Mozilla has partnered with Troy Hunt, a Microsoft Regional Director, to create a more user-friendly service where users can check whether or not their email addresses have been exposed in previous data breaches. Mozilla’s new tool, called Firefox Monitor, has API access to Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned database of billions of emails exposed in data breaches.

Early Data Breach Notifications

The free Firefox Monitor service functions much like Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned. You can search for your email address in the service’s search box, and if your email was exposed in a data breach you’ll be shown when that happened and which service, specifically, was hacked. 

The tool can also proactively alert you when your email was exposed in a new data breach. This should give you time to change your password for the exposed accounts before the malicious hackers can act on that stolen information.

Keeping Breached Companies Honest

Firefox Monitor should ensure that even when a company that suffered a data breach keeps the hack a secret, you can still learn about the breach. Many companies tend to keep the breach a secret for weeks or longer until they have figured out what happened, something that’s not always in the user’s best interest.

Furthermore, if the company's security hasn’t been up to par until the data breach happened, they may realize that the users might blame them for not properly securing the accounts, thus creating a larger PR scandal. Therefore, before making the hack public, companies may want to also upgrade and modernize their systems to assure users that this sort of data exposure at least won’t be possible anymore in the future, even if damage was already done.

Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned database would often include emails from new data breaches that hadn’t yet been made public. Security researchers might tell him first if they discovered a new data breach themselves, or if they saw hacked data being sold on underground markets. The Firefox Monitor is available to an audience wider than what Hunt could reach alone.

Mozilla has made it clear with all of its recent new features that security and privacy are some of its top priorities going into the future. 

Mozilla joined other browser vendors in announcing that Firefox will start blocking invisible Flash content this August, and that starting with 2017, it will block all Flash content by default as well.

Last year, Adobe, the creator of Flash, started encouraging Flash developers to switch over to using HTML for their content. However, the transition is not going to be a fast one until browsers start outright rejecting Flash content. Apple has already tried for almost a decade to kill Flash, and despite the popularity of its iOS devices, there are still many websites, especially those serving video content, that continue to use Flash players.

Many advertisers are also still reliant on Flash, which makes it difficult for websites to switch entirely to HTML. Google, Amazon, and Facebook began to push advertisers to HTML last year, while Chrome (and soon Microsoft’s Edge as well) has already started to auto-pause Flash ads, which also began last year. Chrome and Safari will both start to block most Flash content by the end of this year.

Mozilla said that Firefox would start blocking invisible Flash content next month that is not essential to the user experience. According to the company, this should reduce crashes and hangs by about 10 percent on average for its users. To maximize website compatibility, Mozilla will only block a curated list of Flash content that it can replace with HTML.

Over time, the list of content that Firefox can block will increase to the point where the browser will block all Flash content by default in 2017. That’s when Firefox will require “click-to-activate” approval from users for all Flash-based websites that not have switched to HTML.

In March 2017, Firefox will also completely drop support for all the NPAPI plugins, with the exception of Flash. The enterprise version of Firefox (ESR), which Mozilla will release the same month, will continue to support the Flash and Java plugins until 2018. Users who may still want to have Flash enabled by default could switch to Firefox ESR to use Flash for a while longer.

Flash has been the source of many critical browser exploits, so web security should improve significantly once major browsers do not support it anymore and most websites have made the transition to 100 percent HTML content.

Mozilla, along with other browser makers, has been tightening up the rules around HTTPS connections in its Firefox browser by deprecating certain features for HTTP communication and by encouraging web developers to use HTTPS in a stricter fashion. The latest announcement is mainly user-focused by making it more clear just how much security different HTTPS modes provide.

DV Certificates

Up until now, Firefox has been showing a grey lock icon for sites that use Domain Validated (DV) certificates, and a green lock for those that use Extended Validation (EV) certificates. Mozilla realized that many users might not understand the difference and may think the DV sites aren't as secure. That's why Firefox will now show sites that use DV certificates with a green lock as well.

Mixed Active Content

Mozilla has been showing a grey and white shield alongside the lock icon for sites with Mixed Active Content. These are HTTPS sites that also use content served over HTTP that can interact with the rest of the HTTPS website. This leaves the site vulnerable to malicious attacks.

Mozilla will replace the grey and white shield with a green lock icon and a small grey warning sign to signify that the site isn't as secure as it should be. However, those who visit such sites shouldn't worry too much as Firefox automatically blocks the Mixed Active Content by default. This could cause some problems with some sites and users could deactivate this protection, but Mozilla found only a small number of users ever do that.

