Facebook has joined the Rust Foundation, the organization driving the Rust programming language, alongside Amazon Web Services, Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Mozilla. From a report: Facebook is the latest tech giant to ramp up its adoption of Rust, a language initially developed by Mozilla that's become popular for systems programming because of its memory safety guarantees compared to fast languages C and C++. Rust is appealing for writing components like drivers and compilers.

The Rust Foundation was established in February with initial backing from Amazon Web Services, Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Microsoft is exploring Rust for some components of Windows and Azure while Google is using Rust to build new parts of the Android operating system and supporting an effort to bring Rust to the Linux kernel. Facebook's engineering team has now detailed its use of Rust beginning in 2016, a year after Rust reached its 1.0 milestone. "For developers, Rust offers the performance of older languages like C++ with a heavier focus on code safety. Today, there are hundreds of developers at Facebook writing millions of lines of Rust code," Facebook's software engineering team said.

Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Over the past ten years, Firefox market share has decreased substantially and the web browser has lost its appeal and coolness. Seeing that, someone at Mozilla probably decided that the best way to entice people back is by changing its UI, thus Firefox has already seen quite a huge number of changes despite other major web browsers staying relatively the same in terms of their visuals; i.e. Google Chrome and Apple Safari look almost the same as they did a decade ago. The most substantial redesign, which is being prepared for the next release, called Proton, promises to drive most power users away because it's broken on a number of levels and makes using the browser a very unpleasant experience.

So, what has changed:
- The compact density option for the address bar is now gone, and not only that, the title bar is now a lot taller than before. Overall, vertically, the title bar and address bar now take almost a dozen pixels more than previous Firefox releases, which steals very precious vertical space.
- The floating tabs. The active tab is now totally disconnected from the active web page and it looks out of place.
- The inactive tabs now completely lack a delimiter between them; and in the case of websites lacking a favicon, all inactive tabs look like one, which makes understanding what's open and what to click very difficult and time consuming.
- Mozilla has removed icons from menus, which makes navigating them slower and more difficult. Human beings can easily recognize and memorize icons, and now instead you have to read 20 menu items and try to understand what you actually need to click. Just to illustrate it, check how Firefox 88 looks and what is up and coming.

It surely looks like whatever UX studies Mozilla has done were either not run properly, or the data being collected was not properly understood. Mozilla has disabled feedback for Firefox, they've made it abundantly clear that you cannot leave comments in their Bugzilla, and considering they want to deprecate userChrome.css, it makes it impossible to restore the semblance of a good web browser experience. The Slashdot crowd loves free and open-source web browsers, so the question is, how can we make the company stop maiming and destroying their most important product?

ewhac writes: Firefox has long had a built-in PDF viewer, allowing users to view PDF files in the browser without having to install a third-party application. In addition to the other weird things PDF files can contain, one of them is JavaScript. Putatively offered as a way to create self-validating forms, this scripting capability has been abused over the decades in just about every way you can imagine. Firefox's built-in viewer, although it has apparently had the ability to execute embedded JS for some time, never turned that feature on, making it a safe(r) way to open PDFs... Until now. The newly released Firefox version 88 has flipped that switch, and will now blithely execute JavaScript embedded in PDFs. Firefox's main preferences dialog offers no control for turning this "feature" off.

To turn off JavaScript execution in PDFs: Enter about:config in the address bar; click "I'll be careful." In the search box near the top, enter pdfjs.enableScripting. Change the setting to False. Close the page.

Slashdot reader LeeLynx shares news from The Register about a Slackware 15 beta release (following the debut of February's alpha), "nearly five years after the distribution last saw a major update." (And nearly 28 years after its initial release back in 1993...) Created by Patrick Volkerding (who still lays claim to the title Benevolent Dictator For Life), the current release version arrived in the form of 2016's 14.2... The Linux kernel has been updated to 5.10.30 (at time of writing) with 5.11.14 available for testing. Desktop fans may be pleased to see, among the many updates, KDE Plasma hitting 5.21.4 as well as updates for old faithfuls, such as Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird.

The beta itself dropped on 12 April (with the 5.10.29 kernel) and Volkerding noted: "I'm going to go ahead and call this a beta even though there's still no fix for the illegal instruction issue with 32-bit mariadb. But there should be soon."

Tinkering has continued since, judging by the change log, although the beta tag brings hope there will be a release before long.

