One of the major reasons Firefox is approaching 400 million downloads is because of how customizable the browser is thanks to extensions. In a way Firefox extensions are bittersweet, because they can provide some unique and useful features, but at the same time they can cause some unwanted problems.
One of the nicest features in the upcoming Opera 9.5 is that the "save this password" prompt doesn't hold back the website from loading. This gives the site an opportunity to log you in before saving would could potentially be an incorrect username or password.
WordPress.com is the home of nearly 1.4 million blogs, and in a days time they receive upwards of 12 million pageviews. There’s roughly 75,000 new posts among those blogs each day, along with 30,000 comments (not including the ones caught by Akismet). For that reason WordPress.com is an accurate measure of what tools the blogosphere is using.
Mozilla launched a new service that’s currently in the testing phase. It’s goal is to make it easier for you to view websites, images, and video on any mobile device. Please give a warm welcome for Joey...
The latest nightly build of Firefox 3 has a nice new feature that the eye-candy lovers out there will like. In Firefox when you open too many tabs they overflow and scrollers on each end of the Tab Bar appear. That way you can navigate between all of your tabs without having them shrink down to the size of a pea.
Opera 9.23 has been released and is ready for consumption by the general public. A majority of the things fixed in this release are credited to Mozilla’s jsfunfuzz tool that was released at Black Hat about two-weeks ago.
Another vulnerability has been found in Firefox, and this one makes it possible for a hacker to retrieve the settings and variables used in extensions. The person who discovered the flaw was able to steal a dynamically generated password created by the Fire Encrypter extension.
Pretty soon Firefox 3 is going to be feature complete, and all that will be left for them to do is fine-tune the things they have implemented. As we build up to that big moment there are some new features that are coming out of the shop for testers.
Mozilla is currently taking new steps to improve upon their 50% user retention rate for Firefox. That number means that only half of the people who try Firefox actually continue to use it on a regular basis. So what’s Mozilla going to do to make that number even better? Here’s their plan:
Robert Hansen, a security researcher, received a business card from Firefox’s Mike Schaver at a late-night party last week during the Black Hat conference. The card Hansen received, which is pictured to the right, used some colorful words to say that it takes just 10-days for Mozilla to patch critical security bugs that have been disclosed. Here is a snippet from Hansen’s blog post:
Earlier this weekend Mozilla released Firefox 3 Alpha 7 to the public. According to the original development cycle we were supposed to be onto the Beta builds already, but Mozilla has run into some setbacks...particularly with performance. They are still continuing on their 6-week release schedule, and here’s what’s changed in the latest version:
Cookies are used in your web browser to store information, but have you ever thought about how easy it would be for a hacker to quickly gain access to them? It is actually frighteningly easy as Robert Graham, the CEO of errata security, demonstrated at the Black Hat security convention.
At the Black Hat conference this week Mozilla announced a new tool called jsfunfuzz that was developed by their very own Jesse Ruderman. This is something developers can use to test the JavaScript engine for both stability and vulnerabilities. Here’s what Mozilla had to say about it:
Mozilla has squashed their 27th security bug for the year on the Firefox browser. Late last night they released Firefox 2.0.0.6 that fixed two serious bugs, one of which also plagues Internet Explorer:
The Firefox development team has finally resolved what was probably the longest outstanding bug for the browser: full page zoom.
Mitchell Baker, Mozilla’s CEO, announced on her blog today that Thunderbird hasn’t been receiving the attention that it deserves. As a result they are looking at a number of options to let Thunderbird continue to grow and flourish, but I don’t like how all of this sounds. Take a look at this snippet from the post:
Mozilla released an important update to the Firefox web browser today. The new Firefox 2.0.0.5 fixes a critical flaw that enables a hacker to control a user’s computer. Ironically, this was done by letting the hacker launch Firefox through Internet Explorer, and then Firefox would run malicious instructions that could compromise their system.
Mozilla added two nice new features in Firefox 3 nightlies that should help protect users from phishing attacks. The first feature will be familiar to those of you using the LocationBar2 extension, and it was actually added by the same person who developed the extension. The goal of this feature is to make the domain and subdomains in the URL stand out a little more.
Alex Faaborg has done several Firefox mockups in the past that we have covered (bookmarking, notifications, and history). He often highlights features that would make the browser more usable, and I occasionally feel myself longing for what he posts. This time around he posted some ideas of what it might look like to bring the keyboard to life.
Mozilla has finally done it! The one feature that I wanted the most in Thunderbird 2 has finally made its way into the nightly builds of Thunderbird 3: Tabs! It was a sad realization when I knew there was no chance of tabs making it into Thunderbird 2, and I almost thought that they scrapped the idea all together.