Mixed Passive Content

Another category of mixed content is called Mixed Passive Content, which mainly refers to embedded images or video being served over HTTP within an HTTPS website. This type of content isn't blocked by default in Firefox.

This was previously reflected in the browser as a grey warning sign. The icon has been updated to a grey lock icon with a vibrant yellow warning sign to show that the site isn't secure. This sign is also shown when the cryptography used by websites has been deprecated by the browser.

Mozilla announced that it made similar changes for its mobile Firefox browser as well.

Lucian Armasu is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware. You can follow him at @lucian_armasu. 

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Even if Mozilla isn't happy about some of the changes in Windows 10, the company still needs to work to optimize its software for the new OS. Mozilla updated the Firefox web browser with a tweaked interface and safety features, making the browser more secure and easier to use.

The key focus of these updates was to give Firefox a more streamlined feel, and to overcome the search issues in Windows 10 that Mozilla previously complained about. Although Cortana is designed to work only with Bing, Mozilla stated that, after installing its browser, all Windows 10 web search functions, including those done with Cortana, will be carried out via your default search engine in Firefox.

Currently, Mozilla uses Yahoo as the default search provider on its Firefox browser, and as such, after installing Firefox, Cortana will also carry searches out in the Yahoo search engine. However, this can easily be changed inside of Firefox's settings if you desire to do so.

Although it wasn't the primary focus of this update, Mozilla also instituted some security features related to its browser add-ons. Add-ons allow users to customize the functionality and design of the web browser to suit their needs, but virtually anyone can create them. As a result, someone could use these add-ons for malicious purposes without Mozilla knowing.

To guard against this, Mozilla pushed out a series of guidelines that add-on developers must follow to ensure security. All current add-ons will continue to work during this transitional period, but a warning will be displayed on uncertified add-ons. Mozilla stated that future releases of the Firefox browser will disable these add-ons in the future, though.

Clearly, the recent Windows 10 release and the new Edge browser from Microsoft have destabilized the balance of power in the web browser market, at least in terms of perception. These feature updates and improved security policies may help Mozilla stave off Microsoft's Edge browser.

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Over the past year or so, Google has begun a campaign to increase the security on the Web. The company promised to declare HTTP sites appearing in Chrome as non-secure in a multi-step process over the next few years. It has also started encouraging the use of HTTPS through its search engine.

Not to be outdone, Mozilla also announced recently that it is going to start a process for deprecating non-secure HTTP features in Firefox while building new features that can work only with secure HTTPS connections.

The company hasn't yet selected a date for when this process will begin. It hasn't selected the features it's going to deprecate or the "new" features it's going to support for HTTPS connections, either. Mozilla is asking the community to help it decide on all of these things and is expecting to make some proposals to the W3C WebAppSec Working Group soon.

Many didn't seem to like Mozilla's announcement. The complaints ranged from having to pay for digital certificates annually when they currently don't have to do it for their non-secure HTTP sites, to HTTPS making their sites slow, to simply thinking HTTPS is just not needed for certain categories of websites.

Mozilla has prepared some rebuttals for all of these criticisms, but it remains to be seen if this will convince the skeptics.

For one, Mozilla said that there are already free certificate solutions right now, such as StartSSL, WoSign and the upcoming EFF project "Let's Encrypt." Mozilla has even built a tool to help website owners properly configure their HTTPS settings for strong security.

When processors were slower and didn't have support for AES hardware encryption, HTTPS did indeed negatively impact site performance. However, these days, the overhead is tiny for most websites, and in some cases HTTPS sites using the new HTTP/2 protocol may load even faster than non-encrypted HTTP.

Many seem to think that their websites don't need HTTPS encryption because they don't have sensitive information, or anything that could become a major privacy breach for the user. However, according to Mozilla, HTTPS is not only about maintaining the privacy of the sites' visitors, but also about keeping the integrity of the website intact.

Without HTTPS, someone could modify what the visitors see on the website and make them believe that what they see comes from the website -- for instance, the way some Internet service providers inject advertising into their customers' traffic.

Recently, with the discovery of China's "Great Cannon" cyber-weapon, HTTPS has become a defensive tool against state censorship, too, as HTTPS is supposed to stop that type of attack.

