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 11/02/09 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 10/28/09 at 12:14:40 PM by Paul Lilly

For those who roll with unified browsing and emailing in a single bundle, Mozilla's SeaMonkey software, which has just been updated to version 2.0, might be just what you're looking for, provided you're a fan of Firefox and Thunderbird.

The newest version comes retooled with Firefox 3.5.4, and as a result, Mozilla says it's much closer to the the standalone browser, at least in terms of user profiles, add-ons, and functionality of UI elements. That also means it now incorporates crash recovery so you needn't lose your browser windows, tabs, and even data entered in web forms should something bad happen.

But it's not all about the browser. On the email side of things, new IMAP accounts now keep local offline copies by default, which ranks as one of the speed tweaks Mozilla implemented when working with IMAP. Tabbed mail has been added, and the mail module lets you subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds discovered by the browser on Web pages.

For a full list of changes and download instructions, see here.

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Posted 10/22/09 at 09:04:06 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Mozilla’s newest project takes a stab at taming the new era of the hyper-personal news stream. It’s called Raindrop, and it just might change the way you communicate with people on the web. Raindrop allows users to follow conversations from a variety of sources in a clean, manageable UI. When you get right down to it, Raindrop filters out the noise.

As an example, a Twitter feed is categorized by highlighting DMs and @ replies, messages from certain contacts can be given precedence as well. The rest of the stream is minimized and kept out of the way while reviewing these. Emails can be sorted by type in Raindrop as well. Anything recognized as a mailing list could be separated from personal emails, or work emails could automatically move into the background at 5PM. The app could also be used to track your comments on various blogs. Mozilla will be encouraging the addition of front-end widgets and third-party code as well.

Raindrop is currently only open to developers. Hopefully we’ll see a full downloadable installer in the near future. If this sort of content aggregation/sorting sounds interesting to you, keep an eye on the Mozilla Labs site for details.

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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 10/13/09 at 07:23:15 PM by Ryan Whitwam

The Internet was just beginning to find a mainstream audience in 1994. It could be said that the introduction of Netscape Navigator on October 13th of that year had a lot to do with increasing internet adoption. Netscape was a huge leap forward, easily leapfrogging other graphical browsers. It supported colored backgrounds, text styling, JavaScript, and media embedding. In many ways, it was the first modern web browser.

By 1996, Netscape had captured 80% market share. Development was rapid, seeing the incorporation of CSS and table layout features as time passed. Microsoft put out the first version of Internet Explorer a year after Netscape, but found little success.

The good times couldn’t last forever, though. Microsoft released IE 4 in 1998. Thanks to some advanced features, IE captured the number one spot in only 12 months. A series of poor decisions left the Netscape browser in the hands of AOL, and we all know how that went. Development slowed, and the once great browser languished. Support was finally completely dropped in 2008.

Amid all the dark times, one great thing did happen with Netscape. The browser code was open-sourced in February 1998. It wouldn’t become apparent until years later how well that worked out for the web. From Netscape, the Mozilla Foundation built Firefox. Many feel that the Firefox browser is the best available, and it enjoys a healthy 27% market share. Let’s all have a moment of silence to remember Netscape on, this, its 15th birthday. Was Netscape your first browser? Any fond memories of those dial-up days?

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Posted 10/08/09 at 08:05:17 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Developers of the Firefox Add-on, SkipScreen, had a bit of a rude awakening recently when Mozilla said they’d received a takedown request. The request was made by file hosting site, MediaFire. They claimed that SkipScreen violated their terms of use. To their credit, Mozilla asked the SkipScreen devs to respond before they’d pull the add-on down. Mediafire contends that SkipScreen “bypasses the MediaFire website and steals costly bandwidth”. They also claimed that SkipScreen displays content from other pages.

SkipScreen allows users to bypass the tedious wait times on sharing sites like MediaFire and Rapidshare. This ingenious little add-on will automatically click through whatever hoops necessary to get to the actual download page. Then it will extract and execute the code for the download link. This is how it bypasses those screens that force you to wait ‘X’ seconds, unless you register. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote SkipScreen’s response. They rightly pointed out that the add-on doesn’t technically bypass any screens. It just automates the process of finding a download link. The EFF also pointed out that SkipScreen does not present content from another site. MediaFire has probably just brought more attention to SkipScreen by going through with this complaint. Apparently, they’ve never heard of the Streisand Effect. So… the add-on is still available on the Mozilla site, get it here.

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