Tag: firefox

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October begins two-for-two with Pook-Emu Bee Links before our regularly scheduled Saturday off-day for the Newsletter Leaf Journal.

I think they’re hoping you get the hint

1 | Japan announces new permanent residency guidelines, foreigners must earn more than average Japanese person (Casey Baseel for SoraNews24. Oct. 1, 2026.)
The earning threshold shouldn’t be too hard to hit. 10 years residence for non-marriage cases however… They’re definitely trying to tell you something. To his credit, article author Casey Baseel appears to get the hint. Meanwhile, the United States still has the Diversity Visa program on the books, wherein we randomly hand out visas to people who have achieved a high school diploma (not great, not the best).

2 | Mamdani Will Be Honored Alongside Group with Alleged Ties to Iranian Regime (Adam Lehodey and Daniel Edward Rosen for City Journal. Oct. 1, 2026.)
I was all but certain the group would be NAIA before opening the article. Did this really need two enterprising reporters? We could also drop the “alleged” for a more to-the-point headline.

We’re going to need you to think this through

3 | Bishops warn inflexible vetting rules could bar eligible family members from taking in migrant kids (Tessa Gervasini for EWTN. Aug. 26, 2026.)
We had a four-year experiment with dropping vetting standards and the results were rather subpar on many levels, so this warning can be safely disregarded.

4 | Prostitution busts plunge 60% — but hookers multiply — in NYC’s infamous ‘Market of Sweethearts’ (Rich Calder, Tina Moore, and Adry Torres for the New York Post. Sep. 27, 2026.)
“But” is doing some incredible heavy-lifting in this headline.

Unexpected angles

5 | New York Public Library hosted author who compared Israel to a ‘dog shelter’ (Carl Campanile for the New York Post. Sep. 28, 2026.)
Does Nicholas Kristoff know about this?

6 | Anthropic Co-Founder Daniela Amodei Kept ‘Personal Advisory Council’ of Stuffed Animals to Solve Problems (Lucas Nolan for Breitbart. Oct. 1, 2026.)
My first though here was “this explains so much.”

It’s not bad

7 | Firefox 157 arrives with major UI redesign, compact mode, and hardware AV1 video decoding (Paul for AlternativeTo. Sep. 30, 2026.)
The new compact mode is good is welcome.

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Pook-Emu Bee was off Saturday for the newsletter and off Sunday because I had work to finish, but we return on this fun Monday for our regularly scheduled links from around the web.

Almond milk in a milk pot on a portable induction cooker on a kitchen counter. Next to it we see a mug with mushrooms, a bottle of powdered peanut butter, cocoa, sugar, and a small bowl with the ingredients mixed together.
I made almond milk hot chocolate last night. Should I share my recipes? Add it to the to-do list.

Links & Commentary

1 | Teenage tourist stabbed in ‘unprovoked’ attack inside McDonald’s near Times Square: sources (Joe Marino, Amanda Woods, and Jorge Fitz-Gibbon. August 17, 2026.)
Note for tourists: Being anywhere near Times Square at 2:00 AM is a poor life choice. I would add that being anywhere Times Square at any time is a poor life choice, but baby steps to giant strides and all.

2 | Debian Turns 33 Years Old, Happy Birthday! (Marcus Nestor for 9 to 5 Linux. August 16, 2026.)
Debian was practically a newborn when I received my first video game console.

3 | Who needs a dedicated portable music player in 2026? (Kevin Boone. August 2026.)
I never “needed” a portable music player but this is an interesting article.

4 | From Argentina to El Salvador: How Latin America is breaking up with socialism (David Asman for Fox Business. August 14, 2026.)
As soon as I saw the headline, I thought “here’s a slam dunk USAID joke for Pook-Emu Bee.” For that reason, I was conflicted when the article noted the USAID angle close to its conclusion.

5 | “Putting my Hand on Your Heart”: Former Senator Kyrsten Sinema Accused of “Alienation of Affection” (Jonathan Turley. August 16, 2026)
The Sinema alienation of affection story gave rise to a thing I learned post back in March.