Mozilla believes there are many other reasons that make HTTPS not just a nice-to-have tool, but a must-have one if we are to have a dragnet-free, censorship-free, and attack-free Web in the future. At the same time, Mozilla is also working on some other security technologies such as DANE or Certificate Transparency that could make HTTPS even better in the long run.

Update, 5/04/15, 2:52pm PST: We asked Mozilla to comment on the story and to help clarify some issues that may have been misunderstood. Richard Barnes, Firefox Security Lead at Mozilla responded:

TH: Can you further clarify when Mozilla will start deprecating HTTP, and when do you expect this to start having an impact on a significant portion of HTTP sites?

RB: "Transitioning the Web to HTTPS is going to take some time, so whatever a website does today it will still work for months or years. The first thing we're going to do is require HTTPS for new features. In the long run, there is some discussion of removing or limiting features that are currently available to unencrypted sites. Those changes will be announced well ahead of any implementation, so users will have time to update their site either to not rely on those features or, we hope, to move to HTTPS. In the short run, the impact on HTTP-only sites will only be that they will not get new features. In the longer run, say several months or a year out, they may begin to lose features if they don't upgrade. We hope that most sites will choose the upgrade path."

TH: Is Mozilla working on some other encryption technology that could replace HTTPS in the future (say something like blockchain technology embedded into Firefox)?

RB: “We believe that HTTPS and the Web PKI are a good foundation for the Web, but like any technology, they can always be improved. We are working on upgrading HTTPS to use the emerging TLS 1.3 standard for encryption, and we are continually improving the assurance that our root CA program provides. We don't have anything to say right now about longer term technologies, but if people have proposals, we would be happy to hear them."

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Mozilla's Chief Technical Officer Andreas Gal updated his blog on Wednesday with news that Nightly builds of Firefox will now include VR support. This should be good news for users and developers who previously had to download a special build of Firefox that was typically lagging behind the current Nightly releases.  

"Consumer VR products are still in a nascent state, but clearly there is great promise for this technology. We have enough confidence in the new APIs we have proposed that we are today taking the step of integrating them into our regular nightly Firefox builds," Gal wrote.

Firefox users eager to see the browser in the Oculus Rift headset must not only download the latest Nightly release, but install the WebVR Oculus Rift Enabler add-on and open a "non-e10s" browser window. To open this window, simply choose "File" and then "New Non-e10s Window."

Mozilla engineering Director Vlad Vukicevic said in a separate blog that users must choose a non-e10s window because WebVR in Firefox currently does not support multi-process browsing. He added that Mozilla wants to add Direct-To-Rift support soon in the Nightly build. After that, Mozilla is eying Firefox for Android, Linux and the Cardboard device for mobile VR experiences.

"We'll also be starting to revisit VR support using CSS and the DOM, to maximize compatibility with existing Web content and Web development knowledge," Vukicevic wrote. "You'll also soon be able to report bugs to us via bugzilla.mozilla.org in a new WebVR component."

For the uninitiated, Firefox Nightly is the build where Mozilla first introduces new features and fixes. This allows Mozilla to receive feedback from those willing to test the build. Because it's fresh out of the mixing bowl, the Nightly build can be somewhat unstable. Mozilla warns that this build should only be used by "experienced" users and testers.

Vukicevic also revealed in his blog that VR support will be baked into Beta and Release builds, but disabled. "We're still making rapid improvements and changes to both the VR interfaces and the necessary platform support pieces," Vukicevic said. "Once WebVR is more complete, we'll discuss shipping plans to our Beta and Release builds."

To download the Nightly version of Firefox, head here.

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Yesterday, Mozilla updated its Firefox browser to version 35. Among the many updates is the official launch of Hello, Mozilla's WebRTC platform. In the past, users had to download programs, the biggest one being Skype, to chat with people via video or audio. By providing the same thing straight from a browser, Hello might be a game changer in video and audio chat.

After upgrading to the latest version of Firefox, Hello should already be available in the menu bar or customization panel. Once it's open, Hello allows you to give a name to the call, or as Mozilla calls it, a "conversation," and you get a URL to share.

The link is unique to the conversation, so the user just needs to copy it and give it to the person they want to call. Hello also "remembers" the link, so if you need to call the same person again, just click the link and an audio notification will tell the user on the other end that you are calling them.

Hello also works across multiple browsers. As long as either person is using Firefox, Hello will work. At the moment, the only WebRTC supported platforms are Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.

