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A developers' version of Firefox 2.0 targeted for release Tuesday evening aims to test the back-end infrastructure supporting the browser's new bookmarks, or Places, functionality. Firefox 2.0 Bon Echo Alpha 1, designed to serve as a developer's and tester's preview, focuses on improving access and ease of use for Web site history and bookmarks, according to the Mozilla wiki. The Places functionality aims to consolidate user data formats, as well as improve the capabilities of Live Bookmarks. "The BonEcho Alpha 1 milestone is the first of many developer milestones on the path to Firefox 2," Mike Schroepfer, vice president of...

Internet Explorer Sucks This study is from August, but I missed it. The researchers tracked three browsers (MSIE, Firefox, Opera) in 2004 and counted which days they were "known unsafe." Their definition of "known unsafe": a remotely exploitable security vulnerability had been publicly announced and no patch was yet available. MSIE was 98% unsafe. There were only 7 days in 2004 without an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. Firefox was 15% unsafe. There were 56 days with an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. 30 of those days were a Mac hole that only affected Mac users. Windows Firefox was 7%...

CHICAGO, Dec. 28 (UPI) -- Fifteen years ago this Christmas week, Tim Berners-Lee, an obscure scientist working in a European laboratory, invented the Internet browser, now a fixture of the digital economy, experts tell United Press International's The Web. Sir Berners-Lee today still lives a simple professor's lifestyle, bicycling around town, as his browser was supplanted by the Mosaic browser developed by a college student, Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois, a few years later. Andreessen's invention led to the creation of Netscape, the Netscape Navigator and other technologies that enervated to the go-go 1990s run in investment in...

Mozilla Corp. has warned users of its newest browser, Firefox 1.5, that a bug in how the software handles extremely long names can make it seem that the computer has crashed. The flaw, however, does not expose users to attack, contrary to earlier reports by researchers. Malicious pages with very long titles--the proof of concept for the pseudo denial-of-service (DoS) attack contained 2.5 million characters--make the browser appear to hang, said Mozilla in an online security advisory, although the software is actually busy processing the name. Once encountered, the very slow start can't be corrected until the site name is...

Exploit code for the latest version of open-source browser Firefox was published Wednesday, potentially putting users at risk of a denial-of-service attack. The exploit code takes advantage of a bug in the recently released Firefox 1.5, running on Windows XP with Service Pack 2. Firefox, which initially debuted over a year ago, has moved swiftly to capture 8 percent of the browser market. The latest Firefox flaw exists in the history.dat file, which stores information from Web sites users have visited with the Firefox 1.5 browser, according to a posting on the Internet Storm Center, which monitors online threats. "If...

"Wow, in just one day, Firefox 1.5 has already been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. That smashes our 1.0 first day downloads by half a million," said Dotzler in his blog. "If you haven't downloaded Firefox 1.5, get it while it's hot!" This demand appears to be continuing, according to a blog post from Chris Beard, the vice-president of products at Mozilla. "There are now more than two million people enjoying a better Web experience with Firefox 1.5. Demand continues to be high, greatly exceeding what we saw last year with the release of Firefox 1.0," said Beard. Firefox...

For those of you who use Firefox, Version 1.5 is now available for download...

Browser competition hasn't been this fierce since the mid-1990s, and the fight is becoming even more intense as Microsoft, Mozilla, and Opera ready new versions of their software for release. With version 7 of Internet Explorer, Microsoft's developers have seriously overhauled the browser, giving it popular features such as tabbed browsing, as well as improved security, thus closing the gap between it and its rivals. But even though the new iterations of both Firefox and Opera bring mostly incremental changes, that's still enough to keep them ahead of IE.We took Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1, Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1,...

A small team of developers in California on Friday launched a cutting-edge Firefox-based Web browser dubbed Flock, which integrates next-generation Web technologies such as RSS content feeds, blogs and bookmark and photo sharing. The team of developers was spearheaded by Bart Decrem, who is well known in the open-source community due to his involvement in the Mozilla Foundation and his ill-fated start-up Eazel, which from 1999 until its demise in 2001 aimed to bring greater usability features to the Linux desktop. "Indeed the time is upon us," wrote Flock co-founder Geoffrey Arone on his blog shortly before the release. "We...

