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Anyone having trouble using 'secure' web browsers? I have been using Ixqick for some time now, hoping to by-pass snooping and tracking. (As an old great-granny, I'm not 'up to much the gov't should be interested in, except of curse being a conservative - high on 'enemies of the state' list, I guess.) However, I'm a stubborn old crone and don't want to think about someone leering over my shoulder every time I email a grandkid or whatever. It's MY DAMN business. I was raised when America was America. So - For about a week, when I tried to bring...

Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox all fell to the mercy of the hackers Thursday. That is, in a controlled environment. Security firms Vupen and MWR Labs were able to crack the browsers during a condoned bug-hunt, with one company winning $100,000 for finding a huge hole. The Pwn2Own competition is an event at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver. The competition was created by HP’s DVLabs as part of its Zero Day Initiative: an attempt to get more people to find and report bugs as opposed to exploiting them for personal gains.

Summary: In the first day of the Pwn2Own cracking contest, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 10, Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox web browsers have all gone down in flames. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for Networking | March 7, 2013 -- 18:20 GMT (10:20 PST) In the eternal war between crackers and security professionals, the hackers have won the latest battle. ZDI_Twitter_AvatarIn ZDI's Pwn2Own hacker competition one browser after another fell. At the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, Canada, the HP Zero Day Initiative's (ZDI) annual Pwn2Own competition has ended its first day of competition and Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) 10,...

Researchers have spotted a new banking Trojan subbed 'Tinba' that appears to have hit on a simple tactic for evading security - be as small as possible. An astonishing 20KB in size, Tinba ('Tiny Banker') retains enough sophistication to match almost anything that can be done by much larger malware types. Its main purpose is to burrow into browsers in order to steal logins, but it can also use 'obfuscated' (i.e disguised) web injection and man-in-the-browser to attempt to finesse two-factor web authentication systems. A particularly interesting feature is the way it tries to evade resident security, injecting itself into...

Officially, Firefox 5 is scheduled for release tomorrow. However, users of the beta channel have already got their hands on it. One of the promises for Firefox 5 is better performance. We took tested Firefox 5 and benchmarked it against two other browsers - Google Chrome and Opera. We used the latest version of Google Chrome from the beta channel and the latest stable version of Opera - Opera 11.11. SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark The SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark is a test for the JavaScript engine of the browser. In this benchmark, lower scores (time) means better performance. In our earlier benchmarks,...

Traditional phishing attacks are reasonably easy to avoid, just don’t click links in suspicious e-mails (or, for the really paranoid, any e-mail). But Firefox Creative Lead Aza Raskin has found a far more devious way to launch an attack — by hijacking your unattended browser tabs. The attack works by first detecting that the tab the page is in does not have focus. Then the attacking script can change the tab favicon and title before loading a new site, say a fake version of Gmail, in the background. Even scarier, the attack can parse through your history to find sites...

Some of you may know about this gem, but I want to make sure every Firefox and Chrome user knows about the beauty of FR Tree View. I'm not taking credit for it, I don't know which FReeper wrote the software. But it's amazing! It makes following long, nested threads much easier. See a screen shot here: Click to enlarge

If you're having trouble with Firefox 3.6 freezing up while you're trying to scroll down through a webpage, try going to the Firefox help page and update your Quicktime plug-in software to the latest version. That update fixed the problem for me. EOM

So the developers of Google Chrome have released a “developer only” version of Chrome saying you should NOT install it unless you are a developer. They warn you short of saying that the developer release of Google Chrome will ruin your love life, steal your cash, and flirt with your mother. With this warning I assume most people shy away from installing on Linux.I ignored the warning. I’m glad I did.Let me preface all of this by saying I have been using Firefox since the alpha days. So I guess you’d consider me a Firefox Fanboy. I’ve tried all of...

Today, we're releasing an early version of Google Chrome Frame, an open source plug-in that brings HTML5 and other open web technologies to Internet Explorer. We're building Google Chrome Frame to help web developers deliver faster, richer applications like Google Wave. Recent JavaScript performance improvements and the emergence of HTML5 have enabled web applications to do things that could previously only be done by desktop software. One challenge developers face in using these new technologies is that they are not yet supported by Internet Explorer. Developers can't afford to ignore IE — most people use some version of IE —...