Google is all alone with its proposed advertising technology -- FLoC-- to replace third-party cookies. Every major browser that uses the open source Chromium project has declined to use it, and it's unclear what that will mean for the future of advertising on the web. Firefox, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, and Brave have said they are not implementing Google's FLoC into their browsers.

What if the key to improving speech recognition accuracy is simply mixing all available speech datasets together to train one large AI model? That's the hypothesis behind a recent study published by a team of researchers affiliated with Google Research and Google Brain. They claim an AI model named SpeechStew that was trained on a range of speech corpora achieves state-of-the-art or near-state-of-the-art results on a variety of speech recognition benchmarks. VentureBeat reports: In pursuit of a solution, the Google researchers combined all available labeled and unlabelled speech recognition data curated by the community over the years. They drew on AMI, a dataset containing about 100 hours of meeting recordings, as well as corpora that include Switchboard (approximately 2,000 hours of telephone calls), Broadcast News (50 hours of television news), Librispeech (960 hours of audiobooks), and Mozilla's crowdsourced Common Voice. Their combined dataset had over 5,000 hours of speech -- none of which was adjusted from its original form. With the assembled dataset, the researchers used Google Cloud TPUs to train SpeechStew, yielding a model with more than 100 million parameters. In machine learning, parameters are the properties of the data that the model learned during the training process. The researchers also trained a 1-billion-parameter model, but it suffered from degraded performance.

Once the team had a general-purpose SpeechStew model, they tested it on a number of benchmarks and found that it not only outperformed previously developed models but demonstrated an ability to adapt to challenging new tasks. Leveraging Chime-6, a 40-hour dataset of distant conversations in homes recorded by microphones, the researchers fine-tuned SpeechStew to achieve accuracy in line with a much more sophisticated model. Transfer learning entails transferring knowledge from one domain to a different domain with less data, and it has shown promise in many subfields of AI. By taking a model like SpeechStew that's designed to understand generic speech and refining it at the margins, it's possible for AI to, for example, understand speech in different accents and environments.

A new report from The Washington Post reveals how the FBI gained access to an iPhone linked to the 2015 San Bernardino shooting. Apple refused to build a backdoor into the phone, citing the potential to undermine the security of hundreds of millions of Apple users, which kicked off a legal battle that only ended after the FBI successfully hacked the phone. Thanks to the Washington Post's report, we now know the methods the FBI used to get into the iPhone. Mitchell Clark summarizes the key findings via The Verge: The phone at the center of the fight was seized after its owner, Syed Rizwan Farook, perpetrated an attack that killed 14 people. The FBI attempted to get into the phone but was unable to due to the iOS 9 feature that would erase the phone after a certain number of failed password attempts. Apple attempted to help the FBI in other ways but refused to build a passcode bypass system for the bureau, saying that such a backdoor would permanently decrease the security of its phones. After the FBI announced that it had gained access to the phone, there were concerns that Apple's security could have been deeply compromised. But according to The Washington Post, the exploit was simple: [An Australian security firm called Azimuth Security] basically found a way to guess the passcode as many times as it wanted without erasing the phone, allowing the bureau to get into the phone in a matter of hours.

The technical details of how the auto-erase feature was bypassed are fascinating. The actual hacking was reportedly done by two Azimuth employees who gained access to the phone by exploiting a vulnerability in an upstream software module written by Mozilla. That code was reportedly used by Apple in iPhones to enable the use of accessories with the Lightning port. Once the hackers gained initial access, they were able to chain together two more exploits, which gave them full control over the main processor, allowing them to run their own code. After they had this power, they were able to write and test software that guessed every passcode combination, ignoring any other systems that would lock out or erase the phone. The exploit chain, from Lightning port to processor control, was named Condor. As with many exploits, though, it didn't last long. Mozilla reportedly fixed the Lightning port exploit a month or two later as part of a standard update, which was then adopted by the companies using the code, including Apple.

Last year, NetMarketShare showed that Edge's 7.59% desktop market share pushed it past Firefox in March last year. Now, StatCounter reports that Edge has been adding users over the last few months as Firefox's userbase shrinks. TechSpot reports: While the data doesn't prove Firefox users have been leaving for Edge, we see that Microsoft's browser has seen its market share jump from 7.81% to 8.03% this year, while Mozilla's product declined from 8.1% to 7.95%. That's an all-time high for Edge, according to StatCounter. Edge's gain in users hasn't secured it the second position. That honor goes to Safari, which now has a 10.11% share, though its numbers have been falling since December, so Edge could overtake it soon enough.