But the best part about Hello is that it requires no signup whatsoever. All you need to do is start a conversation and share the link, making the process quick and easy. For those who are looking for a more direct approach to calling, Mozilla also provides contact support. By logging in to a Firefox account, you can also see which of your contacts has a Firefox account and contact them that way. There is also support for Google accounts that imports contact directly to your Hello address book.

I tried Hello for a bit today before writing this story, and for the most part it's really easy to use. When you make a call, a small window for the video call appears on the bottom left corner of the screen, which makes it non-intrusive. On the receiving end, it features a large screen for the other user and a smaller window that shows how you look in the call. Both the audio and video quality is surprisingly great, especially when you consider the fact that it's running from the browser.

However, there are still a few issues with Hello as well as a lack of certain features that puts it behind other programs. The most glaring feature is that Hello is strictly one-on-one. You can't provide the link to more than one person, because each conversation can only hold two people, so conference calling is impossible.

When testing the call on different browsers, I also found that Hello doesn't "know" I'm switching browsers -- which can be a good thing. For example, if I'm on the receiving end of the call, and the caller is using Firefox, I can open Google Chrome and paste the link there to join in. However, we found a glitch. When I opened a conversation in Chrome at one point, I received a message saying that there were already two people in the conversation. Thus, at some point, Hello didn't "remember" that I left the call, opened another browser, and started the call again.

Text chat, as well as the ability to share files, are features currently missing from Hello, and I missed having them. So many conversations on video and audio these days go beyond just talking, as people want to share files such as documents and pictures, not to mention links.

For now, Hello is both a very impressive tool and has a ways to go. Even though everyone can start using Hello, it's important to note that it's still in beta. Additionally, WebRTC, the API that powers Hello, is constantly being worked on since it's an open project with the goal of providing easy and high-quality real-time communications via browsers and mobile devices. There's definitely more work to be done with Hello, but what it offers now bodes a promising future for WebRTC-based platforms.

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As promised last week, Mozilla released a browser created specifically for web designers: the Firefox Developer Edition. This web authoring toolset comes packed with a number of items for designing and debugging websites and apps such as WebIDE, Valence, a web audio editor, a style editor and more.

"The first thing you'll notice is the distinctive dark design running through the browser," said Dave Camp, Director of Developer Tools at Mozilla. "We applied the developer tools theme to the entire browser. It's trim and sharp and focused on saving space for the content on your screen. It also fits in with the darker look common among creative app development tools."

In addition to the web audio and style (CSS) editors, the new developer browser includes a network monitor for viewing network requests made by the browser, a JavaScript Debugger, and a page inspector for checking out the CSS and HTML code of websites. There's also a web console for viewing a web page's logged information as well as a mode for viewing a website or app in different screen sizes without having to resize the browser window.

With this browser, the company is also introducing two new features: WebIDE and Valence. The latter feature was originally called Firefox Tools Adapter, and it allows developers to create and debug apps for a number of browsers and devices. This is made possible by connecting Mozilla's new developer browser to other browser engines.

"Valence also extends the awesome tools we've built to debug Firefox OS and Firefox for Android to the other major mobile browsers including Chrome on Android and Safari on iOS," Camp said. "So far these tools include our Inspector, Debugger and Console and Style Editor.

As for WebIDE, this tool allows apps to be created within the browser by using a template or by opening and editing the code of any Web app. These apps can be run in a simulator with just a single click, and debugged by clicking twice. Users can also edit the app's files.

Developers wanting to get their hands on the Developer Edition can download the browser here. This page also provides video samples of all the tools provided with the browser, including WebIDE, Valence, Web Audio Editor and more.

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Mozilla announced the launch of Firefox 29 on Tuesday, reporting that the company has re-imagined and re-designed Firefox to reflect how web surfers use the Internet today. The browser now has a new user interface, customization mode and an enhanced Firefox Sync service powered by Firefox Accounts.

"The first thing you'll notice in Firefox is the beautiful new design that makes it easy to focus on your Web content," reads the company blog. "The tabs are sleek and smooth to help you navigate the Web faster. It's easy to see what tab you're currently visiting and the other tabs fade into the background to be less of a distraction when you're not using them."

Mozilla ripped out the old menu system and placed a re-designed interface in the right corner of the toolbar, using the same three-bar icon found in Google's Chrome. This new menu includes a "customize" tool that allows users to add or move any feature, service or add-on. Other settings in the re-designed menu include New Window, New Private Windows, Save Page, Print, History and more.

