firefox

40 Articles

Mozilla’s First Public Release

June 17, 2008 by 1 Comment

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZTJbsUcdeU&hl=en&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]
In honor of Firefox 3.0 download day, Waxy.org has posted the full Code Rush documentary. It spans March ’98 to April ’99, as the Mozilla team publishes the first source code and then the eventual AOL acquisition of Netscape. Embedded above is a short clip of [Jamie Zawinski] pushing the code live at 10AM on March 31, 1998. The hour documentary is well worth watching.

If you’re unsure about moving from FF2 to 3, MultiFireFox still works perfectly fine with the new release.

Get Firefox 3 Early

June 17, 2008 by 14 Comments


It’s five hours till the official release of Firefox 3. We know your hands are sweating in anticipation, waiting to click that download link and contribute to the greatest World Record known to man… What? You don’t want your browser to have all the notoriety afforded to fat twins? Well then, let’s just go grab the file now since they’re already on the mirrors.

First, pick out a mirror from the official list. Navigate to the the directory of the Firefox 3.0 release: /pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0/ You’ll be greeted by a message that says, “We’re not quite ready yet!” and that “Downloading them directly can harm our ability to distribute Firefox efficiently.” Also, you won’t be in the world record count. Think about that, jerk. All releases are named using a consistent pattern. Looking at an earlier release you can determine that the Mac version of 3.0 will be named: Firefox 3.0.dmg Add on the OS and language directories and it will look like this: /pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0/mac/en-US/Firefox%203.0.dmg

You can find out more about the new release by reading Dria’s Field Guide to Firefox 3.

Exploit-Me Firefox XSS And SQL Scanning Addon

June 14, 2008 by 7 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbL2ptbjoSA&hl=en&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]
One of the best tools we saw at LayerOne was the Exploit-Me series presented by [Dan Sinclair]. Security Compass created these tools to help developers easily identify cross site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection vulnerabilities.

Continue reading “Exploit-Me Firefox XSS And SQL Scanning Addon” →

Speed Testing The Latest Web Browsers

June 13, 2008 by 10 Comments


With the imminent release of Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5 being finalized this week, Lifehacker decided it was a good time to run the browsers head to head to see which was the fastest and least resource intensive. The testing system was a 2GHz 2GB Vista machine. The timing system used wasn’t directly hooked to the browser, so tests were repeated multiple times to improve accuracy. The cold start winner was Opera, but most browsers opened in about a second if they had been run recently. Safari did well loading content in multiple tabs at the same time, probably due to its short render times for JavaScript and CSS. The final test was memory usage; we’re sure many people will be happy to know that Firefox 3 RC3 only used 66% of the RAM required by the other three browsers.

Using Multiple Browsers For Security

June 3, 2008 by 16 Comments


[Rich] over at Securosis takes us through some of his browser paranoia exercises. He uses different browser profiles for different types of web activities. Based on potential risk, various tasks are separated to protect from CSRF attacks and more. Everyday browsing with low risk passwords is done in one. RSS reading with no passwords is done in another. He runs his personal blog in a browser dedicated just to that.

For high risk research, he uses virtual machines to further minimize any potential nasty code getting through. Very high risk sites are browsed through a non-persistent read-only Linux virtual machine. While these techniques can be less effective if the entire OS is comprised, they can still provide a few layers of additional security.

Fellow browser paranoia sufferers may want to consider Firefox plug-ins like NoScript and memory protection from Diehard.