Tux Machines

Web Browsers, Firefox, and Tor Browser

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 10, 2025

Tom MacWright ☛ Theme selector

Two weeks ago I added dark mode to this website. It was late one night and I was revisiting an article and my eyes were tired, so that was that. It was based solely on system dark mode settings, and I started using some more nice, modern CSS features like light-dark() to tie it all together.

But some people want dark mode for their desktop and light mode for their websites or the opposite, and sometimes I’m like that too. So I wanted to do it.

But I want this website to be peculiar. Like: I obsessively optimize it and intentionally use zero JavaScript on a basic pageload, though YouTube and Bandcamp embeds often bring in some junk. But even then, I optimize my YouTube embeds with lite-youtube-embed.

So: I wanted theme switching, but zero JavaScript involved in setting it or reading it. Here’s what I’m currently deploying: [...]

W Evan Sheehan ☛ Attenuating the Web - Evan Sheehan

For some time now I’ve been thinking about how our RSS1 feeds homogenize the web. Web standards have grown over the past few decades to provide us with more interactivity and more room for expression, but most feed readers strip all of this away. I’ve written before about my ambivalence towards RSS, how reading blog posts from friends in my feed reader denudes their beautifully designed websites of nearly all personality. In the intervening two years I’ve begun to notice more ways in which feed readers limit our ability to express concepts through our designs. If we are publishing a feed, we have to be cognizant of the limited semantics that feed readers are likely to present readers.

James G ☛ A concept for a two-panel web reader settings page

For a while, I have had an idea for Artemis – the calm web reader I maintain – to have a page that shows your feed and feed settings on the same page.

Ben Werdmuller ☛ Why RSS matters

Most people know RSS powers blogs and podcasts. But it powers popular news apps too, from aggregated headlines on MSN or in SmartNews to up-to-date headlines in business services like Lexis Nexis or Bloomberg. It’s also widely used to keep track of status updates of all kinds: weather, software updates, infrastructure uptime, and so on. Most of this activity happens behind the scenes. Publishers often think of feeds as an afterthought, but entire industries rely on them. It’s a workhorse that's become essential infrastructure for the web.

Even for something as simple as consuming news, RSS beats the alternatives. As Molly White wrote earlier this year: [...]

Mozilla

Firefox Developer Experience: Firefox WebDriver Newsletter 146

WebDriver is a remote control interface that enables introspection and control of user agents. As such it can help developers to verify that their websites are working and performing well with all major browsers. The protocol is standardized by the W3C and consists of two separate specifications: WebDriver classic (HTTP) and the new WebDriver BiDi (Bi-Directional).

This newsletter gives an overview of the work we’ve done as part of the Firefox 146 release cycle.

Tor ☛ New Release: Tor Browser 15.0.3 | The Tor Project

Tor Browser 15.0.3 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

This version includes important security updates to Firefox.