Heads up, Google Chrome-hounds. Version 2.0 of your favorite, lightning-fast, "anti-establishment" browser has been released, and it's quicker and more feature-packed than ever. That is, if you take the word of the massive corporation that designed it. Over at the official Chrome blog, Googleite Darin Fisher says that a few of the new additions were included in the re-beta-ed beta released back in March, but the new version does contain some new features and sports faster speeds and increased stability thanks to the proper squashing of some 300 bugs. One of the new, and predictably appreciated, features lets you remove...

6 Reasons Why Firefox Dude May Want to Switch to Chrome Apr. 21st, 2009 By David Pierce I did it. About a week ago, I took the plunge. I made Google Chrome my default browser, and now do almost everything within Chrome. I do miss Firefox every once in a while (after all, we were in a relationship for quite a while, and over a number of version changes), but I’m glad I’ve moved on. Chrome is only getting better – rolling out more features, making existing features work even better, and generally getting faster and awesome-er. Here are the...

Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 is done and beta 4 is slated to be released on April 14. That’s the latest from the Mozilla Firefox team, which held its weekly meeting on Tuesday. Q&A is expected to sign off on the long delayed beta 3 on Thursday and the beta 3 web page should be up and running tonight, a key Mozilla Firefox developer said. As expected, the team last week upgraded the code version number to Firefox 3.5. The new naming with appear when beta 4 makes its debut. The code freeze for beta 4 is planned for April 6,...

Safari 4 benchmarked: 42x faster than IE 7, 3.5x faster than Firefox 3 By Nate Lanxon on 24 February 2009, 6:01pm Proving itself a staggering 42 times faster at rendering JavaScript than IE 7, our benchmarks confirm Apple's Safari 4 browser, released in beta today, is the fastest browser on the planet. In fact, it beat Google's Chrome, Firefox 3, Opera 9.6 and even Mozilla's developmental Minefield browser. We used the SunSpider suite of JavaScript tests to determine which browser was the quickest, and the Safari 4 beat every browser in terms of speed, on both a PC running...

Security Advisory: Firefox 3.0.7For all you alternative browser types out there, Mozilla has released a new version of Firefox (3.0.7). The latest updated fixes eight vulnerabilities, six of which are considered critical. Mozilla developers identified and fixed several stability bugs in the browser engine used in Firefox and other Mozilla-based products. 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. Comments

Release delayed a week to deal with 'large number' of bugs; final still due in Q1 Mozilla Corp. said yesterday that it will delay the third beta of Firefox 3.1, citing a "large number" of remaining bugs as the reason for the slip. The setback won't affect the final release date for Firefox 3.1, a company executive said. "Right now, we're not expecting this to delay our shipping target of late in the first quarter," said Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox, said in an e-mail today. Firefox 3.1 Beta 3, which until this week was slated to launch on Jan....

What's New in Firefox 2.0.0.20 Note: This is the last planned release of Firefox 2. All users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3. Firefox 2.0.0.20 does not include Phishing Protection. Release Date: December 18, 2008 Security Update: Firefox 2.0.0.20 includes an additional security fix over Firefox 2.0.0.19 for users of the Windows platform. The following security issue was fixed. Earlier Changes: For information about previous changes, please see the Firefox 2.0.0.19 Release Notes.

Microsoft Corp. is taking the unusual step of issuing an emergency fix for a security hole in its Internet Explorer software that has exposed millions of users to having their computers taken over by hackers. The "zero-day" vulnerability, which came to light last week, allows criminals to take over victims' machines simply by steering them to infected Web sites; users don't have to download anything for their computers to get infected, which makes the flaw in Internet Explorer's programming code so dangerous. Internet Explorer is the world's most widely used Web browser. Sponsored Links (Ads by Google) Security for Your...

Mozilla just a couple of days ago updated Firefox to version 2.0.0.18, and used this occasion to advise users to upgrade to Firefox 3.0.4 (the latest Firefox build). At the time Mozilla said that it will issue just one more update, Firefox 2.0.0.19, but now we find out that one of the features that made Firefox so popular back in the day, phishing protection, will not be included in this final update. To my mind this is just one more reason to update. Mike Beltzner explains: “The latest published update for Firefox 2, which is version 2.0.0.18, has the Phishing...

Excerpt - Google have announced plans to take on Microsoft and Firefox with their own open-source browser, codenamed Chrome, by releasing a specially drawn comic by Scott McCloud explaining the app. Based on the existing Webkit rendering engine, Chrome will integrate not only tab-based browsing but Google Gears and a newly integrated search and address system called Omnibox. ~ snip ~