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Mozilla Firefox 3.0 Vulnerability Found

Raj — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:58:31 +0000

Less than a day after the Firefox 3 has been launched, a zero day vulnerability has been found that not only affects Firefox 3.0 but also earlier versions such as Firefox 2.0.x. The vulnerability was verified at TippingPoint labs and then it was reported to the Mozilla security team.

The exact details of the vulnerability are not known yet but we only know that the vulnerability could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the exploited computer.

Mozilla is still working on patching up the vulnerability and a patch is expected soon.

[source]

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Firefox 3 releases on June 17th

Raj — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 01:52:52 +0000

The much awaited release of the next version of Firefox browser has been announced – June 17th. Firefox 3 will be officially released on June 17th and an attempt will be made, on the same day, to set a Guinness world record for software downloads. Currently Firefox 3.0 RC3 is available for download and Mozilla is most likely going to make RC3 available on the download day.

If you are a Firefox fan who would like to help them set a world record, please do your bit and click on the image below. You will then land on a page where you can pledge to help Firefox set a Guinness World Record. All you have to do is download Firefox 3.0 on the download day.

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Blocking Ads: The dark side of ad blocking and its consequences

Raj — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 15:00:35 +0000

As Internet continues to evolve from just a concept more than a decade ago to it being called a network of networks, it has come a long way. Many years ago, companies used to be confined to a small geographical area for selling their products and when Internet came into picture, companies found that just by having a website, they could start selling their products on a global basis, but that’s a different story.

As of today there are over a 60 million (or many more) domains registered on Internet that are involved with plenty and variety of things. Some sell software, some offer services. Then there are those who offer free software and services, and are quite popular because of what they offer. But everything can not be free on Internet and that’s where advertisement comes into picture. Many companies want to reach audience from around the world and for them advertisement on Internet is the cheapest, fastest and the best way to accomplish this.

But what if you start blocking all the ads from showing up by using either some sort of ad blocking software or by other means? This will disturb the way Internet works today. Example – If Google offers you free search service, that’s because there are hundreds of companies using their AdWords program, spending enormous amount of money towards advertisement. Google indirectly makes money from various other services they offer and that powers the infrastructure and man power to keep their search engine running. Would you otherwise like to pay $1 or $0.1 for every search query? I don’t think so! I myself search ~300 to 1000 times a month on Google and if I were to pay for every time I search, I won’t even think about it. Would you?

Let me now draw you attention to the real problem which is the main objective of writing this post. The Adblocking plugins that many of us have been using in our browsers to block advertisement from showing up while we browse web sites, is directly contributing towards negatively impacting the advertisement model on the Internet.

If you are a publisher who’ll not like it if people block all the ads on your site when they visit it, you must also not block ads when you visit their websites.

There are some websites that have started to block Firefox browser because of the Adblock Plus plugin it supports. Last, read this anti-firefox post from John Andrew’s blog.

Would you still consider blocking ads in your browser or continue blocking them? Please share your thoughts by post them in the comments section below.

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Customize the look and feel of your GMail with this Firefox extension

Raj — Wed, 30 May 2007 19:17:05 +0000

Who doesn’t want to make her/his GMail interface look pretty and better? I know, most of us do! Gmailskins is an excellent extension for Firefox browser that will let you change the look and feel of your GMail interface by completely integrating with your GMail account and also make it look much better than how it is now. A simple installation of the add-on will do lot of things for you and it’s very easy. Here is a quick run down of its feature, just in case you are interested in this add-on.

Colors – Change the colors of the elements in your inbox. You choose whatever colors you like and leave the rest to Gmailskins extension.

Add Modules – Add any GMail module to your inbox and see your calendar items, pictures from your Picasa album, news headlines, play games. You can possibly add any module, that you can add to your iGoogle (formerly Google personalized home page), to your GMail using this extension.
Insert HTML – If you could not do it before, you can now! Insert images, tables and other HTML elements when you compose your emails. Have you been waiting for a way to add your HTML signature to outgoing emails in GMail? Well, it’s now here and you can do it without much efforts. Isn’t that nice?
Hide Elements – This extension will also give you the power of customization to hide unwanted areas of your GMail account such as page footer, the invitation panel etc. Everyone may not be looking forward to it but some may find it highly useful.

