Displaying items by tag: Firefox

Although Firefox already supports the "do not track" option for cookies, which informs some advertisers to stop tracking your activities on the web, for version 22 they are preparing options that go a step further. It seems that the popular browser will refuse cookies from third parties by default, typically these cookies are from various advertising networks.

Mozilla has announced that the initial default values on their browser will force Internet users to manually enable plug-ins on every page that uses them. Firefox will therefore block attachments like Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe's Reader, Apple QuickTime, and Oracle Java. As a reason for this decision in Mozilla said they are doing this for improvements of security, stability and performance of the browser.

Last month Mozilla announced that they will cease the development of 64-bit Firefox for Windows (but not for Linux and Mac OS X). This move was, rightly, met with the disapproval of many users. However Mozilla refused to change their mind until now.

Mozilla has allowed developers and other interested users to start test the upcoming Firefox OS. Firefox OS simulator r2d2b2g has been released, which is a prototype Firefox plugin that allows easy installation and testing of the new OS on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

Firefox has caught up with Google’s Chrome browser when it comes to insecurity. After forcing updates on unsuspecting users (we turn on the computer the other day to be told it was already updated) the newest version of Firefox apparently takes screen shots of your pages to put them into their Tab-Thumbnail view including sites that might be encrypted or secure connections (like your banking information). This is a pretty big privacy issue and one that has quite a few people upset.

After reporting on the potential for Congressional involvement in the “issue” over Windows RT we are hearing that Mozilla is trying to drag this into a new area simply because the new software will have the name “Windows” in it. You see Mozilla’s argument revolves around Microsoft’s promises to make “Windows” more open to other developers. When asked how Microsoft’s new way of handling Windows RT differs from what both Google and Apple are doing they claimed that by not allowing access to certain Win32 APIs that Microsoft has ported to WindowsRT (the actually only exist in the desktop mode) they are locking out competition.

So Mozilla complains about Microsoft and suddenly Congress wants to take a look at Microsoft’s plans for Windows on ARM. Now we are not really surprised that Mozilla is complaining (after all that is what they do), but we are shocked that they are not complaining about Google and Apple at the same time.While we are not all that happy with the direction that Microsoft is going with Windows 8 and Windows RT they are not doing anything that has not been done by both Apple and Google on the same platform; the tablet.

When Microsoft first announced that only Microsoft based products would have access to the “desktop” mode in Windows on ARM (Windows RT) we began to wonder just how long it would take for Mozilla, Google, Opera and others to chime in about how wrong this is. We now have heard from Mozilla who seems to feel that this lock out from the desktop is nothing more than Microsoft being unfair to the competition and, according to Mozilla, is in violate of the promises Microsoft made to both the EU and the US DoJ.

Apparently it has been something of a tradition for the Internet Explorer Team over at Microsoft to send a congratulatory pastry to FireFox with each new version they ship. However, now that Mozilla is pushing out a “new” release every six weeks the IE gang has shortened up on the size of the pastry. For their latest release MS sent over a small Cup Cake only. The running joke is that because of the smaller update the congratulatory gift is also smaller.

Mozilla’s new rapid release program is supposed to allow patches and fixes to get to market quicker without the normal delay of a major feature update. This decision by Mozilla has cause mixed feelings in the IT community and also the consumer market. Many feel that the short span is annoying and can be inconvenient. IE on the other hand is sticking with the larger full featured releases which, while some times better developed can also throw wrenches into web page performance and compatibility.

Honestly there really is no better way to do this, but I do wish that both companies would address some of the security and performance issues that are plaguing both browsers. FireFox needs to fix the Flash bug that it has while MS really needs to work on securing the way that Plug-in interact with it (especially allowing elevated privileges).

Still it is sort of funny to find out that the IE team sends over a (cup)cake every time a new version of FireFox ships.

Source CNET

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