6 | Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s Wife Cami Clark Courted Jeffrey Epstein to Invest in Her Porn Company (Lucas Nolan for Breitbart. August 16, 2026.)
Sometimes the headlines write themselves.

7 | Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin (Viktor Eriksson and Joel Lee for PC World. August 13, 2026.)
I’m writing this edition of Pook-Emu Bee in Firefox with uBlock Origin watching over me, protecting me from any nefarious ads or trackers I may have planted to manipulate or track me.

Quotable

8 | The World Cup of Ink (Theodore Dalrymple for The American Conservative. August 2, 2026.)

Tattoos retained their superficial connotations of rebellion and non-conformity, but they also became—in a deeper sense—marks of conformity, as tends to happen with all fashions, no matter how outrageous they may seem at the start. By means of tattooing, one could rebel and conform at the same time.

Pretty Photo

9 | Between the Nets (Daniel Sofer at Hermosoawave Photography. August 15, 2026.)
Beach volleyball nets frame the boat (photo in the link).

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I was too busy yesterday to put together my daily Pook-Emu Bee links. I am busy today as well, but not too busy to take a link break.

Article Links

1. Six search engines worth trying now that Google isn’t really Google anymore (Amanda Siberlin for TechCrunch. May 21, 2026.)

This is a fair list but the article misses some nuance about the sources used by Startpage and Ecosia. I would add Mojeek to the selection.

2. Prosecutor charged for allegedly emailing self sealed Jack Smith Trump report veiled as cake recipes (Justin Dunleavy for Just the News. May 20, 2026.)

This scheme sounds like a lemon cake.

3. Jeff Bezos blasts Mamdani for casting billionaire Ken Griffin as a ‘villain’ in Hizzoner’s viral video filmed outside NYC penthouse (Carl Campanile and Anna Young for the New York Post. May 20, 2026.)

Mr. Bezos is not wrong. While he is on the subject of being right, can he right the wrong that is the Amazon chatbot on store pages? It evolved from Rufus to Alexa and I think it went from war crime to super war crime.

4. A before-and-after look at downtown Brooklyn’s new streetscape (Nate Berg for Fast Company. December 9, 2025.)

They did a nice job. But it is still Downtown Brooklyn. You can only do so much with all the traffic and ugly apartment and office towers.

5. Delivery Robots Take Over Chicago Sidewalks, Sparking Debate And A Petition To Hit ‘Pause’ (Alec Karam for Block Club Chicago. December 8, 2025.)

I’d welcome them to Brooklyn on the condition that they take over the bike lanes while keeping bikes off the sidewalk.

6. Pocketbook Era With Koreader (tc3. September 21, 2025.)

I have a Pocketbook Color and InkPad Color with Koreader. I have almost talked myself into buying an Era for the side buttons, but it would be a bit expensive in light of the fact that I already have two working Pocketbooks. But let it be said Pocketbook comes with my recommendation for anyone who does not “need” the Kindle or Kobo stores.

7. Firefox Should Let Users Disable Searching from the URL Bar (Terence Towles Canote at A Shroud of Thoughts. May 20, 2026.)

I enable the search box on Firefox and agree with this take. But with that being said, I have reasons for usually searching from the address bar.

Videos

Natsu Basho (May Grand Sumo Tournament) Day 10: Atamifuji vs Wakatakage (May 19, 2026.)

I won’t spoil the outcome other than saying it was a big lift.

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We are having a second consecutive 90+ degree day here in Brooklyn today’s Pook-Emu Bee links are warmer than the outside temperatures.

Photograph of an LED clock screen showing 35 minutes past the hour, indoor temperature of 84, and humidity of 51.
According to the Marathon atomic clock by window, it is 84.4 degrees F there (which is about 6 feet from my desk) and 51% humidity.