Carry your settings – You will love this!! Once installed and customized, your setting are stored right within your GMail account using a special label. That means that you can carry your settings from one computer to another. You will no longer be required to change your settings on every computer that you use. Isn’t that really useful?

» [Download GMailskins Extension]

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Are Firefox Addons and Plugins Safe to Use?

Raj — Tue, 15 May 2007 15:30:50 +0000

Are you a fan of Firefox and other Mozilla products and enjoying every bit of what they offer? This will be an interesting question for you – Would you know if the add-ons or the plugins that you use for Firefox and other Mozilla products are safe to use?

What is that’s not so safe about them, you might ask. Here is a quick run down of some points worth considering that will tell you why those plugins and add-ons may not be safe to use.

The addons and plugins for many Mozilla products are not certified by Mozilla.
There is no central authority at Mozilla to scan through the plugins to check if the plugins and addons collect information from your system and pass it onto remote servers.
Plugins may not be malicious in nature but poorly coded plugins may indirectly create a security hole that can be exploited to steal information from your browser and computer.

What can you do to safeguard your information?

There are no definitive ways of doing it. You will have to use the plugins and add-ons at your own risk. Having said that, you may want to download plugins and addons from Mozilla’s Add-ons website and also search Google for any known security issues with the plugin before you choose to install them. You may also want to use anti-spyware and other such softwares to alert you when any malicious activity takes place in your computer. This will not help entirely but only mitigate the risk to certain extent and you will still be using the plugins at your own risk till someone actually detects any security issues with the plugins that you use today.

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Secure Your Firefox Browser with Firekeeper Intrusion Detection System

Raj — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:00:38 +0000

Firekeeper is an IDS, Intrusion Detection System, for Firefox browser that can detect, warn and block the websites that are malicious in nature. Firekeeper has the ability to scan the incoming traffic, including HTTPS, and analyze URL, body and response headers to cancel further processing of suspicious looking websites.

Firekeeper uses rules that are similar to Snort to identify the malicious websites and attack attempts. The pattern matching algorithm is very fast as it’s taken directly from Snort. It also has the ability to use any number of files with rules and can automatically load files from remote systems too. Once an attack attempt is detected, it provides you with an interactive alert such that you can choose a response to detected attack attempt.

» Download Firekeeper | Visit Firekeeper’s homepage

Note: After installing visit a page with some tests, Firekeeper should display an alert for every link on that page.

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linkify: A Great Bookmarklet Tool for Blogging

Raj — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 23:14:48 +0000

If you are a blogger who does lot of linking to other blogs and websites, linkify, by Laurence, is a must to have tool for you to ease the task of creating links in your posts.

After you add linkify to your browser, all you have to do is highlight the text in the textarea that you want to create a link for and click on linkify in your browser. It will then pop-up a small window (see the snapshot below) with the search results based on what you had highlighted. Then click on create link against the most relevant search result and the highlighted text will be instantly turned into a hyperlink with that URL.

The tool is based on Google AJAX Search API and can create links for the text in the multi-line textarea, and as of now works in Firefox only.

All the links in this post were created using linkify and it was very much an easy task to create those links. I wish this was a built-in feature of WordPress.

I highly recommend that you give it a try and I am also sure that you will love linkify.

Source: [Matt Cutts Blog]

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Run Your Browsers and Programs in a Virtual and Isolated Environment with Sandboxie

Raj — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 23:29:08 +0000

What are we talking about here? Well, as we all know that running a browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox could open your system to various Spywares, Adwares and Trojans and since options are limited on your Windows system, there is perhaps only one way of protecting yourself and it’s by installing Anti Spyware, Anti-Virus and some other softwares. It’s just not browsers which could download unwanted things to your systems but also some applications that connects to Internet for various reasons. So what do you do?

