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The latest Firefox 127 appeared on June 11 with a modest list of changes – automatically reloading the browser when the OS reboots, closing duplicate tabs, and requiring more authentication to access stored passwords.

A change Mozilla didn’t mention in the release notes has users complaining online, though.

Users complained on Mozilla’s forums and on Reddit at the time, but it was at least possible to recombine the icons with the option in about:config – but no longer.

As you might imagine, people are not happy, although according to the official response in this complaint, it looks like the change will be reverted in Firefox 128:

According to this thread, users of Firefox on Apple iOS are finding that if you have both a main and private Firefox instances open, when the main one is closed, all the tabs in the private instance are closed too.

Slip-ups like this suggest to us that, as has long been the case, the Firefox developers lack a good understanding of how its remaining followers use it, and why they stick with it.

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The browser extensions, which are hosted on the Mozilla store, were made unavailable in the Land of Putin on or around June 8 after a request by the Russian government and its internet censorship agency, Roskomnadzor.

Among those extensions were three pieces of code that were explicitly designed to circumvent state censorship – including a VPN and Censor Tracker, a multi-purpose add-on that allowed users to see what websites shared user data, and a tool to access Tor websites.

It turns out wasn’t mere PR fluff, as Mozilla tells The Register that the ban has now been lifted.

“In alignment with our commitment to an open and accessible internet, Mozilla will reinstate previously restricted listings in Russia,” the group declared.

"Our initial decision to temporarily restrict these listings was made while we considered the regulatory environment in Russia and the potential risk to our community and staff.

“We remain committed to supporting our users in Russia and worldwide and will continue to advocate for an open and accessible internet for all.”

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Stanislav Shakirov, the chief technical officer of Roskomsvoboda, a Russian open internet group, said he hoped it was a rash decision by Mozilla that will be more carefully examined.

“It’s a kind of unpleasant surprise because we thought the values of this corporation were very clear in terms of access to information, and its policy was somewhat different,” Shakirov said.

Developers of digital tools designed to get around censorship began noticing recently that their Firefox add-ons were no longer available in Russia.

Roskomnadzor is responsible for “control and supervision in telecommunications, information technology, and mass communications,” according to the Russia’s federal censorship agency’s English-language page.

In March, the New York Times reported that Roskomnadzor was increasing its operations to restrict access to censorship circumvention technologies such as VPNs.

“For the last few months, Roskomnadzor (after the adoption of the law in Russia that prohibits the promotion of tools for bypassing blockings) has been sending such complaints about content to everyone.”

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Plus, the Hailo-8L has remarkably low power consumption, Raspberry Pi’s CTO Avi Baum told The Register.

Relying on a separate accelerator rather than an integrated NPU is an intentional design choice, Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton told The Register.

Upton observed that including the Hailo-8L or some other accelerator on the Raspberry Pi 5s main board wouldn’t have been ideal, as it would have made it more expensive.

By offering the AI Kit, users can still buy the Raspberry Pi 5 for a lower price, and add the Hailo-8L if they are keen on exploring machine learning.

The modular approach also meant rapid development: Upton revealed the AI add-on moved from concept to final product in just six months.

Although the AI Kit represents a big performance leap for the Raspberry Pi 5, the single-board machines already have history in the field.

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This would make it faster than the 45 TOPS offered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus in the first wave of Copilot+ compatible PCs, and also Intel’s projected performance for its next-generation Core Ultra chips, codenamed Lunar Lake.

Copilot+ PCs can do more AI processing locally on device rather than relying on the cloud, potentially improving performance and giving users more privacy.

If you don’t particularly care about generative AI, locally executed or otherwise, the Ryzen AI 300 processors also come with an updated CPU based on the same Zen 5 architecture as the desktop chips, plus an “RDNA 3.5” integrated GPU to boost gaming performance for thin-and-light systems that can’t fit a dedicated graphics processor.

The result is essentially AMD’s version of one of Intel’s E-cores, though without the truly heterogenous CPU architecture that has caused incompatibility problems with some apps and games.

The company said that the 890M was an average of 36 percent faster in a small selection of games compared to the Intel Arc integrated GPU in the Meteor Lake Core Ultra chips and 60 percent faster than the Snapdragon X Elite in the 3DMark Night Raid benchmark (this was part of a slide that was specifically highlighting the performance impact of translating x86 code on Arm chips, though for the time being it’s true that the vast majority of games running on Snapdragon PCs will have to deal with the overhead of code translation).

AMD says that the Ryzen AI chips are slated to appear in “100+ platforms from OEMs” starting in July 2024, a month or so after Microsoft and Qualcomm’s first wave of Snapdragon X-equipped Copilot+ PCs.

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Companies like Adobe have pledged support for the Windows on Arm initiative, with aims to bring its suite of creative tools to the platform natively.

Details on real world gaming scenarios are still trickling out of Build 2024 and other similar events, but these early glimpses certainly seem promising.

It could be especially ideal in smaller devices and handhelds, like the ASUS ROG Ally or the Steam Deck, particularly if it provides better battery life than AMD’s Z1 Extreme chipset.