Links

1. Google Search as you know it is over (Sarah Perez for TechCrunch. May 19, 2026.)

The AIfication of Google Search is concerning but NLJ has been hitting new highs in Google Search despite my disfavoring AI cawlers via .htaccess and robots, so we’ll see if it has any effect on my numbers.

2. Japanese indie gay bar management sim Sodomy Fatale will have you serving blood cocktails to flamboyant homosexual vampires (Dorde P for Automation West. May 19, 2026.)

That title is a little bit more attention-grabbing than the one Victor and I gave our visual novel back in January-February.

3. Don’t let the old man in (Robert Birming. May 19, 2026.)

Too late. I already let myself in.

4. Fedora Retiring Its Deepin Desktop Packages (Michael Larabel for Phoronix. May 19, 2026.)

I was never tempted to try Deepin. That was apparently the right call.

5. Firefox 151 brings PDF merging, local profile backup, document PiP, and enhanced privacy (Paul for AlternativeTo. May 19, 2026.)

Local profile backup and the PDF features sound useful.

6. Matter of I-B-M-S-, 29 I&N Dec. 628 (BIA 2026) (Board of Immigration Appeals. May 19, 2026.)

Interesting Board of Immigration Appeals decision on adjudicating change of venue requests. The logic should be applicable to other motions. I have a feeling the Immigration Judge who issued decision below will be (or already is) looking for new employment.

7. LaGuardia Airport adds hologram ‘concierge’ Bridget in latest spooky invasion of AI (Brooke Steinberg for the New York Post. May 19, 2026.)

That’s not a hologram. That’s an AI generated woman on a screen. For real holograms, go read my review of A Midsummer Day’s Resonance.

Video

Natso Basho Day 8: Tobizaru vs Ura

I have been following the Natsu Basho grand sumo tournament (I’m up to date on day 9 of 11). This fight between Tobizaru and Ura on day 8 was terrific. Watch and enjoy. I watched the January and March tournaments as well and recalled the announcers discussing how popular Ura is (it was also obvious from the crowd). Ura struggled in January and March (maybe injuries?), but I got he idea. He has been doing well in May and is consistently producing exciting matches. I understand why he’s popular. Add me to the Ura fan club.

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My Pook-Emu Bee links are a bit late today. I had to deal with an issue related to my wireless access point this morning and then some work assignments. Unfortunately, I did not have time to engage in my regular morning reading, but we can take advantage to clear links from my to-use backlog.

1. Bee Write Back is a DIY distraction-free writing machine with OLED display and mechanical keyboard (Brad Linder for Liliputing. April 9, 2026.)

This is adorable.

2. Penn Station’s chaotic World Cup plan could unleash travel hell on New Jersey commuters ( Hannah Fierick, Ella Morrison, and Matt Troutman for the New York Post. April 6, 2026.)

I am starting to wonder whether New York is trying to be so obnoxious about the World Cup that it kills the “this is soccer’s American moment” trope once and for all.

3. Make the NBA better: 7 New Year’s resolutions for the league in 2026 (Tom Haberstroh for Yahoo! Sports. January 1, 2026.)

3-6 are all reasonable. 1-2 and 7 should go into the discard pile.

4. Waterfox to integrate Brave adblock engine, with search ads enabled by default (Mauricio B. Holguin for AlternativeTo. April 3, 2026.)

I never used Waterfox, but this may be worth watching for if (or when) upstream Firefox does away with Manifest V2. I’ll submit that I prefer uBlock Origin to Brave’s built-in implementation as a user, but Brave’s does work well.

5. CEO of America’s largest public hospital system says he’s ready to replace radiologists with AI (Marty Stempniak for Radiology Business. March 31, 2026.)

Let’s not.

6. NFL’s Goodell Defies Florida’s Lawsuit Over Rooney Rule, Calls Diversity ‘A Benefit’ (Warner Todd Huston for Breitbart. April 1, 2026.)

Left unexplained by the comissioner is why this benefit cannot be achieved in 2026 without the Rooney Rule. Also left unexplained is how narrowly the Commissioner defines diversity.

