Posted 11/04/09 at 11:15:51 AM by Paul Lilly

In the grand scheme of things, October might go down as a month to remember. That's the month Mozilla's Firefox browser was finally able to catch up to, and surpass, Microsoft's still popular Internet Explorer 6.

Internet Explorer remains way out in front in market share, but it's becoming clear that Microsoft's lead isn't long for the world. From September to October, IE dropped 1.07 percentage points, settling in at 66.64 percent. At the same time, Firefox gained ground on its own accord by moving up 0.32 percentage points to end up at 24.07 percent. Those are significant numbers for such a short period of time. If the current pace were to keep up, it would take a little over 2 years for Firefox to completely catch up with IE, and could conceivably jump ahead by early 2012.

But it's not just about Firefox. Safari, Chrome, and Opera combined hold a little over 10 percent of the market. Throw Firefox into the fray and alternative browsers (non-IE) are being used by a third of all surfers. When looking at it from that angle, IE is on pace to give up its market share lead even before 2012, just not to a single browser.

Maybe then, Netscape can finally rest in peace.

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Posted 11/03/09 at 04:30:00 PM by Florence Ion

As your library of Firefox Add-ons continues to grow, so does the worry that a system crash will wipe out your carefully assembled collection of extensions. To quell this fear, all you have to do is download just one additional add-on that will ensure your extensions say safely backed up in a folder on your computer or portable storage device. FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension) is a worry-free backup system that will preserve your highly-customized Firefox settings in the case of a crash.

Read on to find out more.

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Posted 11/02/09 at 02:40:20 PM by Bart Salisbury

Back in the old days all you got was green phosphor, mono-spaced text, and 80 characters per line. And weren’t those days just awful for presenting anything interesting on a computer screen? Today, while creative opportunities abound, there are still problems to address. A big one is having presented on those screens--all of those screens--what you want to have seen. One of the components of this is typeface, and at present there aren’t any definitive standards.

Mozilla, in combination with Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland, type designers who have been working on the .webfont format, are proposing a solution: the Web Open Font Format (WOFF). WOFF makes use of Leming and van Blokland’s work to embed useful font metadata with font resource compression developed by Jonathan Kew of Mozilla. The resulting format includes optimized compression that reduces download time for font resources. Because the fonts won’t include encryption or Digital Rights Management (DRM) it would have to be open source. A draft of the WOFF file format is available online.

WOFF is receiving support from a wide array of font producers. And efforts are now underway to incorporate this new technology into Firefox 3.6 (including the beta version). It is expected that it will also be implemented into WebKit-based browsers, such as Safari, Chrome and Opera.

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Posted 10/28/09 at 02:35:12 PM by Bart Salisbury

Clearly there is nothing that hackers won’t go after in the attempt to monkey about with your computer’s innards. Any opening, no matter how insignificant, needs to be closed before it can be exploited. With this in mind Mozilla today released an update to Firefox, upping its version to 3.5.4, that patches 16 weaknesses, eleven of which are critical.

Hackers were busy on the obvious: the browser engine, JavaScript, and open-source media libraries; as well as the less obvious: the GIF color map parser and the string-to-number converter. In its security advisory, Mozilla reports: “Some of these crashes showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances and we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code.”

Mozilla notes that the JavaScript vulnerabilities can cause browser crashes. Those not able or unwilling to upgrade are recommended to turn JavaScript off.

If you’re still hanging out in Firefox 3 you’ve also got a security patch waiting for you. Version 3.0.15 was released, addressing nine problems, four of which Mozilla tagged as critical.

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Posted 10/27/09 at 04:30:00 PM by Florence Ion

Frequent Flickr users who utilize the popular photo-sharing site for its social networking perks will appreciate the Better Flickr plug-in for Firefox. This add-on incorporates an assemblage of useful Greasemonkey scripts to super-power your Flickr experience with essential features like adding a link for replying with a user’s name, icon or both for easily replying to the appropriate person within a comment thread, tacking on a short URL link in the sidebar, and including links to view the photo in various other sizes.

 Read on for more info!

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Posted 10/20/09 at 05:15:00 PM by Florence Ion

If you haven’t figured it out already, folks, its Windows 7 week. This week, we’re featuring downloads and web apps that will enhance the novelty of having a brand new operating system (it’s really a great thing, isn’t it?). We wanted to include a sleek looking, crystallized browser skin for our Firefox add-on of the week to match Windows 7, but we figured you’re already satisfied with Personas, so why not something a little more utilitarian? In comes Tab Mix Plus, which enhances Firefox’s tab browsing capabilities and gives you more options when you’re working with tabs. 

Read on for more! 

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Posted 10/19/09 at 10:32:24 AM by Paul Lilly

In a blog post on Friday, Mike Shaver, Mozilla's VP of Engineering, explained why his company had decided to block Microsoft's .NET Framework Assistant add-on to the Firefox browser.

"It's recently surfaced that it has a serious security vulnerability, and Microsoft is recommending that all users disable the add-on," Shaver wrote. "Because of the difficulties some users have had entirely removing the add-on, and because of the severity of the risk it represents if not disabled, we contacted Microsoft today to indicate that we were looking to disable the extension and plugin for all users via our blocklisting mechanism."

And so Mozilla did just that, as you may have noticed over the weekend if you're a Firefox user. But as it turns out, the add-on may not be so harmful after all.

"We received confirmation from Microsoft this evening that the Framework Assistant add-on is not a mechanism for exploiting the vulnerabilities detailed in the earlier post, so we've removed it from the blocklist," Mozilla said.

Mozilla went on to say that the blocklist update propagates to clients, so if the add-on was previously disabled, it should automatically re-enable, though you'll need to restart your browser for it to take effect.

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Posted 10/16/09 at 04:17:22 PM by Bart Salisbury

Microsoft’s .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1) update, which came out last February, seems to have slipped a roofie to both Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox in the form of a “browse-and-get-owned attack vector.” The issue with Firefox is a point of contention with some users because Microsoft never made clear the update would affect Firefox, and users weren’t made aware that Firefox was being modified.

The security weakness was introduced through the Windows Presentation Foundation plug-in, which was installed both in IE and Firefox. According to Annoyances.org, the update made Firefox susceptible to one of IE’s biggest weaknesses: “the ability for websites to easily and quietly install software on your PC.”

Initially, the plug-in couldn’t be removed from Firefox, a problem rectified by a May update to the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. However, given that Microsoft has revisited the issue in a newly released security bulletin, the problem seems to persist.

If you are a Firefox user and have .NET Framework 3.5 installed you might want to check for the Windows Presentation Foundation plug-in and, if it is present, disable it. Microsoft’s security bulletin provides these instructions: “Tools”-> “Add-ons” -> “Plugins”, select “Windows Presentation Foundation”, and click “Disable”.

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