Firefox

A security testing firm today said a recent report that named Google's Chrome as the most secured browser was flawed -- and part of a campaign by Google to undermine Mozilla's Firefox. Google denied the charges.

The work done by Denver-based security consultancy Accuvant, which released a report last week naming Chrome as more secured than either Firefox or Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE), was paid for by Google. That raised the hackles of NSS Labs, a California company that tests browser security and antivirus software.

A Google researcher has resurrected an attack that allows website operators to steal the browsing history of visitors almost a year after all major browser makers introduced changes to close the gaping privacy hole.

If 1 in 50 people on the Web move from Firefox to Chrome, Google's browser will unseat Mozilla's for the No. 2 spot in worldwide usage. That's because, according to Net Applications' November browser usage measurements, Chrome is now within 4 percentage points of Firefox. With a 2 percentage-point increase in one and a 2-percentage decrease in the other, Google comes out on top.

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.