Firefox

Mozilla today pulled out the PR stops to trumpet the 10th anniversary of Firefox, and in celebration released an interim build of Firefox 33 that includes a new privacy tool and access to the DuckDuckGo search engine.

Firefox 1.0 was released on Nov. 9, 2004, at a time when Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) had a stranglehold on the browser space, having driven Netscape -- Firefox's forerunner in many ways -- out of the market two years before. Mozilla has been widely credited with restarting browser development, which had been moribund under IE.

Hey! You there! You've got it pretty good, you know that? While you're sitting there using your Internet-enabled device to read about some other Internet-enabled device, it's easy to forget that the majority of people doesn't have any access to the Internet at all. The "World Wide" Web is actually not that worldwide—only about one-third of the population is online. That's 4.8 billion people out there with no way to get to the Internet.

On July 22, Mozilla officially released the stable version for Firefox 31 for all supported platforms, integrating 11 security fixes, three of them being marked as critical.

One of the major vulnerabilities corrected would allow exploitation of a WebGL crash with Cesium JavaScript library. Details about this glitch are not available at the moment, but Mozilla notes that it cannot be leveraged through email in the Thunderbird client because scripting is disabled.

Mozilla's Firefox OS continues its slow march across the globe, with carriers set to begin shipping devices running the open source, browser-based smartphone platform in additional developed markets this week.

Spanish telecoms giant Telefónica has previously sold Firefox OS phones in Spain, but the bulk of its efforts have been focused on its subsidiaries in Spanish-speaking emerging markets, including Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

Mozilla is a company that has prided itself on releasing products that embrace an "open web" with few to no restrictions on how to access content. Today, the company announced that it will make an exception for its Firefox browser and enable it to use the W3C Encrypted Media Extensions.

In a blog post, Mozilla says that W3C EME allowed web browsers to play videos in HTML5 that have a Content Decryption Module (CDM). This would allow the browser to play videos on sites such as Netflix or Hulu but still have a DRM system in place.

OKCupid has removed a letter that only Firefox users could see asking them to change browsers over the anti-gay marriage politics of Brendan Eich, Mozilla's newly appointed CEO.

Mozilla has unveiled Firefox 28.0 FINAL for desktop, with Firefox for Android 28.0 also due for release shortly.

The most notable feature in version 28 is a missing one, with Mozilla pulling the planned Firefox for Metro release for Windows 8/RT shortly before shipping. The end result is an underwhelming desktop update overshadowed by the new Android release.

Mozilla claims it’s dropped the Modern UI due to lack of uptake during the beta-testing program, but this has stripped Firefox 28 of any headline-grabbing new features.

Mozilla has teamed up with Unity to run its games on the Web without plugins -- but with an add-on.

Announced at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, the extension will ship later this year with the anticipated Unity 5.0. Powered by the Web graphics library WebGL and the JavaScript subset asm.js, the add-on update says more about game developer's faith in Firefox than anything else.

While Apple is focused on spreading premium-prices smartphones across the globe, browser maker Mozilla has its sights aimed squarely on the low-cost smartphone market and has announced a deal for a chipset which it said will pave the way for $25 smartphones.

Mozilla announced at Mobile World Congress that it is partnering with Shanghai-based fabless semiconductor company Spreadtrum to come up with reference designs of the low-cost Firefox OS-powered smartphones.

Mozilla today released Firefox 27, giving users of the open-source browser new security features and improved performance.

There are 13 security advisories attached to the Firefox 27 release, four of them ranked as being critical. As is common in nearly all Firefox release updates, one of the critical updates is for a group of vulnerabilities that Mozilla labels "Miscellaneous memory safety hazards."