Mozilla Shuts down Firefox Send and Firefox Notes
Sep. 18, 2020In July, Mozillasuspended its file-sharing service ‘Firefox Send’after malware operators abused the service to spread ransomware, banking trojan, spyware, and more. The company has nowofficially discontinued Firefox Send, along with its note-taking service Firefox Notes.
For those unaware, Mozilla’sFirefox Sendwas a neat way to securely share files up to 2.5GB. The service had handy features like the ability to self-destruct files once the recipient has downloaded it, and even auto-deletion after 24 hours. It was quite popular among power users.
“Some abusive users were beginning to use Send to ship malware and conduct spear phishing attacks. This summer we took Firefox Send offline to address this challenge. In the intervening period, as we weighed the cost of our overall portfolio and strategic focus, we made the decision not to relaunch the service,”wrote the company in its blog post.
Firefox Notes, on the other hand, was available as a browser extension and an Android app for taking and syncing notes. According to the company,Firefox Notes browser extension will continue to be available for existing users. However, it won’t get new updates and can no longer be installed.
Mozilla is discontinuing the Android app of Firefox Notes on November 1. You can follow the instructions in thissupport pageto export all your existing notes before the service gets discontinued.
The company’s decision to discontinue Firefox Send and Firefox Notes comes a month after itlaid off over 250 employeesas part of its major restructuring to focus on commercial products. Mozilla is now focusing on services likeMozilla VPN,Firefox Monitor, andFirefox Private Network.
Subin writes about consumer tech, software, and security. He secretly misses the headphone jack while pretending he’s better off with the wireless freedom.
