firefox

There are so many easy ways to download streaming media these days that we find absolutely no reason to bother with a program that's the least bit complicated. For that reason, we recommend that users who want to download video and music from streaming sites (where that's permitted, of course) look for something other than Faster Downloader to do it with. This unintuitive program left us scratching our head and wondering why the creators had so needlessly complicated what should be a simple process.

Faster Downloader boasts that it's "fully integrated" with Firefox and Internet … Read more

Last week's notice by researchers at Security Explorations of an unpatched hole in the Java runtime environment may have left you wondering whether to disable Java until Oracle releases a patch. CNET's Topher Kessler noted in his report on the Java flaw that no malware exploiting the vulnerability has yet been documented.

Which leads to the question, "Do I need Java?"

The best way to find out is to disable Java in your browser and re-enable it only if you encounter a site that prompts you to download Java before it will open. Then you can … Read more

Microsoft's Internet Explorer still grabs more than half of all traffic among browsers, at least as viewed by Web tracker Net Applications.

Leading the desktop browser market for September, IE took home a share of 53.6 percent. That left Firefox in second place with 20 percent and Chrome in third with almost 19 percent.

Trailing the top five were Apple's Safari with 5.2 percent and Opera with just 1.6 percent.

IE's lead has dipped over the past few years. A high of 79 percent in November 2007 fell to a low of 51.8 … Read more

Having your browser store password data for sites can be a huge time-saver and convenience. Naturally, there are security issues to consider-- what if someone else uses your computer? Less severe but more irritating, what if you forget your password and need to log in on another machine? Unless you use the same password for several services, you could be left in a bad situation.

Instead of answering security questions to reset your password to something else you might forget, try these steps to figure out what it is.

Step 1: Open the log-in page for the service you're … Read more

ZTE, one of China's most prominent handset makers, plans to launch smartphones running the new Firefox OS early next year.

Speaking today to reporters in China, the company said it will launch handsets running Firefox OS in the first quarter of 2013. According to the Wall Street Journal, which was in attendance at the press event, the company didn't say how many Firefox OS-based smartphones it plans to launch, and offered no further details on the devices.

Mozilla announced its ZTE partnership over the summer. At that time, the company also named the operating system Firefox OS. The … Read more

Mozilla has begun building a new technology called IonMonkey into Firefox to improve its JavaScript performance.

High JavaScript performance is essential in today's hotly competitive browser market, because JavaScript is the language behind complicated Web sites and Web apps such as Google Docs and Facebook. IonMonkey has now been packaged into the "nightly" version of Firefox 18 for hardcore developers; that version is scheduled to become the mainstream version of the browser early in 2013.

IonMonkey is what's called a just-in-time compiler, or JIT for short. In olden days, JavaScript would run line by line in … Read more

The Internet Engineering Task Force has standardized the Opus audio compression technology as RFC 6716.

The move paves the way for much broader use of Opus for anything from playing music to online voice chats. Opus is what's called a codec because it defines how to encode and decode a stream of data for more efficient storage or transmission.

"Opus is the first state-of-the-art, free audio codec to be standardized. We think this will help us achieve wider adoption than prior royalty-free codecs," Jean-Marc Valin, a Mozilla employee and author of Opus, said in a blog post today. … Read more

If you're not a fan of relying on browser add-ons and plug-ins, you'll probably want to enable a feature that can help you ditch at least one of them. Firefox now has a built-in PDF reader, and while it doesn't offer all of the same features that Adobe's version does, it's more than sufficient for most uses.

Before you get started enabling the PDF viewer, make sure you have the latest version of Firefox and you've disabled the Adobe PDF viewer.

To check the version: click the menu at the top left-hand corner and … Read more

Browser maker Mozilla has patched a bug in the latest major version of Firefox that could have exposed the websites of those using the "Private Browsing" mode.

"Private Browsing," a feature implemented in most modern browsers, allows users to browse the Web without leaving any trace of the websites visited on the user's computer.

But shortly after the latest Firefox release was dished out to end-users, a bug report was filed to claim that any site visited while in the privacy-conscious mode "could be found through manual browser cache inspection," according to Mozilla's bug-reporting site Bugzilla.… Read more