The company also updated the Firefox Sync service that provides access to Awesome Bar browsing history, saved passwords, bookmarks, open tabs and form data across the user's computers and mobile Android devices. This feature is powered by Firefox Accounts to simplify the setup and device syncing process.

"We looked at every piece of Firefox and made everything more enjoyable and easier to use – even bookmarks. You can create bookmarks with a single click and manage them from the same place," states the blog.

For those who haven't used Firefox for a while, now may be a good time to test run Mozilla's browser. Save for the text, tabs seemingly disappear when not in use, providing a more streamlined look. The menu itself is extremely easy, providing an app menu-like environment with drag-and-drop capability. The big seller will likely be the customization aspect, allowing users to fine-tune the browser to their own needs, not the needs of the many.

To download Firefox, head here. The list of changes in Firefox 29 can be found here.

Mozilla this week announced that it will launch a program called 'Directory Tiles' that will fill those tiles on a new tab with sponsored content. Don't worry, though. If you're a frequent Tom's Hardware visitor, this doesn't mean your Tom's tile is going to be pushed out of the way in favor of an ad. Instead, this program will only affect new users.

"[New users'] tiles – those nine rectangles that populate over time with the most frequent and recent websites they visit – are empty.  The new tab page isn't delivering any value for them," Mozilla's Darren Herman explained. "Directory Tiles will instead suggest pre-packaged content for first-time users. Some of these tile placements will be from the Mozilla ecosystem, some will be popular websites in a given geographic location, and some will be sponsored content from hand-picked partners to help support Mozilla's pursuit of our mission. The sponsored tiles will be clearly labeled as such, while still leading to content we think users will enjoy."

Mozilla says Directory Tiles carries 'inherent value' for users and helps Mozilla become more diversified and sustainable. That said, it's possible some users will see this as black and white as a once ad-free product displaying ads. After all, it's hard not to play the 'what if' game when a company makes a move like this. What if targeting new users is no longer enough? What if, down the road, Mozilla decides to reduce the number of user-generated tiles to six and save the last row for ads?

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Andreas Gal, Mozilla's vice president of mobile and R&D, and Brendan Eich, CTO and SVP of Engineering, have updated Gal's blog with a long entry about how Firefox users can trust Mozilla when it comes to government backdoors and user privacy.

In the blog, they point out that due to laws in the U.S. and elsewhere, Web surfers must interact with Internet services knowing full well that even though cloud service companies want to protect user privacy, eventually one day those companies will be required to comply with laws. The government may acquire information that seems to violate privacy and could even force surveillance. Even more, the government can do so while enforcing gag orders on the service, leaving the consumer unaware.

This creates a problem in regards to privacy and security. Every major browser today is distributed by an organization within reach of surveillance laws, they point out. Injecting surveillance code in a web browser is quite possible.

"The unfortunate consequence is that software vendors — including browser vendors — must not be blindly trusted," they report. "Not because such vendors don't want to protect user privacy. Rather, because a law might force vendors to secretly violate their own principles and do things they don't want to do."

They also point out that unlike other browser vendors, Mozilla's products are truly open source. That's a "critical advantage," as Internet Explorer is closed, and both Safari and Chrome have open-source rendering engines, but contain "significant" fractions of closed source code. By being 100 percent open source, security researchers can verify the executable bits contained in the browsers Mozilla is distributing.

However, the answer to getting real trust, it seems, is to create a global audit system verifying that Firefox isn't immediately injected with government-tainted code at the request of court orders.

"To ensure that no one can inject undetected surveillance code into Firefox, security researchers and organizations should regularly audit Mozilla source and verified builds by all effective means, establish automated systems to verify official Mozilla builds from source, and raise an alert if the verified bits differ from official bits," they suggest.

"Beyond this first step, can we use such audited browsers as trust anchors, to authenticate fully-audited open-source Internet services? This seems possible in theory," they add.

In light of all the controversy surrounding cookies and possible real-time monitoring by the government, on Friday Mozilla announced the launch of Lightbeam, an add-on for Firefox that allows the web surfer to see who is tracking them online. After installation, Lightbeam will create a record of events for every site the user visits and every third party site that is stored locally via cookies on the user's browser.