At the event, Microsoft also showcased the website WorksOnWoa.com, which is a community-led project to catalogue the games that run decently well on Windows on Arm.

They also announced that Unity 6 will have native support for game developers, with a demonstration showcasing how smooth it runs on a Surface Laptop 7.

If the Snapdragon X Elite or future Arm iterations can deliver better battery life while maintaining the small form factor, that’s really the holy grail of portable Windows and Xbox gaming.

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At a minimum, systems will need 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, to accommodate both the memory requirements and the on-disk storage requirements needed for things like large language models (LLMs; even so-called “small language models” like Microsoft’s Phi-3, still use several billion parameters).

Microsoft says that all of the Snapdragon X Plus and Elite-powered PCs being announced today will come with the Copilot+ features pre-installed, and that they’ll begin shipping on June 18th.

But the biggest new requirement, and the blocker for virtually every Windows PC in use today, will be for an integrated neural processing unit, or NPU.

Right now, that requirement can only be met by a single chip in the Windows PC ecosystem, one that isn’t even quite available yet: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus, launching in the new Surface and a number of PCs from the likes of Dell, Lenovo, HP, Asus, Acer, and other major PC OEMs in the next couple of months.

NPUs that meet Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC requirement will be used to power (among other things) a group of features that Microsoft is calling “Recall,” a collection of AI features that will try to make helpful suggestions by keeping track of everything you’ve done on your PC, including attending meetings, opening files, and doing web searches.

On a Copilot+ PC with the minimum 256GB SSD, Microsoft says Recall will take up about 25GB of disk space and store around three months’ worth of events.

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New memory variants were this week launched for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module family.

A CM4SLite variant also turned up - seemingly earlier this year - , supplied without the eMMC storage fitted, but 1GB of RAM was all that was available at launch.

The Compute Module has proven to be a popular device for industrial users, with a fair few turning up in hardware such as digital signage.

The Raspberry Pi team said the device was for customers “who are looking to retain the same form factor but would like greater computing power and more memory.”

In the hardware documentation [PDF], the team notes: “The CM4S SoC has a slightly increased z-height over the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3.”

Pi supremo Eben Upton told The Register that the hardware design was complete, and the company was still aiming for release in the second half of 2024.

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ASML, the firm which makes machines to produce computer chips, saw its shares drop on Wednesday after the release of its first-quarter results.

… While the latest results have spooked the market, ASML insists its full-year outlook is unchanged and it is sticking with the belief that the chip industry will improve as 2024 progresses."

As electronic makers struggled to source enough chips during the pandemic period, they were subsequently driven to over-order, dampening demand for components when the economy began to stabilise.

ASML was also hit last year by sanctions restricting its sales to China, introduced by the US government to curb Chinese chipmaking capacity.

Over the coming year, it remains unclear what impact export restrictions will have on the Dutch group, although it is estimated that 15% of its Chinese sales will be affected.

On Thursday, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, the dominant producer of chips used in AI applications, is expected to report a 5% rise in first-quarter profit.

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After years of failed promises from Qualcomm, Microsoft believes the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors will finally offer the performance it has been looking for to push Windows on Arm much more aggressively.

Microsoft is so confident in these new Qualcomm chips that it’s planning a number of demos that will show how these processors will be faster than an M3 MacBook Air for CPU tasks, AI acceleration, and even app emulation.

This new class of PCs will get access to new AI-powered Windows features first, including an AI Explorer app that lets you “retrieve anything you’ve ever seen or done on your device.”

I’m told Microsoft is also looking to improve video streaming on Arm-powered Windows devices with a new AI-powered feature that will ship on these “next-gen” AI PCs.

Microsoft’s big AI PC reveal will take place on May 20th, just a day before the company’s annual Build developers conference.

Expect to see a round of new Windows on Arm devices in June, just a month after Microsoft details its AI PC plans.

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It evokes a flood of romanticized images of Homebrew Computer Club nerds soldering together circuit boards in South Bay garages.

Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.”

Mark Zuckerberg is probably as guilty as any single person for perpetuating that perception, happily working his hardest to make the company’s Horizon Worlds platform synonymous with conceptions of the metaverse.

As an HTC Vive exec told me back in February at MWC, “I think Meta has adjusted the market perception of what this technology should cost.” Other companies can’t compete on price and content in the customer space, so the savviest of the bunch have moved over to enterprise, where clients have much deeper pockets.

Apple is targeting business customers at that price point, while Meta is far more committed to democratizing access by — again — losing money on a per-unit basis.

As we mark a decade since the Oculus acquisition, I find myself returning to the above Zuckerberg comment: “Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.”

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If you read my scoop last week, I bet you’ve been wondering — how well could a Snapdragon chip actually run Windows games?

With medium-weight games like Control and Baldur’s Gate 3, it looks like the target might be: 30 frames per second at 1080p screen resolution, medium settings, possibly with AMD’s FSR 1.0 spatial upscaling enabled.