What Firefox and Mozilla users should know about the IDN buffer overflow security issue On September 6 a security vulnerability affecting all versions of Mozilla Firefox and the Mozilla Suite was reported to Mozilla by Tom Ferris and on September 8th was publicly disclosed. On September 9, the Mozilla team released a configuration change which, as a temporary measure to work around this problem, disables IDN in the browser. IDN functionality will be restored in a future product update. The fix is either a manual configuration change or a small download which will make this configuration change for the user....

The fine folks at Mozilla have released an update today for both the Firefox web browser, and the Thunderbird email clients. Links here. This is a bugfix/security update. All users are advised to upgrade to the latest versions. For a list of vulerabilities addressed in this release, click Here.

The Mozilla Foundation is expecting to see a surge in interest in the Firefox browser from enterprise users once Microsoft launches Internet Explorer 7 next year. IE 7, which will be available in beta this summer, will not be available to users of Windows 2000. Asa Dotzler, the community coordinator at the Mozilla Foundation, said Tuesday that he hopes to attract many corporate Windows 2000 users to the Firefox browser, since they will be unable to take advantage of the improvements in IE 7. "We have high hopes that we'll do better and better in (the enterprise) space with Windows...

A new version of the firefox browser was released today. It contains security updates and all firefox users should undate asap.

The end of free Internet content will come when Web browsers start blocking online advertisements by default, a DoubleClick executive has warned. Bennie Smith, the online advertising network's privacy chief, told ZDNet Australia the popularity of tools like Adblock -- an extension to the Mozilla Firefox browser -- which makes blocking online ads simple was tied to "a negative vibe against advertising in general". However, only the online arena is able to easily produce and widely distribute such tools, he added. He said if a similar tool could be produced for newspapers, it would not be accepted by consumers. "You'd...

Internet Explorer and Firefox -- even the newest edition that's getting ready for release -- can be spoofed by hackers intent on stealing passwords or other confidential information, a security firm said Tuesday. According to Danish vulnerability tracker Secunia, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox, and virtually every other popular browser could be used by malicious Web site to display bogus Java dialog boxes atop legitimate sites. "The problem is that JavaScript dialog boxes do not display or include their origin, which allows a new window to open -- a prompt dialog box -- which appears to be from a trusted...

AOL's Netscape has finally unveiled its long awaited Netscape 8.0 browser in the "gold version" which combines the best of Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers. Its underlying engine is FF but it can automatically switch to an I.E engine when that's necessary on certain websites that are designed to work only with I.E. Its finally here!

New browser speeds up Internet May 12, 2005 Mike Goldfein Tech Files are video reports examining popular topics about technology and the Internet. Links to helpful Web sites are listed. Mike Goldfein reports from the Belo Washington bureau. STORY In our digital age, the one thing we all spend way too much time doing is surfing the Web. One reason is that it's fun. But another may be that the most popular browsers are not designed for speed and convenience. Here's one that is. Here's Mike Goldfein: For lack of a better analogy, it seems to me that browsers are...

Firefox seems to be heading Internet Explorer's way with security research company Secunia stating on its website that two vulnerabilities found in the popular browser can be exploited to conduct cross-site scripting attacks and compromise a user's system. The Mozilla Foundation is aware of the two potentially critical Firefox security vulnerabilities. They maintain that there are currently no known active exploits of these vulnerabilities though a "proof of concept" has been reported. Mozilla stated that it is aggressively working to provide a more comprehensive solution to these potential vulnerabilities and will provide that solution in a forthcoming security update. Users...

Firefox hit 49,000,000 downloads last night. Today, as we approach 50,000,000, SpreadFirefox is offering prizes for photographic proof of your most amazing spectacles to celebrate. To quote: 'We have a handful of unique prizes that you won't find anywhere else, and we're asking you to do one simple thing to claim one: impress us. As we drive toward 50 million downloads, do something so cool, so unusual and so spectacular to spread Firefox that we can't help but scurry around the Mozilla Foundation to tell every one.

ohn S. von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera Software is putting his money were his mouth is. Today Opera announced that 1 million copies of Opera 8 have been downloaded in the first four days. Von Tetzchner is in the water and beginning his long trans-atlantic swim. "I will swim from Norway to the USA if download numbers of Opera 8 reach 1 million in four days."- Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. In a press release, Opera PR stated that the CEO "spent a good half hour submerged in the bathtub at home in relatively cool temperatures to reduce...