Mozilla

Mozilla’s latest Firefox 4 browser is sweepingly outpacing Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 even though there is still time before the open source company will introduce an automatic update to its aging Firefox 3.5 browser. Mozilla's Asa Dotzler reported that early this month Firefox 4's usage began to show a sharp increase while IE9 continued on a much more gradual climb.

Mozilla refused the request of US regulators to ban a Firefox add-on that allows users to access sites which have domain names confiscated earlier this year.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency under the Department of Homeland Security that in February took the unprecedented step of seizing domain names accused of streaming live pay-per-view sporting events, requested the open source company to ban MafiaaFire add-on.

According to a research conducted by a security group Firefox and Chrome browsers cannot detect new phishing attacks that targeted recently customers of Bank of America and PayPal. The phishing scam manages to bypass fraud protections built in to the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome by attaching an HTML file to the spam email.

Another beta of Firefox 4 is coming again before Mozilla will at last launch its Release Candidate.

"There are currently fewer than 20 'hard' blocking issues which have been identified as requiring beta coverage [1] and only 7 without patches," noted the open source outfit's Mike Beltzner late on Friday.

"At this point in time I do not believe we will require an additional beta, and am recommending that we continue to push hard to close these blockers out over the next few days."

In a move to compete with Google which makes updated browsers every six to eight weeks Mozilla announced that it is planning to release four new versions of Firefox this year shortening thus the browser’s cycle. Up to present days Mozilla has released updated versions every 12 to 18 months.

The draft of Mozilla’s Firefox roadmap for 2011 shows that one of the non-profit entity’s priorities is to "ship our new technology to users in smaller bundles, more frequently."

Mozilla removes standard browser interface to give the priority to web content with its new experimental add-on for Firefox 4. The add-on dubbed as Home Dash "moves the usual browser functionality into a dashboard that sits on top of the page and goes away after you have found what you were looking for," Mozilla developer Edward Lee wrote in a recent blog post.

A new privacy feature under development by Mozilla that is aimed at enabling users to opt out of online tracking has a significant flaw that makes it more than useless. As the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has recognized that tracking is a privacy concern for Web-surfing citizens and has proposed implementation of some sort of do-not-track framework similar to the do-not-call lists that are supposed to keep annoying telemarketers from calling you, many web browser makers included a privacy feature.

The latest financial statement of Mozilla revealed that Google still drives 86% of revenue to the open source company. In an audited financial statement for 2009 Mozilla lists an unnamed search company (as in previous years) under "concentrations of risk." In 2008, Google accounted for 91 per cent of Mozilla's revenues, so the risk has dropped.

Mozilla revoked its plans to roll out the new browser Firefox 4 next month. According to a new schedule the browser will not arrive until "early 2011."

"As discussed in today’s Firefox delivery meeting, release candidate builds are now scheduled to ship in early 2011, with the final GA release shortly after," a Mozilla representative said.

Firefox 4 is now in its sixth beta release. Beta 7 — the "feature complete" beta — was due on September 17, but according to Mozilla's schedule, it will not arrive until November.

Mozilla claims that its browser has the fastest SunSpider scores on the planet after its internal tests revealed that the company’s latest Firefox JavaScript engine — which includes the new JagerMonkey extension — outperforms both Google Chrome's V8 engine and Apple Safari's Nitro. The tests, apparently excluded Opera and Internet Explorer. Director of community development Asa Dotzler made the claim on Monday morning with a blog post.

While the new Firefox engine trails Chrome on Google's V8 benchmarks Mozilla has reached a milestone nonetheless.

Users of Firefox are being tricked into installing a Trojan that makes the browser to save all login credentials by default and subsequently uses the stolen information to create a new user account (username: Maestro) on the compromised machine. Then it steals personal user data from the Windows Protected Storage Area which is on a constant basis transferred to the crooks’ server.

The author behind the Trojan known as Salar “Salixem” Zeynali is an Iran-based crimeware hobbyist and heavy metal enthusiast, according to his Facebook profile.

Mozilla adds Bing as a standard search option in Firefox 4. While at present Firefox users who try to look over their search options will only see Google, Yahoo, Amazon.com, Answers.com, Creative Commons, eBay, and Wikipedia as alternatives, Firefox 4 will list Bing right after Google and Yahoo.

A post on the Mozilla Blog says: "Bing itself offers a user experience that we think users will find valuable, and with its significant rise in popularity over the last year, we will also be including Bing as a general search option for English language users."

Revolutionary new concept mobile phone is unpredictably getting available from Mozilla, but not from Apple, Google, Motorola or HTC.

The hottest concept mobile phone, Seabird, was developed by a designer Billy May in his spare time as part of a Mozilla Labs project.

According to the data from the Net Applications regarding to browser market share in August, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 holds its leadership, advancing all its rivals in growth. 

However, elder Internet Explorer 6, an outdated and insecure browser, refuses to die down, though it’s losing ground violently.

According to a new research four major browsers fail to remove users’ personal information even when they browse in a private mode. While privacy settings provided by the browsers should supposedly allow users to visit a website without leaving any trace on their computers, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari frequently leave tracks, according to the research, which is scheduled to be presented at next week's Usenix Security Symposium in Washington DC.