Mozilla

Mozilla has blocked all versions of Adobe Flash in its Firefox browser by default, following the discovery of numerous critical security flaws in the platform.

Mark Schmidt, head of Firefox Support, took to Twitter to announce the change.

The news comes just a day after Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos called for moves to force the extinction of Flash, as the plugin is reportedly being used to spread malware on users’ systems via security exploits.

Mozilla revealed big plans for Firefox earlier this month, including that it would be bringing the browser to new platforms like Windows 10. We didn’t focus much on that part of the news because it wasn’t much of a surprise: Firefox has supported every Microsoft desktop OS since the ancient Windows XP. As such, we didn’t expect it to look very different than the current release, and now we can say that’s true.

The first smart TVs powered by Firefox OS have gone on sale today in Europe. They will be available around the world "in the coming months." This isn't just some token gesture, either: Panasonic's top-of-the-line TV, a curved 65-inch 4K monster, is powered by Firefox OS.

Mozilla has had a change of heart regarding opportunistic encryption—for now. The company rolled out its open-source Firefox 37 Web browser on March 31, with one of the key new features being a capability known as opportunistic encryption. However, due to a security issue related to opportunistic encryption, Mozilla disabled the feature in the Firefox 37.0.1 update released April 3.

The security issue is located in Mozilla's HTTP Alternative Services (Alt-Svc) implementation, which is connected to the opportunistic encryption capability.

A total of 17 security holes have been addressed by Mozilla with the release of Firefox 36. The latest version of the Web browser also includes support for the HTTP/2 protocol.

While the number of fixed vulnerabilities is higher than usual, only four of the flaws have been rated critical.

Mozilla yesterday detailed plans to require Firefox add-ons to be digitally signed, a move meant to bear down on rogue and malicious extensions, and one that resembled Google's decision years ago to secure Chrome's add-on ecosystem.

Some Firefox users called out Mozilla for disregarding its own long-and-often-expressed ethos of the need for an open Internet.

If you want to find out more about the security of a connection to a particular website or a request that a site made while it was loading, then it is quite difficult to do so right now in most browsers.

While you can look up protocol information if https is used with a click on the lock icon in the browser address bar, and go from there to retrieve additional information, it is taking quite some time to do so.

Since 2004, Google has been paying Mozilla a ton of money each year—estimated at around $100 million—for the privilege of being the default search engine used in the Firefox browser. This contribution represented the lion's share of Mozilla's income, something in the ballpark of 85 percent.

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.