firefox

Signature of the times

How long does it take you to type, "Now Playing"? And how can FoxyTunes, the popular browser extension, help?

Switching windows to your desktop's MP3 player takes up precious nanoseconds, too. Even worse, you might have to physically move and actually get up and look at your stereo. In the average e-mailer's day, that could add up to hundreds of thousands or even millions of seconds.

… Read more

Firefox version 2.0.0.6 patches two vulnerabilities

Mozilla released on Tuesday an update to Firefox 2 that patches the Mozilla side of a flaw shared with Microsoft Internet Explorer.

The update, Firefox 2.0.0.6, also patches a privilege escalation vulnerability.

Current users of Firefox 2 will receive an update notice. Others can download it from the Mozilla site.

Researcher Jesper Johansson noted that Firefox did not percent-encode spaces and double-quotes in URIs (uniform resource identifiers) handed off to external programs. That means the receiving program could interpret a single URI as multiple arguments. For example, when running Firefox on Windows XP with IE7 installed, URIs … Read more

MXPlay mashes up with Firefox

Today, MXPlay--the digital-music player that focuses on customizing and enhancing your playback sound, while also letting you mash up streaming audio with Web videos (covered previously)--launched a Windows-only add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser. Called MXPlay Web, the Firefox add-on part is a simple orange MXPlay button that sits in your toolbar. Whenever you navigate to a Web page that includes MP3 files, the button transforms into a musical note. Click that note, and you can "play" that Web page in a pop-up music player.

After you select "Play this page," MXPlay Web will list all of the available MP3 songs on that Web page. You can then mark any of your favorites and save them to a personal playlist. Unfortunately, once you create that playlist, MXPlay Web somewhat randomly puts them into an order that you cannot change manually.

Just like the full app, MXPlay Web lets you customize the sound of the music using the same unique graphic interface. Drag and drop the head icon (the listener) and each of your available speakers to a specific location on the screen, which affects sound levels and direction. A blue circle in the upper left lets you control the size of your virtual room, and the bars in the upper right offer three levels of reverb.… Read more

Yahoo: 13 rules for making your web pages faster

Yahoo's Exceptional Performance team has put together a list of "13 rules for making web pages fast" and posted it on Yahoo's developer network. The list, which includes "Make fewer HTTP requests," "Use a content delivery network," and "Avoid redirects," should really help webmasters figure out what is slowing their site down.

As if that wasn't enough, the team just released a Firefox add-on which integrates on top of Firebug, a web development tool. This add-on will analyze any web page to check for how they comply with the … Read more

Firefox magic: Kill your Search box

I know that 90 percent of Mozilla Firefox (download it for Windows or Mac) users who read this post will think I'm nuts. I can hear you now: "I love my Firefox search engines! How will I search Amazon?!"

Well, I love my search engines, too, but that silly Search box in the Firefox toolbar simply takes up too much room for my liking, especially because you can use all of the functionality of your favorite search engines directly from the Firefox location bar (also called the "address bar" by people like me). I'll show you how.… Read more

Latest Firefox 2.0.0.5 update fixes nine flaws

Today, Mozilla patched nine vulnerabilities including the Firefox portion of the Internet Explorer-Firefox flaw identified last week. That flaw occurs when IE passes malformed URLs from IE to another application such as another browser. Mozilla wrote, "this fix only prevents Firefox and Thunderbird from accepting bad data." And it stated in boldface, "this patch does not fix the vulnerability in Internet Explorer."

This security update also addresses known issues involving browser crashes, privilege escalation, and cross-site scripting vulnerability. Current users of Firefox 2.0.0.4 or earlier will be automatically prompted to install the new … Read more

Haute Secure pledges safe-surfing toolbar for IE

A new security company, Haute Secure, is offering a free beta version of its safe surfing toolbar for Internet Explorer that blocks malware from downloading onto your desktop. Firefox support is expected soon. Entering an already crowded field, the Haute Secure toolbar hopes to distinguish itself by taking the best of Exploit Prevention Labs Linkscanner Pro and McAfee SiteAdvisor, and then adds additional layers of protection. If they can pull it off with the final release, Haute Secure could be a must-have add-on for both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The Haute Secure toolbar hooks into 70 processes running on your … Read more

Firefox and IE together brew up security trouble

UPDATE: Blame them both.

That's the latest update from security researchers who initially laid the blame on Microsoft's Internet Explorer for the latest zero-day exploit that also can afflict those using the Firefox Web browser.

Users could face a "highly critical" risk if they have both IE and Firefox version 2.0, or later, loaded on their computer. The trouble begins when browsing a malicious site while using IE and it registers a "firefoxurl://" URI (uniform resource identifier) handler, which allows the browser to interact with specific resources on the Web. As a result, … Read more

Mozilla releases Firefox 3 Alpha 6

On Tuesday, without fanfare, Mozilla quietly released the final alpha for its new Firefox 3, codenamed Gran Paradiso. Alpha 6 doesn't add much to Firefox in terms of new features; we expect that to happen with the first betas. As with previous Alphas, most of the tweaks are internal. See our slide show of Alpha 5 to see what changes are currently visible within Firefox 3.

According to the Alpha 6 release notes this version includes: Updated SQLite engine to version 3.3.17; support for site-specific preferences--text size; a new Quit dialog box that resolves termination errors; added … Read more