"Lightbeam visually graphs these events to highlight the interactions between sites you intentionally visit and the third parties," reads the product description. "Lightbeam will continue to add to your graph as you browse the Web. You can stop Lightbeam at any time by disabling it or uninstalling the add-on. Your Lightbeam data can be easily saved or deleted."

Mozilla's Alex Fowler said that the company set out to create a big picture view of Web tracking, and how first and third party sites are connected to each other. "Development of Lightbeam for Firefox, we worked with a number of leading online publishers about the value of the crowdsourced data," he said. "More work is needed, though. Once the open data set has time to mature, we'll continue to explore how publishers can benefit from additional insights into the interaction of third parties on their sites."

Once installed, Lightbeam users will find the logo installed in the bottom right hand corner of the browser. Click on it, and the Lightbeam screen loads up in another tab. At the bottom right, users can toggle between Recent Site, Last 10 Sites, Daily and Weekly to see how they are tracked across the Internet. Just for kicks, I loaded up Tom's Hardware and received a full cloud of sites (shown above).

According to the chart, 40 third-party sites were attached to the Tom's Hardware nucleus by cookie-based data and other connections. These include Google Services, Google Syndication, Doubleclick, Twitter, Moockie1, Yieldmanager, and a number of our affiliates and tools that help make the Tom's world go round. Facebook and Google actually tracked my journey to Tom's, it seems.

The legend shows that triangles are third-party sites, and circles are visited sites. The more connections these sites have to your data, the larger they become. The purple lines represent connections via cookies, whereas each site you supposedly visit is connected by a white line, seemingly whether directly or indirectly.

Lightbeam also provides information in a graph, as a clock and in a list. The graph looks like an atom of sorts (or a ball with lots of balloons), whereas the clock resembles the side view of a planet, with the data shooting outwards in a straight line every 15 minutes or so. Out of the few sites I tested with Lightbeam, Tom's Hardware has the least number of connections. Naturally, Facebook was loaded, as was the Mozilla Festival website.

"Not all tracking is bad. Many services rely on user data to provide relevant content and enhance your online experience. But tracking can happen without the user’s knowledge," reads the Lightbeam page. "That’s not okay for some. It should be you who decides when, how and if you want your browsing data to be shared. We recognize the importance of transparency and our mission is all about empowering users — both with tools and information."

By default, the data collected by Lightbeam is yours and yours only. However, Mozilla provides an option for sharing this information so an even bigger picture can be created from a pool of users. To see who is tracking you, download the add-on here.

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Chris Lee, Director of Product for Firefox OS, updated the Mozilla blog with news that the company's mobile operating system has been updated to v1.1. The release arrives after the first Firefox OS phones hit the market this summer, and now provides new features, significant performance improvements and support for more than 15 new languages.

That said, Mozilla announced in a separate blog that Firefox OS is expanding into new territories. Telefonica has already released the ALCATEL ONE TOUCH Fire and ZTE Open devices in Spain, Venezuela and Colombia, and now plans to launch Firefox OS in Brazil and three other Latin America markets in 4Q 2014.

Meanwhile, Poland's Deutsche Telekom has rolled out Firefox OS devices under the T-Mobile brand, and is currently planning to launch a device in Germany this month using the Congster brand, followed by additional devices in Greece and Hungary. Norwegian operator Telenor has also confirmed that it plans to launch Firefox OS phones in Hungary, Serbia and Montenegro before the end of the year.

"The positive market reception of the first Firefox OS smartphones demonstrates that people like the user experience and openness we're building with Firefox OS," said Jay Sullivan, Mozilla Chief Operating Officer. "We continue to enhance Firefox OS to deliver the best experience for the many people around the world buying their first smartphones. We are looking forward to seeing the response to the next round of Firefox OS launches."

As for Firefox 1.1, the updated platform now supports sending and receiving pictures, audio and video files via MMS, and providing an adaptive app search directly on the home screen. There's also a push notifications API so that developers can push timely notifications, the new ability to download images, audio and video in the browser, and keyboard improvements.

Firefox OS 1.1 also promises faster application load times and smoother scrolling, email enhancements, calendar enhancements, contact management enhancements, and a new music search. This function allows users to simply swipe down from the top of the Music app to reveal a search bar and find music by artist, album or song title. Email enhancements include a draft mode, sending image attachments and downloading audio and video attachments.

