firefox

Security vendor Secunia on Wednesday reported a highly critical JavaScript flaw in Opera 9.22 and earlier. Fortunately, Opera already knew about the problem and on Wednesday released a more secure version of Opera, version 9.23. How did it know? The Norwegian browser company said it used a tool that was released during this year's Black Hat USA by rival Mozilla, the makers of the Firefox browser.

According to Secunia, the Opera vulnerability is the result of an unspecified error when processing JavaScript code. The error can produce a virtual function call using an invalid pointer. This can … Read more

Mahalo launched a new Firefox extension last week at Gnomedex. It's called "Follow," and once installed, it does just that. It's a mix of a toolbar and sidebar that pulls up related search results from whatever page you're on. It's got a built-in Mahalo search box in an attempt to ween you off your Google and Yahoo search tendencies. It's also got a StumbleUpon-like function to recommend whatever page you're looking at to others with yes, no, and maybe buttons, along with a button to take you to a random Mahalo … Read more

Just back from coaching my daughter's soccer practice, and I stumble into this on Slashdot: "only 50% of the people downloading Firefox actually try it out, and only a further half of those continue to use it actively.

In other words, a 25% retention rate, as ZDNet points out. Why is the retention rate so low?

Arguably, because Firefox isn't much better. Let the flames begin.… Read more

I'm used to visiting the official Mozilla add-ons site to grab my Firefox extensions, but there's a new option in town for Facebook app-aholics. It's called Rock Your Firefox, and it accomplishes nearly the same thing as does the Mozilla add-ons site, but in a simple Facebook application. Its "killer app" is that it keeps track of what themes and extensions your friends have downloaded and recommend--a process that usually requires nosing around their browsers.

Each add-on has its own landing page, along with a list of people who recommend the application. You can sort … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Thursday morning at Black Hat, Window Snyder and Mike Shaver of Mozilla released new tools for testing their browser, Firefox, and other popular browsers, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple Safari and Opera. The tools include a protocol fuzzer by Michael Eddington, and a Javascript fuzzer by Jesse Ruderman. Fuzzing is a method by which researchers randomly simulate common conditions under which most browsers fail.

In an interview before the presentation, Snyder said that Firefox enjoys a community of users in the millions worldwide. Of these, there are about 10,000 users who regularly download what are called nightly … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Thursday morning at Black Hat, Window Snyder and Mike Shaver of Mozilla released new tools for testing their browser, Firefox, and other popular browsers, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple Safari and Opera. The tools include a protocol fuzzer by Michael Eddington, and a Javascript fuzzer by Jesse Ruderman. Fuzzing is a method by which researchers randomly simulate common conditions under which most browsers fail.

In an interview before the presentation, Snyder said that Firefox enjoys a community of users in the millions worldwide. Of these, there are about 10,000 users who regularly download what are called nightly … Read more

How long does it take you to type, "Now Playing"? And how can FoxyTunes, the popular browser extension, help?

Switching windows to your desktop's MP3 player takes up precious nanoseconds, too. Even worse, you might have to physically move and actually get up and look at your stereo. In the average e-mailer's day, that could add up to hundreds of thousands or even millions of seconds.

… Read more

Mozilla released on Tuesday an update to Firefox 2 that patches the Mozilla side of a flaw shared with Microsoft Internet Explorer.

The update, Firefox 2.0.0.6, also patches a privilege escalation vulnerability.

Current users of Firefox 2 will receive an update notice. Others can download it from the Mozilla site.

Researcher Jesper Johansson noted that Firefox did not percent-encode spaces and double-quotes in URIs (uniform resource identifiers) handed off to external programs. That means the receiving program could interpret a single URI as multiple arguments. For example, when running Firefox on Windows XP with IE7 installed, URIs … Read more

Today, MXPlay--the digital-music player that focuses on customizing and enhancing your playback sound, while also letting you mash up streaming audio with Web videos (covered previously)--launched a Windows-only add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser. Called MXPlay Web, the Firefox add-on part is a simple orange MXPlay button that sits in your toolbar. Whenever you navigate to a Web page that includes MP3 files, the button transforms into a musical note. Click that note, and you can "play" that Web page in a pop-up music player.

After you select "Play this page," MXPlay Web will list all of the available MP3 songs on that Web page. You can then mark any of your favorites and save them to a personal playlist. Unfortunately, once you create that playlist, MXPlay Web somewhat randomly puts them into an order that you cannot change manually.

Just like the full app, MXPlay Web lets you customize the sound of the music using the same unique graphic interface. Drag and drop the head icon (the listener) and each of your available speakers to a specific location on the screen, which affects sound levels and direction. A blue circle in the upper left lets you control the size of your virtual room, and the bars in the upper right offer three levels of reverb.… Read more