Like Windows 7, it seems some people are having trouble letting go of the now-discontinued Internet Explorer. It has a 1.7% share that is declining very slowly. The data is only for the desktop market. Looking at all platforms -- desktop, tablet, and mobile -- iPhones and iPads make Safari's second spot more secure with a 19.03% share, while Firefox moves ahead of Edge, albeit by just 0.23%.

This week the lead consumer technology writer for The New York Times urged readers to switch their browser from Chrome, Safari, or Microsoft Edge to a private browser.

"For about a week, I tested three of the most popular options — DuckDuckGo, Brave and Firefox Focus. Even I was surprised that I eventually switched to Brave as the default browser on my iPhone." Firefox Focus, available only for mobile devices like iPhones and Android smartphones, is bare-bones. You punch in a web address and, when done browsing, hit the trash icon to erase the session. Quitting the app automatically purges the history. When you load a website, the browser relies on a database of trackers to determine which to block.

The DuckDuckGo browser, also available only for mobile devices, is more like a traditional browser. That means you can bookmark your favorite sites and open multiple browser tabs. When you use the search bar, the browser returns results from the DuckDuckGo search engine, which the company says is more focused on privacy because its ads do not track people's online behavior. DuckDuckGo also prevents ad trackers from loading. When done browsing, you can hit the flame icon at the bottom to erase the session.

Brave is also more like a traditional web browser, with anti-tracking technology and features like bookmarks and tabs. It includes a private mode that must be turned on if you don't want people scrutinizing your web history. Brave is also so aggressive about blocking trackers that in the process, it almost always blocks ads entirely. The other private browsers blocked ads less frequently....

In the end, though, you probably would be happy using any of the private browsers... For me, Brave won by a hair. My favorite websites loaded flawlessly, and I enjoyed the clean look of ad-free sites, along with the flexibility of opting in to see ads whenever I felt like it. Brendan Eich, the chief executive of Brave, said the company's browser blocked tracking cookies "without mercy."

"If everybody used Brave, it would wipe out the tracking-based ad economy," he said.

Count me in.

Ashkan Soltani was the Chief Technologist of America's Federal Trade Commission in 2014 — and earlier was a staff technologist in its Division of Privacy and Identity Protection helping investigate tech companies including Google and Facebook

Friday on Twitter he accused another group of privacy violations: the nonprofit rights organization, the American Civil Liberties Union. Yesterday, the ACLU updated their privacy statement to finally disclose that they share constituent information with 'service providers' like Facebook for targeted advertising, flying in the face of the org's public advocacy and statements.

In fact, I was retained by the ACLU last summer to perform a privacy audit after concerns were raised internally regarding their data sharing practices. I only agreed to do this work on the promisee by ACLU's Executive Director that the findings would be made public. Unfortunately, after reviewing my findings, the ACLU decided against publishing my report and instead sat on it for ~6 months before quietly updating their terms of service and privacy policy without explanation for the context or motivations for doing so. While I'm bound by a nondisclosure agreement to not disclose the information I uncovered or my specific findings, I can say with confidence that the ACLU's updated privacy statements do not reflect the full picture of their practices.

For example, public transparency data from Google shows that the ACLU has paid Google nearly half a million dollars to deliver targeted advertisements since 2018 (when the data first was made public). The ACLU also opted to only disclose its advertising relationship with Facebook only began in 2021, when in truth, the relationship spans back years totaling over $5 million in ad-spend. These relationships fly against the principles and public statements of the ACLU regarding transparency, control, and disclosure before use, even as the organization claims to be a strong advocate for privacy rights at the federal and state level. In fact, the NY Attorney General conducted an inquiry into whether the ACLU had violated its promises to protect the privacy of donors and members in 2004. The results of which many aren't aware of. And to be clear, the practices described would very much constitute a 'sale' of members' PII under the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA).

The irony is not lost on me that the ACLU vehemently opposed the CPRA — the toughest state privacy law in the country — when it was proposed. While I have tremendous respect for the work the ACLU and other NGOs do, it's important that nonprofits are bound by the same privacy standards they espouse for everyone else. (Full disclosure: I'm on the EFF advisory board and was recently invited to join EPIC's board.)

