For about the past six years, Mozilla has been putting cash bounties on bugs, and more recently, the open-source company upped the reward from $500 to $3,000. Not a bad score for researchers who make it their business to hunt down bugs and turn them in, but for some, it's not about the money.

In fact, roughly 10-15 percent of the serious security flaws reported to Mozilla since the cash bounty program was first offered have been provided at no cost.

"A lot of people would say, 'Don't worry about it. Donate it to the eFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) or just me a T-shirt,'" said Jonathan Nighingale, the director of Firefox development, in a recent interview.

Turning down the cash for reporting clunky browser behavior is made even more impressive considering these bugs can sometimes fetch even more money in the underground market. Cyber crooks are always on the lookout for rogue software to infect people's machine, and Mozilla's cash bounty is an attempt to counter this practice.

"In North America, $3,000 is not nothing," Nightingale added. "But in a lot of the world, $3,000 is a big deal, and our contributors come from lots of places."

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Innovation in the browser market is pretty rare these days with most developers putting the focus on speed rather than features, but Mozilla is working on something that may fundamentally change the way you work with tabs. A new feature called “Tab Candy” is currently being tested that will allow users to group tabs by category and zoom out on all your open pages giving you the freedom to organize the chaos that comes from a day’s worth of browsing.

You need to watch the video after the jump to truly appreciate what they are trying to do here, but to sum it up in words, it’s somewhat similar to a Mac OSX feature called expose which gives you a smaller preview of everything going on in your browser. If after giving the video a preview you want to give Tab Candy a try, you can download the custom Firefox 4 beta build which contains an alpha version of the new tab manager.

I’m not sure if this will come together in time for Firefox 4, but it’s the one feature I could see myself switching back from Chrome for. It’s great to see new ideas continuing to evolve.

What do you think of the new tab manager?

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Browser extensions may seem innocuous from a security standpoint to most internet surfers, but as with any chunk of code it is a mistake to presume their harmlessness. It is a lesson that probably most of the people, who downloaded a Firefox add-on called Mozilla Sniffer, have learnt by now.

The add-on was disabled and added to the block list on July 12 by Mozilla, after it was found stealing passwords. Ironically, Mozilla Sniffer was itself advertised as a security add-on. That said, the add-on totally lived up to its name.

“Mozilla Sniffer has been downloaded approximately 1,800 times since its submission and currently reports 334 active daily users. All current users should receive an uninstall notification within a day or so,” Mozilla said in a statement on its blog. “The site this add-on sends data to seems to be down at the moment, so it is unknown if data is still being collected.”

Mozilla has also disabled another add-on, CoolPreviews, after a security escalation vulnerability was discovered in version 3.0.1. All previous versions of the add-on have been disabled along with the flawed version. However, a fixed version “was uploaded and reviewed within a day of the developer being notified.”

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Sometimes wars come down to alliances, and in the browser war, Mozilla now has IBM in its corner, says Bob Sutor, VP of Linux and Open Source at IBM.

"Some of the software we all use shouldn’t surprise you since we make it, such as Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime, and Lotus Symphony," Sutor wrote in a blog post. "We’re officially adding a new piece of software to the list of default common applications we expect employees to use, and that’s the Mozilla Firefox browser.

"Firefox has been around for years, of course. Today we already have thousands of employees using it on Linux, Mac, and Windows laptops and desktops, but we’re going to be adding thousands more users to the rolls."

Sutor listed out several reasons why he himself prefers Firefox over the competition, chief among them that "Firefox is stunningly standards compliant, and interoperability via open standards is key to IBM's strategy." Sutor also praised Firefox for its security and extensible nature, or in other words the very same reasons why it's been such a hit on the consumer side.

Full blog post here.

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