Sandboxie is a free program that could solve all these problems. Before we get to understand how Sandboxie works, look at the pictures below:

Before using Sandboxie on your system

After installing Sandboxie on your system

Yes, you guessed it correct. It’s that Sandboxie transient storage area that makes all the difference. Now imagine you running an application that requires some data for it to run. Sandboxie will read that data from the hard disk and make it available to the application. The application will then perform its tasks and when it’s required to write that data back to hard disk, Sandboxie transient storage will intercept and write that in the sanboxie storage area instead of writing it to the hard disk.

The flow of information is always in one way with Sandboxie. It reads from your hard disk and writes it in transient storage but never writes back anything to the hard disk. If you happen to install some toolbar in your browser and want to make that change permanent, you will have to do it outside Sandboxie since it will not write that data to hard disk and also registry changes will never make it to the registry on your hard drive. The major advantage of Sandboxie is that you can dump a sandbox and create a new one if you wish to and it will discard all the data it had written in transient storage of sandbox you discard.

Applications of Sandboxie

Sandboxie will best serve the following, in our opinion:

Home PCs used by people with basic computer skills.
Internet Cafes where information does not needs to be stored.
Public Internet spots.
Situations when you don’t want to leave any trace of your browsing history.
And many more…

Why don’t you download Sandboxie and give it a try?

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How to Create a Personalised Menu for Your Firefox?

Raj — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 22:57:19 +0000

Tired of looking at same menu for very long? Try the [Personal Menu], a free Firefox Add-on that will let you hide existing menus in the Firefox tool bar and design your own menus with few settings to work with. There is a history and a bookmark button.

However, the tool bar items that you hide might still appear upon a restart of Firefox but that requires a change of setting to change the delay before hiding and you should be all set with it.

If some of the menu items are not replaced to their original location after you hide the menu, just take a back up of ‘menuedit.rdf’ in your profile’s folder and then delete it.

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Easy Web Development with Firebug Add-on for Firefox

Raj — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 22:01:17 +0000

If you haven’t come across Firebug yet, you are missing a lot of good things that Firefox can do for you.

Firebug is an amazing Firefox add-on that lets you edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. The entire add-on is under 300k in size and offers the following features.

One key stroke to open the interface.
Global enable and disable options for websites.
Option for blacklist and white listing websites.
Inspect and edit HTML code.
Visualize CSS metrics when your CSS code doesn’t work as expected.
Monitor page load time for individual pages and including external scripts.
DOM explorer is built in.
Powerful Javascript logging console.

What are you waiting for? Get [Firebug] now!

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How To: Deploy Firefox throughout your Organization

Raj — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 05:05:20 +0000

Before you proceed any further with mass deployment of Firefox in your organization or entire network, conduct a survey to determine the websites used by your employees to do their job. Then, test those websites in Firefox and ensure that they work [in most cases they will]. You are now ready to deploy Firefox throughout your network.

We will cover two topics in this post.

We will learn about a way to deploy Firefox on all the computers in your organization.
We will then learn to control various settings of Firefox like we do for Internet Explorer, such as proxy settings, enabling and disabling certain options etc.

Mass Deployment

For installing Firefox throughout the network, you will need MSI installer version of Firefox. You can grab your copy of MSI installer of latest version of Firefox from frontmotion. The MSI installer is Active Directory deployable, upgradeable and contains official binaries. The package can detect and upgrade already installed Non-MSI versions as well and is packaged along with Macromedia Flash Player plugin.

Active Directory deployment is fairly simple task, just follow the steps mentioned on [http://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox/].

For IT Administrators who want to build their custom MSI Installer package, the site has a ‘Firefox Packaging Service‘ that will let you build a custom installer. Select the language, version and up to ten extensions and download a custom Firefox version. What more? You can distribute your custom installer to your friends and customers with your own or favorite extensions along with it.

Controlling settings within Firefox for the Enterprise

Certain companies do not want users to select custom proxies or change the settings in the browsers on their desktops. A tool called [FirefoxADM] will allow centrally managed locked and/or default settings in Firefox via Group Policy and Administrative Templates in Active Directory.

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How To: Change the look of Google’s Homepage

Raj — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 05:53:58 +0000

I am very much bored of looking at the same homepage of Google for so many years now. It’s time for a change.