My experience with the ACLU further amplifies the need to have strong legal privacy protections that apply to nonprofits as well as businesses — partially since many of the underlying practices, particularly in the area of fundraising and advocacy, are similar if not worse.
Soltani also re-tweeted an interesting response from Alex Fowler, a former EFF VP who was also Mozilla's chief privacy officer for three years: I'm reminded of EFF co-founder John Gilmore telling me about the Coders' Code: If you find a bug or vulnerability, tell the coder. If coder ignores you or refuses to fix the issue, tell the users.

Sunday IT Wire counted up the number of signatories on two open letters, one opposing Richard Stallman's return to the FSF and one supporting it.

- The pro-Stallman letter had 3,632 individual signers
- The anti-Stallman letter had 2,812 individual signers (plus 48 companies and organizations).

But the question of Stallman's leadership has now also arisen in the GCC community:

A long-time developer of GCC, the compiler created by the GNU Project and used in Linux distributions, has issued a call for the removal of Free Software Founder Richard Stallman from the GCC steering committee. Nathan Sidwell [also a software engineer at Facebook] said in a post directed to the committee that if it was unwilling to remove Stallman, then the panel should explain why it was not able to do so.

Stallman is also the founder of the GNU Project and the original author of GCC.

"RMS [Stallman] is no longer a developer of GCC, the most recent commit I can find regards SCO in 2003," Sidwell wrote in a long email. "Prior to that there were commits in 1997, but significantly less than 1994 and earlier. GCC's implementation language is now C++, which I believe RMS neither uses nor likes.

"When was RMS' most recent positive input to the GCC project? Even if it was recent and significant, that doesn't mean his toxic behaviour should be accepted."
Meanwhile, the following groups have also issued statements opposing Stallman's return to the FSF:

- Mozilla: We can't demand better of the internet if we don't demand better of our leaders, colleagues and ourselves. We're with the Open Source Diversity Community, Outreachy & the Software Conservancy project in supporting this petition.
- The Tor Project: The Tor Project is joining calls for Richard M. Stallman to be removed from board, staff, volunteer, and other leadership positions in the FOSS community, including the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project.
Rust creator Graydon Hoare: He's been saying sexist shit & driving women away for decades. He can't change, the FSF board knows it, is sending a "sexism doesn't matter" message. This is bad leadership and I'm sad about all of it, agree with calls to resign.

If someone is a public leader their public behaviour matters. I don't criticize private individuals here and I don't think twitter-justice is especially nuanced. But this is so far over the line, such a stupid and tone-deaf choice, and it is about community leadership.
The EFF: We at EFF are profoundly disappointed to hear of the re-election of Richard Stallman to a leadership position at the Free Software Foundation, after a series of serious accusations of misconduct led to his resignation as president and board member of the FSF in 2019. We are also disappointed that this was done despite no discernible steps taken by him to be accountable for, much less make amends for, his past actions or those who have been harmed by them. Finally, we are also disturbed by the secretive process of his re-election, and how it was belatedly conveyed to FSF's staff and supporters.

Stallman's re-election sends a wrong and hurtful message to free software movement, as well as those who have left that movement because of Stallman's previous behavior.

Free software is a vital component of an open and just technological society: its key institutions and individuals cannot place misguided feelings of loyalty above their commitment to that cause. The movement for digital freedom is larger than any one individual contributor, regardless of their role. Indeed, we hope that this moment can be an opportunity to bring in new leaders and new ideas to the free software movement.

We urge the voting members of the FSF1 to call a special meeting to reconsider this decision, and we also call on Stallman to step down: for the benefit of the organization, the values it represents, and the diversity and long-term viability of the free software movement as a whole.
Finally, the Free Software Foundation itself has now pinned the following tweet at the top of its Twitter feed: No LibrePlanet organizers (staff or volunteer), speakers, award winners, exhibitors, or sponsors were made aware of Richard Stallman's announcement until it was public.

Mozilla Firefox will soon include a revised Referrer Policy to tighten up queries and better protect user information. From a report: Firefox 87, due to ship on March 23, will cut back on path and query string information from referrer headers "to prevent sites from accidentally leaking sensitive user data." In a blog post on Monday, developer Dimi Lee and security infrastructure engineering manager Christoph Kerschbaumer said the latest browser version will include a "stricter, more privacy-preserving default Referrer Policy." Browsers send HTTP Referrer headers to websites to indicate which location has 'referred' a user to a website server. Full URLs of referring documents are often sent in the HTTP Referrer header with other subresource requests, and while this may contain innocent information used for purposes including analytics, private user data may also be included. Referrer policies aim to protect this data, but if no policy is set by a website, this often defaults to "no-referrer-when-downgrade," an element that Firefox says does trim down the referrer when navigating to a less secure resource, but still "sends the full URL including path and query information of the originating document as the referrer."