That’s what Qualcomm has apparently been showing influencers, according to numerous videos from YouTubers, TikTokers, and “Snapdragon Insiders,” many of which were uploaded over the past week after they flew down to Qualcomm’s San Diego headquarters for the company’s “eXperience Day.”

While some of the videos feel a little promotional — one influencer talks about how he’s seeing “Elden Ring playing really nicely at about 30 frames per second” while actually showing Baldur’s Gate 3 running at a mere 21-24fps — it’s admittedly pretty neat to see games like these running on Arm silicon at all.

Enobong Etteh, aka BooredAtWork, has the video with the most uninterrupted gameplay footage; he apparently got to try Control, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Redout 2 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this February.

In early scenes from Control that don’t demand as much horsepower, we’re seeing frame rates that dip as low as 26fps in a firefight or between 30fps and 40fps just running around.

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Initially, Tiny Corp was happy to use AMD GPUs as it felt customers were “overpaying for petaflops” with Nvidia hardware, and criticized the CUDA software stack for being closed source.

Earlier in the month, however, the Tiny Corp X account (likely piloted by Hotz) began complaining about driver and firmware issues that caused crashes and hangups, threatening to undermine the Radeon GPU-powered computer.

Since making the firmware open source to debug it was a key priority of Tiny Corp, it seemed to signal the end of the AMD model of the TinyBox.

However, earlier today the startup announced it would be going through with the RX 7900XTX TinyBox after all thanks to a “umr” repository it found.

This may mean AMD has partially addressed Tiny Corp’s stability issues with the RX 7900XTX, though it’s not clear whether this solution is at least in part open source.

Tiny Corp may also ship an Arc A770 TinyBox in the future, though it says there’s only a prototype and that there are no plans to launch it at the moment.

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Can Qualcomm replicate Apple’s feat and finally create Arm-based laptops worth buying, 15 years after its first attempts?

Here’s one incredibly promising sign it might: Qualcomm is telling game developers their titles should already work on a wave of upcoming Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops — no porting required.

Qualcomm says it has Adreno GPU drivers for DX11, DX12, Vulkan, and OpenCL and will also support DX9 and up to OpenGL 4.6 via mapping layers.

As you can see in the slide above, there are a few caveats: games that rely on kernel-level anti-cheat drivers (which have been growing in popularity, though some players now fear hacks) won’t work under emulation.

For now, neither will games that use AVX instruction sets, where Khalil suggests developers use SIMDe to get a huge headstart on converting them to NEON code.

It’s important for Qualcomm to be able to offer existing games, senior director of product management Micah Knapp told me in a recent interview: “In the immediate, near, and not so near future, you have to provide a platform for what people already have.”

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AMD used the Game Developers Conference (GDC 2024) this week to announce FSR 3.1, the latest iteration of their FidelityFX Super Resolution tech for game upscaling.

FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.1 brings upscaling image quality improvements by way of improved temporary stability at rest and in motion to yield less flickering/shimmering.

FSR 3.1 should also result in less ghosting and better detail preservation.

More details on today’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.1 announcement via community.amd.com.

This seems to be an announcement-only today with the FidelityFX SDK on GitHub still pointing to v3.0.4 as the latest version.

(Update: It looks like the FSR 3.1 availability is set for next quarter.)

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With today’s debut of the Blackwell GPU architecture during CEO Jensen Huang’s GTC keynote, it aims to extended that lead — in both performance and power consumption.

AMD’s MI300-series accelerators, which we looked at in December, are objectively more complex and rely on both 2.5D and 3D packaging tech to stitch together as many as 13 chiplets into a single part.

This means if your datacenter can already handle Nvidia’s DGX H100 systems, you shouldn’t run into trouble adding a couple B100 nodes to your cluster.

However, considering the fact that the older GH200 was rated for 1,000W between an 700W and the Arm CPU, that suggests that, under peak load, the Grace-Blackwell part, with its twin GPUs is capable of sucking down somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,700W.

Nvidia’s rackscale architecture appears to be a hit with the major cloud providers too, with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle signing up to deploy instances based on the design.

As we mentioned earlier, the MI300X is something of a silicon sandwich which uses advanced packaging to vertically stack eight CDNA 3 compute units onto four I/O dies, which provide high speed communications between the GPUs and 192GB of HBM3 memory.

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In a summary of a business update call on March 6th, Midjourney claimed that “botnet-like activity from paid accounts” — which the company specifically links to Stability AI employees — was behind the outage.

In its summary of the business update call on March 6th (which Midjourney refers to as “office hours”), the company says it’s banning all Stability AI employees from using its service “indefinitely” in response to the outage.

Midjourney is also introducing a new policy that will similarly ban employees of any company that exercises “aggressive automation” or causes outages to the service.

Midjourney founder David Holz responded to Mostaque in the same thread, claiming to have sent him “some information” to help with his internal investigation.

It does seem odd that scraping activity from just two accounts allegedly managed to cause such an extended server outage.

Stable Diffusion and Midjourney have both been targeted with several copyright lawsuits, with the latter being accused of creating an artist database for training purposes in December.

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