Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/ Firefox 33.1 Agen G. N. Schmitz Back in October, Mozilla released [1]Firefox 33 with several improvements and new features. The biggest change was the addition of support for the OpenH264 video codec, which enables the Web browser to use Cisco's open source H.264 implementation to encode and decode video, thus bypassing the requirement to pay license fees to MPEG LA (for more background, see this [2]blog post from Andreas Gal, Chief Technology Officer of Mozilla). Additionally, Firefox 33 quickened the speed of searches from the location bar, improved the reliability of Session Restore (which prevents data loss after a crash or a restart), and slimmed down JavaScript strings to improve performance and save memory (read the complete [3]release notes for version 33). This last week, Mozilla updated Firefox to version 33.1 with two privacy improvements. The Web browser adds DuckDuckGo as a search option (to learn more about this search engine, see '[4]Search in Privatewith DuckDuckGo,' 20 August 2014), plus adds a new Forget button that enables you to wipe out your recent browsing history. You can choose to clear history and cookies from the previous five minutes, two hours, or 24 hours. On the other hand, Firefox 33.1 brings Enhanced Tiles (which appear on new tabs) that replace the default screenshots of a Web page with an image or logo supplied by a partner Web site. All partner content will be marked as 'sponsored,' and data for the aggregate number of impressions, clicks, and Tile placement is collected by Mozilla. To turn off this 'enhancement,' click the gear icon in the upper right corner of a new tab and select Classic to deactivate click and impression tracking (see this Mozilla [5]blog post for more info on this new feature). (Free, 64.3 MB, [6]release notes) [7][tn_firefox-33_1-enhancedtabs.jpg] References 1. http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/new/ 2. http://andreasgal.com/2014/10/14/openh264-now-in-firefox/ 3. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/33.1/releasenotes/ 4. http://tidbits.com/article/15007 5. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/tiles/ 6. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/33.1/releasenotes/ 7. http://tidbits.com/resources/2014-11/firefox-33_1-enhancedtabs.png .