After making some changes in my browser, my new Google home looks like:

And the search results page looks like:

How did I do it? It’s simple with the Stylish plugin for Firefox. Let’s see how to do it yourself:

At first, [download] the Stylish plugin for Firefox and install it. Then [download] the CSS file for Google web search from Valacar’s website.

Now in Firefox, click on Tools->Add-ons and select Stylish. Then click on Options and click on Write button [down below on left hand side]. Then write a description [something like "my google web search"] and in the big box below that, paste the content of the CSS file you had downloaded earlier.

Save the changes and close the windows. Now, open the URL [www.google.com] and that’s it. You are now looking at styled Google home page. Write your own CSS for any website and let the Stylish plugin do the magic for you.

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Adobe Flash Player Source Code Open to Firefox

Raj — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 02:57:48 +0000

Are you looking for latest version of Flash Player for your browser? It’s available on [Adobe's web site].

It’s official now! Mozilla foundation will have access to the source code of the Flash Player. This will enable developers at Mozilla Foundation to come up with better handling model for Web 2.0 based applications in Firefox.

How will Flash source help Firefox?

Developers at Mozilla will incorporate ActionScript Virtual Machine from Flash source into their Firefox browser. ActionScript is believed to be faster and efficient than the JScript currently used. This is a part of the open source project called Tamarin which is aimed towards providing a faster, rich and unified scripting engine to web developers.

What is ActionScript

ActionScript is based on ECMAScript, an international standardized programming language for scripting. The current version of ActionScript 3.0 is well suited for developing rich Internet applications, capable of handling large datasets, object-oriented, reusable code makes a win-win situation for both Adobe and Mozilla Foundation.

In coming months, we can expect to see Firefox advancing by several steps and take an edge over all other browsers with ActionScript integration. Adobe, however, also wants Microsoft to incorporate the ActionScript into Internet Explorer but no official communication is released yet from Microsoft.

Found @ iTWire [via] Google News

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My Favorite and Top Firefox Add-Ons!

Raj — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 23:34:08 +0000

Here is a list of my favorite Firefox add-ons that I use very often and just can’t imagine doing so many things on Internet that I do everyday without their assistance.

AD-Blocker

Adblock Plus – Very helpful to prevent most of the annoying ads from loading up in the browser. Backed up by an automatically updated Filter list of Ads, am sure you will find it useful. I strongly recommend this to people with very slow Internet connections (are there any?)
Get it @ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1865/

Bookmarks

del.icio.us Bookmarks – Use this extension to automatically add bookmarks to your del.icio.us page. (For those who don’t know about del.icio.us) it is an online bookmarking website, to which you can post your bookmarks from your browsers also and can be viewed from any other system. Example is my del.icio.us page.
Get it @ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3615/

Internet & Web Development

[Firebug] – Firebug is an amazing Firefox add-on that lets you edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript – live in any web page. The entire add-on is under 300k in size.

Web Developer – One of my personal favorites, I use it to look at the structure of any given website in the browser. It is capable of outlining block level elements such as DIV. You will no longer need to copy the source and paste in HTML editor to understand the anatomy of a website.
Get it @ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/60/

FireFTP – FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox. Though you may not find it as easy to use as a commercial FTP client, I still recommend it if you are looking for a free alternative.
Get it @ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/684/

IE Tab – Another great extension that lets you change the rendering engine for any given URL and instead of using the native Firefox rendering engine, it will use IE to open the page in a tab inside Firefox. Great help for developers who wants to see how their pages show in both the browsers. You can keep switching between rendering engines as and when you like.
Get it @ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1419/

Gmail Space allows you to use your Gmail Space for storing your files, just like an online drive.

Performance

Fasterfox - Fasterfox allows you to tweak many network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections, pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay. All this helps in faster browsing.
Get it @ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1269/

Downloads

DownThemAll! – It’s a download manager for Firefox browser. It features an advanced accelerator that increases speed up to 400% and it allows you to pause and resume downloads at any time!
Get it @ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/201/

Download Statusbar is a browser extension that allows you to keep track of ongoing and completed downloads in a hide-away status bar.