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Replied to Search engine shortcuts in Firefox by James (jamesg.blog)
Firefox has a feature that lets you map a character or sequence of characters typed in the Firefox address bar to a custom search engine. For example, you can map w to Wikipedia, so the query w coffee would take you to the Wikipedia search page for coffee ...

James at James’ Coffee Blog published a good post in 2024 titled Search engine shortcuts in Firefox, which regular New Leaf Journal readers will know is a topic near and dear to my heart. James demonstrated how to add search engine shortcuts to Firefox using the search box (which, readers should note, is distinct from running searches in the omnibar address bar (HT to yoasif for the correction; see source in Firefox docs) and provided a nice tutorial on how to assign and use shortcuts to custom search engines. I strongly encourage people to take advantage of custom search engine functionality. It can be put to creative use. See, for example, the following articles on the subject I have published on NLJ:

For fellow Firefox wielders out there, I recommend using Soufiane Sakhi’s Search Engines Helper extension for adding novel search engines (e.g., anything other than a search engine’s website’s default search). As I note in the articles, Chromium-based browsers make adding custom search engines easier and more intuitive than the Firefox family.

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Replied to Firefox AI by cybrkyd (Cybrkyd)
AI is creeping into my beloved Firefox

I use Firefox. I have mostly missed its new “AI features,” but a good post by Cybrkid alerted me to Firefox’s newest in-development AI “feature”: AI Window. Cybrkid is (correctly) nonplussed about this new feature and linked to good critiques in the official Mozilla forum. I learned more about what the AI Window will do in a favorable post on It’s Foss (with which I disagree). I submit for the record that if people have to go into About:Config to fully disable a new feature, I would not call it entirely opt in. Unlike Cybrkid, I am not looking to leave Firefox at the moment. I appreciate that I can disable unwanted “features” and that uBlock Origin works as expected in Firefox. But I will submit my own objection to the AI window. Souraw Rudra explains the AI Window by staying that “[i]t is basically [Mozilla’s] way of keeping up with Chrome and Edge, both of which have gone all-in on AI.” Firefox cannot “keep up” with Chrome and Edge. People have to go out of their way to use Firefox instead of Chrome and Edge. Focus on how to deliver a good product to people who are looking for an alternative to Chrome (even Microsoft understands that no one cares about Edge). Leave AI to browser extensions.

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Through Hacker News, I read that Google Chrome will go HTTPS by default with the release of Chrime 154, which is apparently slated for October 2026. I have not regularly used Chrome since 2015 or so, but I recall having heard from a friend that it did not enforce HTTPS by default. I unsurprisingly enable HTTPS by default in Firefox. Google’s post explains the decision well and it sounds to me like a good implementation. But it is worth noting that some sites do have valid reasons for eschewing HTTPS. See for example Frogfind, a search engine (really a DuckDuckGo front-end, but semantics aside) designed to work well on old computers and in old web browsers (see my 2022 Frogfind review). Websites that have no particular reason for not going HTTPS have a year to make the transition before Google Chrome changes its default setting.

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I saw a very unusual number of views in my Statify stats. The source was… Hacker News? While I have had a few dramatic Hacker News successes on my main site, The New Leaf Journal, I was not expecting one here. The culprit is yesterday’s Firefox “Privacy-Focused Direct Results” PSA, which I published as an aside after a more substantive Firefox PSA earlier in the same day. Interesting. For any new visitors, I hope you like the site and note you can find my long-form writing over on The New Leaf Journal.

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I covered how to disable Firefox’s new AI “features” in my previous post. While browsing my feeds, I came across a new AlternativeTo post on another enabled-by-default addition to Firefox titled Firefox tests privacy-focused direct results in the address bar with possible sponsorships. This new “feature” was already disabled in my config (thank you Arkenfox!), but AlternativeTo helpfully included a note about how to disable it for people with a more vanilla configuration:

Users can disable the feature in Firefox’s Search settings or by setting browser.urlbar.quicksuggest.online.enabled to “false” in about:config.

