Mozilla postpones default blocking of third-party cookies in Firefox
Mozilla has postponed blocking third-party cookies by default in Firefox 22, "to collect and analyze data on the effect of blocking some third-party cookies."
The nonprofit organization is, however, not softening its stand on protecting privacy and putting users first, Brendan Eich, Mozilla's CTO and senior vice president of engineering, wrote in a blog post Thursday.
Mozilla has been testing a patch from Jonathan Mayer, a graduate student at Stanford University in computer science and law and online privacy activist, which like Apple's Safari browser allows cookies from websites already visited, but blocks cookies from sites not visited yet. Read more...
Opera sues designer for leaking trade secrets to Mozilla
Norwegian browser maker Opera Software has filed suit against Trond Werner Hansen, one of its former developers, alleging that Hansen took trade secrets with him when he went to work with Opera rival Mozilla.
As first reported by The Next Web, Hansen worked at Opera from 1999 through 2006. There he led design and UI development, first for the Windows version of the Opera browser, then for the cross-platform Desktop version. He later returned as an independent consultant from 2009 to 2010, at Opera's request.
Then in 2012, Hansen began to work with the Mozilla Foundation, makers of the open source Firefox browser – and that's when things got dicey. Read more...
Mozilla yanks Firefox 16 one day after release
Mozilla yesterday took the unusual step of yanking Firefox 16 from distribution just a day after its release.
The company said a critical vulnerability triggered the move.
The bug was apparently overlooked by Mozilla while it was developing Firefox 16, or introduced by the fixes baked into the upgrade that started reaching users early Tuesday.
"Mozilla is aware of a security vulnerability in the current release version of Firefox (version 16). Firefox version 15 is unaffected," said Michael Coates, Mozilla's director of security assurance, in a Wednesday post to the company's security blog.
On Tuesday, Mozilla rolled out Firefox 16, which featured patches for 24 vulnerabilities, 21 of which were judged "critical," the open-source developer's highest threat ranking. Read more...
Mozilla exits iOS as it retires Firefox Home
Two years after it managed to place a browser-related app on the iOS App Store, Mozilla last week announced it was retiring Firefox Home and yanked it from Apple's market.
The move was only the latest in a string of messages that the open-source company has sent over several years that it is not interested in developing a version of Firefox for the iPhone or iPad.
Firefox Home, which was approved by Apple on July 16, 2010, was not a full-fledged browser, but instead was a spin-off of the bookmark and tab synchronization technology Mozilla offered as an add-on, then later built into the desktop browser. The app gave users access to their browser bookmarks and history, to the open tabs from their most recent Firefox sessions, and to Firefox's "Awesome Bar" -- Mozilla's name for the address bar -- that let users search for previously-visited pages using keywords or characters in the URL or page title. Read more...
Chrome up, Chrome down in browser share battle
Google's Chrome browser lost usage share for the fifth time in the last seven months, while Mozilla's Firefox gained share for the second consecutive month, a Web measurement company said Wednesday.
Net Applications, which calculates browser usage by tracking unique visitors to approximately 40,000 Web sites, pegged Chrome's share for July at 18.9%, a two-tenths of a percentage point decline from June. Chrome has been in decline this year: Of the six months in which Chrome went into the red since Net Applications began tracking the browser, five were in 2012.
Firefox's share grew by one-tenth of a point to end the month at 20.2%, Net Applications declared. The open-source browser is up nearly half a point since its four-year low of 19.7% in May 2012.
But Net Applications' numbers were again disputed by rival StatCounter, which tallies browser share differently, counting page views, not unique visitors, for about 3 million websites. And unlike Net Applications, StatCounter does not weight the results by each country's pool of online users. Read more...
Silent update speeds Firefox 14 uptake
In the seven days since its debut, Firefox 14's share of all Mozilla browsers went from 3% on July 17 to 46% on July 23, according to usage data collected by Irish analytics company StatCounter.
At the end of their first week, version 12 accumulated a 30% share of all Firefox browsers and version 13 accounted for 31%. Read more...
Mozilla ships Firefox 14, patches 18 bugs, encrypts search
Just days after a former employee blasted Mozilla for its frequent updates, the company on Tuesday shipped Firefox 14, patching 18 vulnerabilities and adding automatic encryption of searches passed to Google's search engine.
The upgrade also lets users set an option that loads plug-ins -- such as Adobe's Flash Player or Oracle's Java -- only after approval, an additional security measure that may prevent stop some attacks.
Half of the 18 bugs quashed in Firefox 14 were rated "critical" by Mozilla, while four were labeled as "high" threats in the company's four-step scoring system. The remaining five were pegged as "moderate" vulnerabilities.
One of the more interesting vulnerabilities, uncovered by a Mozilla security researcher, involved the "javascript:" URL format, which could be exploited by attackers to escape from the JavaScript "sandbox," an anti-exploit technology designed to safely execute scripting code. Read more...
Mozilla shoots down Thunderbird, hatches new release model
Mozilla has announced a new plan for the ongoing development of its Thunderbird email client that it says will provide for a stable product and continued opportunity for innovation.
