Firefox

This is a pretty neat attack from the malware pushes leveraging on the ignorance of the average user – which in all honestly is a safe bet most of the time! You could consider it a Social Engineering attack as it’s taking something that’s familiar and changing it to deliver malware. I’m sure all the Firefox users reading have at some point or another been faced with the warning screen that tells you a site is not safe to visit, the red page which states in big white letters “Reported Attack Page!”. ...

Firefox 3.6.11 and Firefox 3.5.14 are now available as free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://firefox.com. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Firefox 3.6.11. The update fixes 40 security and stability bugs, including 5 critical security vulnerabilities. Firefox 3.6.11: http://firefox.com Firefox 3.5.14: http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-older.html We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to these latest releases. If you already have Firefox, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This updates can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu. ...

A quick and powerful upgrade for your Firefox shortcut mastery: Move Tabs. It’s a simple and useful Firefox extension developed by Jêrome Reybert that allows you to move the current tab to the left, right, the beginnign or the end of the tab bar by simply pressing Ctrl + Shift + PageUp, PageDown,Home and End respectively. Really simple. Get Move Tabs at Mozilla Add-ons. Credit to ‘Mozilla Links’

Firefox’s JavaScript engine, Spidermonkey (including the Tracemonkey and Jaegermonkey JITs) is now faster than Webkit’s JSCore on both Sunspider and V8. Great work, team! Also, on the Sunspider benchmark, Mozilla is only about 1/100th of a second behind Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine (about 3.5%). Oh, and there’s Kraken, where we’re still solidly in the lead.

Welcome to our first release of the new Mozilla about:support add-on. about:support was developed by Siddharth Agarwal with design input from Bryan Clark and testing by Roland Tanglao about:support is based on Firefox’s about:support code, hence the name. It has been modified for Thunderbird to include email account specific information along with the normal preferences and add-ons. You can access about:support from the Help Menu: Help -> Troubleshooting Information which opens a new tab containing all your troubleshooting information including the Thunderbird specific IMAP, POP, and SMTP settings. The account information is often difficult for users to gather and deliver during the Thunderbird troubleshooting process. With the about:support add-on, the troubleshooting information is presented to the user such that it can be copied to the clipboard and pasted into a Thunderbird support forum like Get Satisfaction or emailed directly to others. With your help, Mozilla is hoping to get this add-on built directly into future versions of Thunderbird so please try it out and leave your feedback. See the about:support project page for links concerning issues, feedback, and ideas. ...

Xmarks will be shutting down free browser synchronization services on January 10, 2011. For details on how to transition to recommended alternatives, consult this page. For the full story behind the Xmarks shutdown, please read their blog post. It’s a sad story to me! 😢 Here I found a good article to read: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/no-more-xmarks-no/192

The New York Times is reporting a rising number of law suits against some major players because of their use of persistent web tracking: — Fox Entertainment Group — NBC Universal — Specific Media — Quantcast The Times said the suits are claiming that the companies used Flash cookies to collect data on browsing activities in spite of the fact that users had privacy settings on to block them. Those Local Shared Objects (LSOs) are persistent cookies that are stored in several ways and in some cases will restore themselves when deleted. One is available, with a detailed description here. ...

Google released version 6.0.472.59 of its Chrome web browser. It fixes 10 security vulnerabilities; 1 is only affecting Mac OS X and critical, 6 are rated “high” in their severity. As usual, the update should get delivered and installed automatically – but it doesn’t hurt to check via the “Info about Chrome” option in the “settings” menu whether the new version is already installed. The Mozilla developers pulled the update to Firefox 3.6.9 due to some stability issues some users experienced. Now Firefox 3.6.10 is available which fixes the security vulnerabilities like 3.6.9 and also the instabilities. It is available via “Help” – “Check for Updates” and should be installed ASAP, too.

The Mozilla foundation just released the popular web browser Firefox in version 3.6.9. The new version fixes overall 14 security vulnerabilities of which 10 are rated critical by the developers. Additionally, they added a new feature called “X-FRAME-OPTIONS“-header which shall help mitigating clickjacking attacks as web site owners can ensure with this header that their content isn’t inserted into other sites via frames. The update is available through the automatic update mechanism ( via the “Help” – “Search for updates” menu). ...

Like a lot of seedy stuff, this started with a Twitter post:. The current working version of Mozilla’s Firefox browser is 3.6.8. Version 4 is in beta testing. You get them FREE from Mozilla.. Why would you need a crack (program with its password broken) or a keygen (application that generates a password for a password-protected program) for something that is FREE? Well, there’s a sucker born every minute and the folks at this warez (pirated software) site are betting there are a lot of them using Twitter. ...

With competition in the Web browser field having transitioned from cold to boiling in less than a year’s time, Mozilla suddenly finds itself playing catch-up against not only Apple and Google, but Microsoft as well. In March, the organization realized it needed to completely make over Firefox 4 if it wanted to remain feature competitive against a fast-rising Google Chrome. In a live presentation yesterday, Mozilla Firefox director Mike Beltzner admitted that his group’s March roadmap, which involved an interim release of Firefox 3.7, had too many steps. Now the group has decided to straighten out its path by grafting version 3.7’s main additions onto a point release Firefox 3.6.4, and shifting gears to focus on version 4.0. ...

Almost one year ago, we’ve gotten a glimpse of the next major iteration of Firefox, at least when it comes to its gorgeous new visuals. Now, however, Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner has shared a presentation that reveals quite detailed plans for Firefox 4. HTML5 and CSS support are mentioned, as well as faster operation, a greater focus on security and stability, new developer tools, and a lot of personalization options. Furthermore, from the screenshots embedded in the presentation, we can see that the visuals from one year ago haven’t changed much, although most menu items (the home button, for example) are positioned differently. ...

For the first time, Microsoft’s share of the browser marked has slipped below 60 percent, according to figures from Net Applications, a Aliso Viejo, Calif., web app and metrics firm . Browser market share: Microsoft — 59.95 percent Mozilla’s Firefox — 24.59 percent Google Chrome — 6.73 percent Apple’s Safari — 4.72 percent Opera — 2.30 percent. Story Here.

Apple has been challenging Google on many fronts this week — first with its mobile platform, then with its advertising platform. Earlier today, its developers launched the first volley in the battle’s third front, releasing the first public code for the next WebKit rendering and processing kernel that will likely drive the Safari 5 browser. With Google Chrome using a reworked form of WebKit, the Apple team did something that perhaps any other free and open source developer would be publicly stoned for doing, but which Apple might just have the savvy to get away with: It openly one-upped another developer’s open contribution. ...

An interesting and unknown feature used by sysadmins around the world in some large corporate networks is the use of proxy-auto config (pac) files. This benign feature is accepted by all modern browsers and is described in detail here. It contains a function to redirect your connection to a specific proxy server. Unfortunately this simple and smart proxy technique are being largely used by brazilian malware writers to redirect infected users to malicious hosts serving phishing pages of financial institutions. A .pac script URL is configured in the browser, in the field “Use automatic configuration script”: ...