Tech companies led by Mozilla are urging the Federal Communications Commission to swiftly reinstate net neutrality rules stripped away under the Trump administration. From a report: In a letter to FCC Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel Friday, ADT, Dropbox, Eventbrite, Reddit, Vimeo and Wikimedia joined Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox web browser, in calling net neutrality "critical for preserving the internet as a free and open medium that promotes innovation and spurs economic growth." [...] In a blog post Friday, Mozilla Chief Legal Officer Amy Keating said the pandemic has made the need for net neutrality rules even more clear.

"In a moment where classrooms and offices have moved online by necessity, it is critically important to have rules paired with strong government oversight and enforcement to protect families and businesses from predatory practices," Keating said. "In California, residents will have the benefit of these fundamental safeguards as a result of a recent court decision that will allow the state to enforce its state net neutrality law. However, we believe that users nationwide deserve the same ability to control their own online experiences."

Firefox's "Compact density" option, which reduces the size of the user interface, is set to disappear when Mozilla rolls out its Proton visual redesign for the browser later this year. PCMag reports: A bug was posted on Mozilla's bug tracking system entitled "Remove compact mode inside Density menu of customize palette." The reasons given for its removal include the fact it's "currently fairly hard to discover" and "we assume gets low engagement." The development team wants to "make sure that we design defaults that suit most users and we'll be retiring the compact mode for this reason." The Bugzilla thread highlights a desire for compact density to be retained as an option, but it doesn't seem likely to survive right now.

When Proton arrives, the Normal and Touch density options are expected to remain, with Touch increasing the size of the user interface to make it more finger-friendly. Meanwhile, the development team is optimizing the Normal density for displays that use 768 pixels for height, while most displays now use a higher resolution than that. Hopefully this doesn't mean the UI will be larger than it is now by default.

With the News Media Bargaining Code out of the way, the Australian government has moved its tech giant battle to the browser scene, keeping Google in its crosshairs while putting Apple under the microscope. From a report: Led by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the new battle is focused on "choice and competition in internet search and web browsers." The consumer watchdog on Thursday put out a call for submissions, with a number of questions posed in a discussion paper , centred on internet browser defaults. It claimed Apple's Safari is the most common browser used in Australia for smartphones and tablets, accounting for 51% of use. This is followed by Chrome with 39%, Samsung Internet with 7%, and with less than 1%, Mozilla Firefox. This shifts on desktop, with Chrome being the most used browser with 62% market share, followed by Safari with 18%, Edge 9%, and Mozilla 6%.

The ACCC said it's concerned with the impact of pre-installation and default settings on consumer choice and competition, particularly in relation to online search and browsers. It's also seeking views on supplier behaviour and trends in search services, browsers, and operating systems, and device ecosystems that may impact the supply of search and browsers to Australian consumers. It wants views also on the extent to which existing consumer harm can arise from the design of defaults and other arrangements.

Last week Firefox's official blog responded to some viral misinformation about the Firefox logo. "People were up in arms because they thought we had scrubbed fox imagery from our browser. Rest easy knowing nothing could be further from the truth..." Sure, it's stressful to have hundreds of thousands of people shouting things like "justice for the fox" in all-caps in your mentions for three days straight, but ultimately that means people are thinking about the brand in a way they might not have for years. ..

The logo causing all the stir is one we created a while ago with input from our users. Back in 2019, we updated the Firefox browser logo and added the parent brand logo as a new logo for our broader product portfolio that extends beyond the browser... which represents the family of Firefox products we make outside of just the Firefox browser, like Firefox Monitor. It's not an icon you're going to see on a dock, phone's home screen or desktop, though.

We didn't get rid of the fox then and have no plans to do so now, or ever. Plenty of folks jumped in to try and clear things up in the original thread, but once the "they killed the fox" meme caught momentum and became the "Firefox minimalist logo" meme, there was no stopping it. It spread to Instagram and then to Reddit. The memes became so pervasive that there were memes being made about how there were too many Firefox logo memes... Well, fear not, because no matter what you think you heard on the internet, the fox isn't leaving any time soon.

