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03 Dec 2011 18:00

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Tech: Could Mozilla’s Firefox lose its biggest funding source: Google?

  • growth Over the years, Mozilla’s open-source Firefox browser grew from nothing to provide a solid secondary option to Microsoft’s once-dominant Internet Explorer. It funded itself in large part from a multi-year deal it made with Google to make their search the default, allowing Mozilla to grow quickly.
  • hindrance However, since they made the last deal in 2008, a strange thing started happening — Google created a browser of its own, Chrome, that quickly ate its own share of the market. It’s now tied with or ahead of Firefox. So … will Google renew the deal with Mozilla? Do they need to? source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

17 Nov 2010 10:42

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Tech: Most popular plugin ever: Adblock Plus. Publishers grow very sad

  • 100
    million     number of downloads the plugin, most popular on Firefox, has had since it was released in 2006
  • 12.3
    million     number of active users the plugin currently has, which means millions in lost advertising income source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

25 Oct 2010 10:16

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Tech: Firesheep: Bringing light to a serious problem, but at what cost?

  • From a hacker’s perspective, releasing this was a good idea. Firesheep is a Firefox plugin that allows you to spy on people’s cookies from within a wi-fi network, effectively allowing you to log into other people’s accounts without knowing their passwords. Great, this will get people to work on this very significant issue and force HTTPS connections. But the problem is, you’ve released an exploit that makes it easy for people to spy on anyone, something that anyone can use. And most of those people will not have the idealistic ethics of the creator of this program. Yes, you’ll get Facebook to use HTTPS, even though it’ll cost them money. But you’ve enabled script kiddies to read personal information at coffee shops everywhere. Not everyone is a hacker. Not everyone is going to appreciate the existence of this. They’ll just feel violated. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

08 Jun 2010 11:21

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Tech: Mozilla dude on Apple’s HTML5 demos: “Not intellectually honest”

  • Apple’s messaging is clearly meant to say ‘hey, we love the web’ but the actual demos they have and the fact that actively block other browsers from those demos don’t match their messaging. It’s not intellectually honest at all.
  • Mozilla evangelist Christopher Blizzard • Regarding a series of technical demos Apple put on their site to test HTML5. While the demos are cool – we particularly dig the font one – we were surprised to find out that the demos didn’t work on Firefox OR Chrome, despite the fact that most of the features were supported by both browsers. In case you don’t want to change browsers but want to test out the technology, here’s a version without the Steve-block. They still work, guys, strangely enough. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 11 Comments • Permalink

21 Dec 2009 21:35

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Tech: What piece of software is the most vulnerable? Firefox, of course!

  • 102 vulnerabilities were found in the slow, bloated (but good) Web browser
  • 45 vulnerabilities were found in Adobe Reader, which should scare you, PDF fans
  • 41 vulnerabilities were found in Microsoft Office, which is freaking obvious source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

17 Oct 2009 11:43

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Tech: Microsoft screwed over Firefox users with a sneaky update

  • While the vulnerability is in an IE component, there is an attack vector for Firefox users as well. The reason is that .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installs a ‘Windows Presentation Foundation’ plug-in in Firefox.
  • Microsoft engineers on the company’s Security Research & Defense blog • Describing how a vulnerability which would usually only affect Internet Explorer users also affects IE users, too. The reason? Well, some genius thought it’d be awesome to stealthy foist a Microsoft-centric feature onto Firefox users without them asking – essentially bringing Firefox’s security quality down to the same level as IE. Way to go knuckleheads. • source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

02 Jul 2009 15:28

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Tech: An unabashed plug for an RSS reader: Meet Feedly, brahs.

feedly0702
  • As you might know about us at ShortFormBlog, we’re not against the occasional plug for something we really dig. And in this case, Feedly, which mashes up Google Reader into a very easy-to-read format, totally deserves it. Like other Web products we’ve liked in the past, such as Apture (who likes us back, apparently), it has this way of carrying itself like it the Internet should have always been this way. We like giving nods to cool things like this. Makes life easier – especially when it comes to tweeting links.source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 

30 Jun 2009 23:04

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Tech: A lot of people have downloaded Firefox 3.5 already

  • 2+ million people downloaded Firefox 3.5 already today source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

30 Jun 2009 22:30

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Tech: Firefox 3.5 is out. Is it quality or junk? Ars Technica weighs in.

  • The Firefox 3.5 release builds on the browser’s existing strengths to offer a high-quality user experience with a lot of rich new functionality.
  • Ars Technica writer Ryan Paul • Explaining why Firefox 3.5 is a major step forward for not only the browser itself but the Web in general. Simply put, it doesn’t suck. Less simply put, it offers significant speed increases, private browsing, HTML 5 video standards, drop shadows, interface upgrades and other awesome stuff. But you STILL can’t drag JPG files into Photoshop without a big error box coming up. What the heck, Mozilla? That’s a big problem. • source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

21 Apr 2009 22:54

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Tech: Could Firefox be moving away from the tabbed browsing format?

As we somehow manage to have about 50 tabs open at any time, we get the impression that they know what they’re doing. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
 
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