That's all well and good, but the contents of a leaked internal Mozilla memo suggest that the full picture may be less rosy than it seems.
The announcement, which was made in a blog post by Mozilla Foundation chair Mitchell Baker on Friday afternoon, suggests a major restructuring of the release and governance model of the Thunderbird project:
Once again we've been asking the question: is Thunderbird a likely source of innovation and of leadership in today's Internet life? Or is Thunderbird already pretty much what its users want and mostly needs some on-going maintenance? Read more...
Android Firefox: Screaming, awesome, you’ll go blind etc
Mozilla has galloped a new version of Firefox for Android out of the gates just ahead of the expected full launch of Chrome on mobes later this week.
The open-source firm has had a version of its popular browser on little green phones since 2010, but it hasn't lit many Google-mobe-lovers' fires so far.
Chrome has been available in beta since February, but only on Android mobes running Ice Cream Sandwich (version 4.0). Read more...
Adobe fixes Flash Player for Firefox to stop crashes
Adobe yesterday updated Flash Player to solve a weeks-long problem for users of Mozilla's Firefox browser.
The update, Flash Player 11.3.300.262, was released Thursday and applies only to Firefox on Windows.
Since Adobe shipped an update to Flash Player to 11.3 two weeks ago, users of Firefox, including older editions as well as the current Firefox 13, had reported crashes when trying to access Flash content.
Initial suspicions at Mozilla pointed to Flash Player 11.3's new sandboxed plug-in for Firefox, but yesterday Adobe claimed that there were "different causes" for the crashes, which seemed to be concentrated on Windows Vista and Windows 7 machines. Read more...
Mozilla teaches coding with new Thimble ‘Webmaker’
Mozilla has released a web page creation editing tool that steps novice users through HTML and CSS.
Dubbed “Thimble”, Mozilla bills the new tool a “webmaker”. While that term is cringeworthy, the two-paned web app is anything but. One pane offers raw HTML, with just a few basic tags. The other offers a WYSIWYG view of the HTML as you code.
Once authors deem a page complete, the service allows publication to a new Mozilla service, webmaker.org.
So far, so bland – aside from instructional floating information about each tag (at bottom left in the image below) there's not a colossal difference between Thimble and myriad HTML editors from the mid-90s. Read more...
Crazy Geckos: Nitot on Mozilla’s post-Firefox mobile crusade
First came the BlackBerry, bringing the smartphones for suits perfected by RIM to consumers. Next came the iPhone, which quickly hoovered up 23 per cent of the market. But the iPhone came at a price: the freedom of users and coders. It is tightly controlled by Apple, as Adobe quickly found to its cost with Flash.
Next up was Android. In just four years, Android exploited consumers' desire to poke and stroke their phones to become the world's most popular smartphone OS – burying the iPhone – with 59 per cent of the market.
Android had a plus: freedom of choice for both coder and consumer thanks to an open-source code base.
Honeycomb changed things: the Android code was yanked back inside the Googleplex as Mountain View asserted control over builds and contributions. Read more...
Mozilla product director says Firefox on Window RT ‘probably not worth it’
A Mozilla product director yesterday said that unless Microsoft allows other browser makers to call important APIs in Windows RT, it is "probably not worth it to even bother" building a version of Firefox for the new operating system.
In a Wednesday post to his personal blog, Asa Dotzler, product director of Firefox, again slammed Microsoft for not allowing third-party browsers access to Win32 APIs, or application programming interfaces, in the upcoming Windows RT.
Windows RT, once called Windows on ARM, or WOA, is the operating system Microsoft is developing for devices -- tablets primarily, but also lightweight laptops -- that rely on processors designed for the ARM architecture. Read more...
Senate to look at Mozilla’s browser competition allegations
The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee will look into accusations by Mozilla that Microsoft is restricting access to important programming tools for browsers that will run in Windows RT, a political blog reported Friday.
The Hill cited unnamed aides to Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, as the source for its report.
Last week, Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, said Microsoft was withholding access to APIs -- application programming interfaces -- that Mozilla considers crucial for building a browser that can compete with Microsoft's own Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) on ARM devices. Read more...
Mozilla and Google blast IE-only Windows on ARM
Mozilla and Google are crying foul over Microsoft restrictions blocking rivals from Windows 8 on ARM, due later this year.
Firefox-shop Mozilla has branded Microsoft's restrictions a return to the digital dark ages "where users and developers didn't have browser choices".
Harvey Anderson, Mozilla general counsel, accused Microsoft of restricting user choice, reducing competition and chilling innovation by only allowing Internet Explorer to run on Windows RT – unveiled last month by Microsoft as the new name for Windows on ARM (WOA). He said:
Only Internet Explorer will be able to perform many of the advanced computing functions vital to modern browsers in terms of speed, stability, and security to which users have grown accustomed. Given that IE can run in Windows on ARM, there is no technical reason to conclude other browsers can't do the same. Read more...