For our Firefox Nightly users out there, we're bringing back a very special version of an older logo, as a treat. Stay tuned.

Two years after publicly launching a privacy-focussed browser, Brave, founded by former Mozilla executive Brendan Eich, is taking on Google's search business, too. From a report: The announcement of Brave Search puts the upstart in the rare position of taking on both Google's browser and search dominance. Eich says that Brave Search, which has opened a waitlist and will launch in the first half of this year, won't track or profile people who use it. "Brave already has a default anonymous user model with no data collection at all," he says adding this will continue in its search engine. No IP addresses will be collected and the company is exploring how it can create both a paid, ad-free search engine and one that comes with ads.

But building a search engine isn't straightforward. [...] Eich says Brave isn't starting its search engine or index from scratch and won't be using indexes from Bing or other tech firms. Instead Brave has purchased Tailcat, an offshoot of German search engine Cliqz, which was owned by Hubert Burda Media and closed down last year. The purchase includes an index of the web that's been created by Tailcat and the technology that powers it. Eich says that some users will be given the ability to opt-in to anonymous data collection to help fine-tune search results. "What Tailcat does is it looks at a query log and a click log anonymously," Eich says. "These allow it to build an index, which Tailcat has done and already did at Cliqz, and it's getting bigger." He admits that the index will not be anywhere near as deep as Google's but that the top results it surfaces are largely the same.

As part of its war on web tracking, Mozilla is adding a new tool to Firefox aimed at stopping cookies from keeping tabs on you across multiple sites. From a report: The "Total Cookie Protection" feature is included in the web browser's latest release -- alongside multiple picture-in-picture views -- and essentially works by keeping cookies isolated between each site you visit. Or, in Mozilla's words: "By creating a separate cookie jar for every website." Firefox's new feature pares with last month's network partitioning tool, which works by splitting the Firefox browser cache on a per-website basis to prevent tracking across the web, itself targeted at blocking more stubborn "supercookies." According to Mozilla, these types of cookies are more difficult to delete and block as they are stored in obscure parts of the browser, including in Flash storage, ETags, and HSTS flags. Both tools are available as part of Firefox's enhanced tracking protection suite in "strict mode" on desktop and Android.

Rust -- the programming language, not the survival game -- now has a new home: the Rust Foundation. From a report: AWS, Huawei, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla banded together to launch this new foundation today and put a two-year commitment to a million-dollar budget behind it. This budget will allow the project to "develop services, programs, and events that will support the Rust project maintainers in building the best possible Rust." Rust started as a side project inside of Mozilla to develop an alternative to C/C++. Designed by Mozilla Research's Graydon Hore, with contributions from the likes of JavaScript creator Brendan Eich, Rust became the core language for some of the fundamental features of the Firefox browser and its Gecko engine, as well as Mozilla's Servo engine. Today, Rust is the most-loved language among developers. But with Mozilla's layoffs in recent months, many on the Rust team lost jobs and the future of the language became unclear without a main sponsor, though the project itself has thousands of contributors and a lot of corporate users, so the language itself wasn't going anywhere.

"The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has released this week its own custom web browser," reports ZDNet, "for the sole purpose of re-enabling Adobe Flash Player support, rather than port its existing website from using Flash to HTML-based web forms." To prevent the app from continuing to be used in the real-world to the detriment of users and their security, Adobe began blocking Flash content from playing inside the app starting January 12, with the help of a time-bomb mechanism... As SARS tweeted on January 12, the agency was impacted by the time-bomb mechanism, and starting that day, the agency was unable to receive any tax filings via its web portal, where the upload forms were designed as Flash widgets. But despite having a three and a half years heads-up, SARS did not choose to port its Flash widgets to basic HTML & JS forms, a process that any web developer would describe as trivial. Instead, the South African government agency decided to take one of the most mind-blowing decisions in the history of bad IT decisions and release its own web browser.

Released on Monday on the agency's official website, the new SARS eFiling Browser is a stripped-down version of the Chromium browser that has two features.

The first is to re-enable Flash support. The second is to let users access the SARS eFiling website.

As Chris Peterson, a software engineer at Mozilla, pointed out, the SARS browser only lets users access the official SARS website, which somewhat reduces the risk of users getting their systems infected via Flash exploits while navigating the web. But as others have also pointed out, this does nothing for accessibility, as the browser is only available for Windows users and not for other operating systems such as macOS, Linux, and mobile users, all of which are still unable to file taxes.