Firefox

 Mozilla has begun building a new technology called IonMonkey into Firefox to improve its JavaScript performance.

High JavaScript performance is essential in today's hotly competitive browser market, because JavaScript is the language behind complicated Web sites and Web apps such as Google Docs and Facebook. IonMonkey has now been packaged into the "nightly" version of Firefox 18 for hardcore developers; that version is scheduled to become the mainstream version of the browser early in 2013.

Mozilla released Firefox 15.0.1 last week in order to fix a bug that potentially exposed the websites visited by users while in "Private Browsing" mode.

The goal of the "Private Browsing" mode is to enable Firefox users to surf the web without leaving any traces of the visited websites behind.

Following the release of version 15 of Firefox and Thunderbird, Mozilla has detailed the security vulnerabilities that have been fixed in both products. The fixes include seven critical vulnerabilities in Firefox, five of which are also present in Thunderbird. All in all, the new version of Firefox addresses 16 vulnerabilities while the new Thunderbird version closes 12 holes.

As suggested by some of its developers back in 2010, the Firefox browser will introduce enhanced separation between add-ons and the rest of the browser. With the change, which is planned to take effect with the release of Firefox 17, scripts on web pages will only be able to access the data belonging to add-ons if they are included in a whitelist.

Mozilla has implemented changes to Firefox 14 that address concerns raised by privacy-conscious users over the "new tab" feature in Firefox 13. The Firefox developers have changed the browser's behaviour so that sensitive information should no longer leak via screenshots of web sites.

When opening a new tab, Firefox 13 shows users a grid of screenshots of their most visited pages. After this feature was introduced, several users complained to Mozilla and pointed out that the feature also takes screenshots of sensitive web sites such as login pages for online banking sites.

Mozilla has announced the release of Firefox 14.0.1, the latest major stable release of the popular open source web browser. This update now uses secured search via Google's HTTPS interface by default, providing users with more security and privacy when searching the web. The browser's "Awesome Bar" has been fitted with an auto completion mechanism for URLs which tries to guess what site a user is trying to navigate to based on their browsing history.

Among the enhancements queued up by Mozilla in the next weeks for the new Firefox beta will be a new debugger for web applications. Firefox's JavaScript engine has been providing debugger support to extensions, most notably Firebug, for some years, but with Firefox 15, the entire debugging interface of Spidermonkey, the JavaScript engine, has been redesigned. This has eliminated much of the performance penalty that comes with running JavaScript code with a live debugger and it allows the debugger to be run remotely.

At the end of last May, Mozilla sponsored the HackWEEKDAY contest at the third annual Hack In the Box conference in the Netherlands. The contest ran alongside the rest of the HITB conference which featured presentations on security topics including new iPhone jailbreaks and a second day key note from Bruce Schneier.

Several new device manufacturers and mobile carriers have lined up to support Mozilla’s mobile operating system. The software platform, which is based on Mozilla’s Boot2Gecko (B2G) project, will be called Firefox OS when it launches on handsets later this year.

Mozilla began working on the B2G project last year, aiming to offer a truly open alternative to existing mobile operating systems. The B2G application stack and runtime environment are built around standards-based Web technologies instead of platform-specific development tools and frameworks.

After teasing "Something BIG" late last week, Mozilla has now launched version 14.0 of Firefox for Android, a major update to the open source mobile web browser. Described as "a snappy and dynamic upgrade" by its developers, the new release improves the browser's overall performance while also updating its user interface (UI) and adding features.