cause side-effects when followed.

If it's doing so remotely that's a privacy leak and potentially exposing confidential information.

Summary irresponsibly on by default

Posted Aug 20, 2025 8:37 UTC (Wed) by fishface60 (subscriber, #88700) [Link] (4 responses)

Hm, the article claims it's activated by long press or right-click menu, but from friends discussing it they appeared to have it popping up without activation.

Perhaps something changed during progressive rollout, or some of us have been misinformed.
Either way I will continue to have `browser.ml.enabled` set to false.

Summary irresponsibly on by default

Posted Aug 20, 2025 8:56 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

The problem is applications nowadays have so many shortcuts and "quick keys", and and and ...

I'm regularly enabling/disabling things I have no clue what they are because I've somehow "pressed a hot key" / "clicked a shortcut", and then it's the devil's own job to (a) find out what I've done, and (b) undo it!

Cheers,
Wol

Summary irresponsibly on by default

Posted Aug 20, 2025 9:06 UTC (Wed) by fishface60 (subscriber, #88700) [Link] (2 responses)

Not aided by cats walking on keyboards.

Summary irresponsibly on by default

Posted Aug 20, 2025 11:21 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> Not aided by cats walking on keyboards.

One of my cats has the questionable talent of regularly triggering Firefox's private browsing mode.

...Or at least I think it's the cat.

Summary irresponsibly on by default

Posted Aug 21, 2025 1:35 UTC (Thu) by himi (subscriber, #340) [Link]

My cat likes sleeping on my laptop (it's warm, obviously it's a cat bed). My laptop sits on my desk between keyboard and monitors, so when she lies down on the laptop and shuffles around (as cats do), her butt ends up pushing the keyboard around and pressing keys. I regularly wake up to a dialogue asking me if I want to enable carat browsing (whatever that is) . . .

. . . and having now looked it up (the trigger key is F7, right in the middle of the top row), I guess it could be worse - like waking up to a million help browser windows, or running out of disk space after a few days if the print screen key still triggered a screenshot automatically . . .