Another six weeks have gone by, and another version of Firefox has been released. Still not officially "live," Firefox 9 improves on Firefox 8 with a JavaScript engine that's up to 30 percent faster and, well, not a whole lot else. Mac OS X users will have a little more to gain, as Firefox 9 also includes two-finger gestures for backward and forward navigation on that platform.
Mozilla is planning to implement silent background updates in the upcoming version of Firefox 10, which could be very bad news on the security front, according to Philip Lieberman, CEO of Lieberman Software.
While many IT security systems will have to be reconfigured to allow background updates to Firefox – which is not a good thing in the first place – there is danger that hackers could subvert the update system to allow them backdoor access to the users’ computer.
Mozilla began an aggressive campaign earlier this year to trim Firefox’s memory footprint with a new initiative called MemShrink. The first fruits of that effort landed in Firefox 7, which was released in September. As a result, Firefox’s memory consumption is now between 20 to 50 percent lower. Building on that success, Mozilla is expanding the scope of its MemShrink initiative and looking to address memory consumption in additional areas.
As expected, the Mozilla Project has officially announced the release of version 8.0 of its open source Firefox web browser. Based on the Gecko 8 engine, Firefox 8 adds Twitter as a new default search option for select locales (more locales will be added in the future) and improves how add-ons are controlled.
Mozilla has published the first beta of version 8.0 of the open source Thunderbird news and email client. Compared to previous Thunderbird version updates, the development release offers very few changes, some of which focus on add-ons. According to the Releases wiki, it will arrive in a stable production-ready form on 8 November.
Firefox developers searching for a way to protect users against a new attack that decrypts sensitive web traffic are seriously considering an update that stops the open-source browser from working with Oracle's Java software framework.
Mozilla released Firefox 7 today, and the new version of makes web browsing faster than ever. The update is especially helpful for the hardcore web junkies among us who browse with scores of open tabs and browsing sessions that span multiple days.
Firefox 7 reduces memory usage by 20 to 50 percent, which translates to quicker response times and fewer crashes. These improvements constitute the first publicly available implementation of MemShrink, Mozilla’s project focusing on decreasing Firefox’s memory consumption to make browsing faster and more stable.
The secure webpage hosting addons for Mozilla Firefox was targeted in the same attack that minted a fraudulent authentication credential for Google websites, the maker of the open-source browser said.
A recent proposal to remove the version number from the Firefox Web browser's "About" dialog attracted a surprising amount of attention. As critics and supporters moved to take sides on the issue, it gradually devolved into a divisive controversy.
Mozilla has shipped a critical Firefox update to fix at least 10 security vulnerabilities, some serious enough to expose web surfers to drive-by download attacks.
According to an advisory from the open-source group, 8 of the 10 vulnerabilities are rated “critical,” meaning that they can be used to run attacker code and install software, requiring no user interaction beyond normal browsing.