VideoDownloader adds a small icon on the status bar at the bottom of your firefox window, and a toolbar button. It will let you download the video you are watching. Many popular sites such as Google video, Youtube, metacafe and many other supported.

FlashGot will let you download one link, selected links or all the links of a page, using the external download managers.

PDF Download will let you decide if a PDF file should be opened in a browser window or downloaded as an external file to open with PDF reader.

I will keep this list updated as and when I discover more and useful Firefox extensions.

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IE 7 or Firefox 2 ?

Raj — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 22:23:34 +0000

I am sure, you must be aware about the latest releases of both the browsers by now. Here is my take on both the browsers…

I use both IE and Firefox for surfing. Using IE is a mandate (kind of) in the office as every intranet site is designed and tested with IE in mind. There is no room for Firefox in the company yet and I don’t imagine it making a place on my company systems any sooner. For the sake of my interest, I still have Firefox installed on my laptop and use it for surfing Internet websites at least. Yes, two browsers on my system, one for Internet and another for intranet.

I noticed the following immediately after updating Firefox browser to 2.0:

» The look and feel was almost same as was in the older version but was a little better to look at.

» Every tab has a close button on its top right. This causes some accidental closure when I click left ‘n’ right to navigate and click the close button instead clicking the tab area. I don’t complain though.

» Somehow I end up believing that Firefox 2.0 is much more stable than the earlier releases of Firefox and this is because it hasn’t crashed even once since I installed it on the day it was released. I also see that the memory usage is not high (in task manager) when compared to earlier versions. [Updated 13th Nov'06] The Firefox crashed while I was filling up a form on a website and upon restarting, it came up with restore sessions option and it opened all those websites in tabs which I was browsing before it crashed. Earlier I had told that Firefox was not consuming much memory, but it’s not the case. On opening 3-4 tabs, the usage goes as high as 90Megs. The Internet Explorer 7 on the other hand stays under 60Megs even after opening 5-6 tabs. Also, IE opens much faster than Firefox.

» While filling a comment on a website I noticed that words that were misspelled were showing up with a red underline. It’s the spell checking which is now built in the browser itself.

» Post installation, Firefox 2.0 automatically checks for an update for all of your extensions and advises on availability of their updates. In case an update is not available, the extension is disabled and Firefox will automatically check for any update for your extensions.

» All the external links which used to open in new windows, now, by default, open in new tabs. I like this feature because it saves my task bar space.

» If Firefox 2.0 crashes, it will restore all your closed windows and tabs. Supposedly, it should also restore the text in the form (if you were filling one when it crashed). I have not had an opportunity to test this out yet for a simple reason; it has not crashed on me yet.

» Phishing Protection is now built in. Firefox 2.0 will warn you about sites that might steal your data. It uses third party services (such as Google) to identify the phishing sites though.

Overall a very positive experience with Firefox 2.0, and I am loving it!
Ok, I will move onto IE7 now. The IE7 is a major browser upgrade (and release) from Microsoft in last 5 years. I had to upgrade IE6 and here is what I think about IE7.

» The installation was smooth and I personally like the new installation system (I think vista)

» The interface (graphics and colors) has changed. The new IE features tabbed browsing. This was a feature on my wish list since last 2 years.

» Oh No! My website shows up a little weird. The menu system has broken and it has lost its beauty. Hang on lemme check couple of other sites as well. Ok, I get it now. IE 7 is shrinking the font size by itself and I think for better printing or display. Now it tells me that my CSS was not paid any attention?

» There is a new instant search box (similar to Firefox) on top right and the list has most popular search engine names. This is the first time I see names other than Microsoft on it’s own browser.

» Ok, the phishing detection is now built in the browser itself. There are also some major security improvements (as claimed by Microsoft website) in this release.

To download latest release of Firefox – Visit – http://www.getfirefox.com or

To download latest release of IE7 – Visit – http://www.microsoft.com/ie

Conclusion: Even if you like IE6 or Firefox 1.5 (or older releases), I recommend that you upgrade your browsers (both IE and Firefox) to the latest releases.

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