Mozilla

Mozilla Links: Mozilla has announced that it will release the first update for Firefox 4 on April 26, about a month after the original release, back in March 22. New with this release is that Mozilla will start using code names (somehow related to the main branch codename, in this case Tumucumaque) for udpates as well, as a way to help developers that follow Firefox development closely, more clearly understand what is coming when. ...

Symantec Connect: Not only Facebook is adding new and interesting features to its toolbox; spammers and scammers in Facebook are, too. Currently there is a scam making rounds using a classic “who is viewing your profile” themed bait. So far – nothing new. After the user grants the application the requested privileges, which of course will send out the above mentioned spam posts to all his or her friends, the user gets redirected to a download instruction site. There he or she is asked to download the Firefox browser and then install a popular Firefox extension which allegedly gets downloaded over 27,000 times per week. This simple tweak should generate a new menu entry in Facebook which would then show user statistics. ...

Avira TechBlog: Today is a busy day for those who want to keep their computers secure: Many updates are available, from Adobes Flash Player over Apples Mac OS X operating system to the Firefox web browser. There is a security vulnerability in Flash player which became public as a zero day vulnerability a week ago. It has been attacked in a limited fashion. Now Adobe released this security update which users can download from the website of the company. As this security vulnerability already gets actively exploited, users and administrators should apply the update immediately. ...

Over the past week or two, we have been keeping track of the various releases of Firefox 4 including RC1 and RC2, counting down to the official release tomorrow, the 22nd of March. Though it is officially being released tomorrow, it has been made available for download today at the Mozilla FTP servers. This is the third release of a browser version after Chrome 10 stable and Internet Explorer 9 RTM in recent weeks. ...

Sophos Labs Blog: If you’re interested in computer security, you’ve probably heard of PWN2OWN. It’s a competition which has become an annual fixture at the annual CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. The competition gets its name because, as the CanSecWest organizers explain, “If you can execute arbitrary code (PWN) on these [laptops or mobile phones] through a previously undisclosed browser (Firefox, IE, Safari) exploit, you can go home with one (OWN).” ...

labnol.org wrote: If you are a fan of Firefox, you may want to get this one. The first RC (Release Candidate) of Firefox web browser is now available for download at ftp.mozilla.org. If you have trouble accessing the above link, use this direct link to download the Firefox 4 RC1 installer for Windows. The Mac version of Firefox 4 RC1 is here while the Linux version is here. This Mozilla page has a list of all news features that are part of Firefox 4 beta, including the compact start button, and am not sure if much has changed in the latest RC. ...

Firefox Firefox 3.6.13 and Firefox 3.5.16 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 3.6.13. Firefox 3.6.13: http://firefox.com Firefox 3.5.16: 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. ...

For those who missed this update on Nov 18: In the spirit of releasing early and releasing often – Mozilla bring you version 0.2 of Rainbow – an experimental Firefox add-on from Mozilla Labs that exposes audio and video recording capabilities to web pages. What’s new in this release? It now support both audio and video recording on Windows, and audio recording on Linux. They added preliminary support for writing multiplexed media frames to a websocket. JS callers are now able to specify custom video resolutions, encoding quality, audio sampling rates and channels. Numerous bug fixes, such as behaving correctly on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), and generating correctly encoded OGG files (the audio tracks of which were previously unplayable by Firefox). For a full list of changes, check out their commit logs – or even better – contribute on Github! Also, don’t forget to read the README for additional information. ...

Mozilla announced Miramar Alpha 1, an early version of their next Thunderbird. Miramar Alpha 1, available here for download, is for testers, extension developers, and other friends who are curious to follow the development of the next release of Thunderbird. Miramar Alpha 1 is built on top of the next generation of Mozilla’s layout engine, Gecko 2.0 and includes a new Addon Manager and over 190 platform fixes to improve performance and stability. We expect to release further interim releases as we work towards a major new release of Thunderbird. ...

BetaNews: Mozilla Wednesday released a significant update to the beta of its Firefox 4 browser. The update adds a new JavaScript JIT compiler, going by the name of JägerMonkey, and improves the browser’s support for hardware acceleration, OpenType fonts, and WebGL 3D graphics (the technology used to create an HTML5 version of Quake II back in April.) Additionally, the latest beta includes a stable add-ons API, so developers can finally update their add-ons to Firefox 4. ...

Mozilla Labs: In our first Prospector experiment, Speak Words, we helped Firefox learn what words you might want to type into the Awesome Bar. We have taken that idea to help you find words in your open tab in our latest experiment. Finding a word in Firefox has always been easy because Firefox will move you to the new word formed by your last keystroke. This means you do not need to type out a word then click a search button to try finding a word that you might have misspelled. Firefox will let you know immediately if the new letter you pressed does not form a word that is on the page. ...

Mozilla Labs has been working hard on browser-based audio and video — not just for playback, but also for recording. Labs’ newest creation, called Rainbow, lets developers access your hardware’s video and audio recording capabilities with a few lines of JavaScript. The files created are all in open-source formats, including Theora, Vorbis and Ogg (support for WebM and other formats are planned in the product’s roadmap). Once media is captured, files can be accessed via the DOM with HTML5 File APIs. ...

Firefox is slipping in its development schedule; Mozilla says it won’t be able to release version 4.0 this year, and will have to delay the final version until early next year. “Completing this work is taking longer than initial estimates indicated as we track down regressions and sources of instability,” the company said in a statement. “As part of our commitment to beta users, we will not ship software before it is ready.” ...

Mozilla Labs: The “Chromeless” project experiments with the idea of removing the current browser user interface and replacing it with a flexible platform which allows for the creation of new browser UI using standard Web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Introduction Have you ever had an idea to improve the user interface of your browser? Have you ever actually gone and tried to make that idea a reality? If you have, you would have probably used technologies like XUL and XPCOM. Much of the user interface (browser chrome) of Firefox is implemented in XUL, which uses a lot of Web-based technologies such as the DOM and JavaScript. Firefox is put together in a way that seasoned developers are able implement features with amazing efficiency, but at the same time, the browser interface in XUL represents a barrier for potential contributors. What if the parts of the browser that are most interesting to contributors were implemented in standard Web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript? What kinds of wild-eyed experimentation would we see if a new conception of browser UI could be prototyped in about the same time it takes to write a web 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. ...