While AlternativeTo is mainly for software discovery, I must opine that their short news updates are good quality.

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I came across a guide on Flamed Fury to disabling new AI “features” in Firefox. I run Firefox with Arkenfox and a separate overrides file. I had not noticed any AI features with my set-up, but Flamed Fury inspired me to check my settings. It turned out the main AI toggle, browser.ml.enable, was enabled, as were the other ones he noted. This could be on account of the fact that Firefox is on version 144 but Arkenfox is still on 140 (assuming the AI toggles will be disabled in the next release). In the interim, I followed Flamed Fury’s guide to disabling the AI toggles, but I implemented them from my user-overrides.js file and then ran the Arkenfox updater scripts. See how they look (with one additional) in my overrides:

user_pref("browser.ml.enabled", false);

user_pref("browser.ml.chat.shortcuts.custom", false);

user_pref("browser.ml.chat.sidebar", false);

user_pref("browser.ml.checkForMemory", false);

user_pref("browser.ml.chat.shortcuts", false);

user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page", false);

user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge", false);

user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge", false);

user_pref("browser.ml.chat.menu", false);

user_pref("browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled", false);

user_pref("browser.ml.extensions.ml.enabled", false);

user_pref("browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled", false);

user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart,enabled", false);

user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnable", false);
If you want to maintain a clean Firefox, I recommend taking a look at Arkenfox, albeit it is important to read the docs before using it. Regarding the AI features, while I appreciate that Firefox does make it possible to disable unwanted additions to the browser, it would have been nice if they had at least made the AI stuff opt-in instead of opt-out.

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From AlternativeTo:

Mozilla Firefox is rolling out a new ‘shake to summarize’ feature in Firefox for iPhones, letting users generate an AI-powered summary of a webpage by shaking their device.

I use Firefox as my main desktop browser and I run a Firefox fork called Iron Fox on Android-based devices. The iOS Firefox, which is a re-skinned Safari, is a different deal. Still, I would prefer that Mozilla marshal its limited resources on maintaining Firefox and make it better and not on shake for AI functionality. Why not just learn how to read the first couple sentences of a post to determine whether it interests you or that it was actually written by a human being? Is that so hard?

(PS: This should not be enabled by default.)

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Replied to Tree Style Tab Issue by Nicholas A. FerrellNicholas A. Ferrell
I had been using Tree Style Tab for side-tabs on Firefox along with a userChrome.css file to remove the top bar. I was surprised to find when I opened Firefox this morning that Tree Style Tabs was not working. Instead of checking its GitHub repository, where I would have found the issue, I tried to ...

I use side tabs with my Firefox set up. I briefly switched from Tree Style Tab to Sidebery when Tree Style Tab had an update issue. I was impressed with Sidebery and it comes with more power features than Tree Style Tab out of the box (It also does a better job of clearly showing nested links). However, I opted to switch back to TST when the developer expeditiously fixed the issue with a new update. Why? Firstly, while I was impressed with Sidebery, it does not do anything beyond TST that I need. Secondly, TST can take on my theme for its coloring and I like my theme.

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Filed an Issue tab bar not finishing loading with latest .21 update · Issue #3440 · piroor/treestyletab by piroor (GitHub)
tab bar not finishing loading with latest 3.9.21 update solution: reinstalling 3.9.20 everything is fine again Details many open tabs 500+ (but was never before a problem) latest firefox beta 123.04

I had been using Tree Style Tab for side-tabs on Firefox along with a userChrome.css file to remove the top bar. I was surprised to find when I opened Firefox this morning that Tree Style Tabs was not working. Instead of checking its GitHub repository, where I would have found the issue, I tried to fix it myself and in the process, inadvertently reset my Firefox display settings (separate from my user.js). I decided to switch to Sidebery while the issue with TST is being resolved. While I found TST to be a bit prettier, I like some features that Sidebery comes with such as multi-level nesting. I may stick with it for a bit and see how it goes.