Firefox OS is a Linux-based open-source OS that heavily relies on web technologies such as HTML5, JavaScript, CSS3, open web APIs that communicate directly to hardware, and so on. The platform includes its own Marketplace that offers popular apps like Facebook, The Weather Channel, Twitter, TMZ and a number of others. Most apps don't require to be installed while others are less intrusive on the device than native apps found on Android and iOS.

"Mozilla is working on Firefox OS with more than 20 hardware and operator partners to deliver a better and more attainable smartphone experience to first time smartphone buyers around the world, as only 21 percent of global mobile subscribers have smartphones," the Mozilla blog states.

Not to be outdone by Google's report of blocking most plugins within Chrome starting January 2014, Mozilla updated its own blog reporting that Firefox will no longer activate most plugins by default, starting with the latest Aurora release.

On Tuesday, Mozilla's Benjamin Smedberg said that when a website tries to use a plugin, users can choose whether to enable it or keep it blocked. Ultimately, this should provide a better Firefox experience on a performance level, as plugins are known to be a source of hangs, crashes, and security incidents. Putting control in the hands of users should keep them more secure and the browser running more smoothly.

However, the one plugin that won't be blocked by default is Adobe Flash because it's used just about everywhere on the World Wide Web.

"Many websites use 'hidden' Flash instances that the user does not see and cannot click on; making Flash click-to-play would be confusing for most users," he said. "Users with older versions of Flash that are known to be insecure will see the click-to-activate UI and will be prompted to upgrade to the latest version. Our security and plugin teams work closely with Adobe to make sure that Firefox users are protected from instability or security issues in the Flash plugin."

Back in March, Mozilla conducted a user research survey on the prototype implementation of click-to-play plugins (pdf), and quickly discovered that many Firefox users actually had no idea what a plugin was. As Smedberg pointed out earlier in his blog, many plugins go unnoticed on web pages, so when participants suddenly had to enable these plugins on the same site repeatedly, they grew highly annoyed or confused. Mozilla decided to fix that.

"We redesigned the click-to-play feature to focus on enabling plugins per-site, rather than enabling individual plugin instances on the page," he said. "Advanced users who want to activate individual instances may still do so by installing a Firefox extension. We encourage people who want to try the new plugin experience to use the Mozilla Nightly or Aurora preview releases."

At one time, plugins were ideal for prototyping and implementing new features, but now that browsers have matured, these features can be tested within the browser environment thanks to WebGL, WebSockets, WebRTC and asm.js. Plugins have become legacy technology, they're a consistently growing security threat, and are not used on most mobile devices.

Mozilla is now encouraging website developers to ditch plugins if possible, and to hit the mozilla.dev.platform project list to request plugin features not available in the web platform.

Google said earlier this week that most plugins will be outright banned in Chrome starting January. As of Monday, the Chrome Web Store began rejecting new Apps and Extensions based on the Netscape-based plugin tech, and will delist current NPAPI-based Apps and Extensions in May 2014, followed by a complete removal in September 2014. Installed Apps and Extensions will continue to work until support for NPAPI is removed at the end of 2014.

Mozilla has moved the touch-friendly version of Firefox out of the nightly channel and into the Aurora channel. The company is now asking Firefox users to take the updated browser for a spin and send in feedback. As before, in order to use the touchy side of Mozilla's browser, Windows 8 customers will need to set this version as the default so that Windows 8 doesn't send them straight to the desktop.

"This touch-friendly version of Firefox has been designed to ensure people get the best browsing experience on their Windows 8 tablet," the company said. "It has a tile-based Firefox Start experience and supports Firefox Sync, Windows 8 touch and swipe gestures, Snapped and Fill views, and Windows Share integration all delivered with a streamlined, modern and beautiful interface."

As stated several weeks ago by Mozilla, the goal of this "Metro Preview Release" is to gather feedback and defects from the larger Aurora community. Whether or not the Metro Preview Release will graduate from Aurora to Beta and Release channels is still to be determined, the company said. But if all goes well, the final release of Firefox 27 with the Modern UI version intact will be on January 21, 2014.

Originally the plan was to release the touchy version of Firefox to the Aurora channel on September 16, and market it as the Metro Preview Release. All Aurora features would then be merged into the Beta channel on October 28, thus making the Windows 8 touch-based version available to the Beta audience. After that, Firefox Metro was scheduled to be released on December 10. That has obviously changed, and could likely still as Mozilla receives feedback from the Aurora build.

"Because this new version of Firefox uses the same powerful Gecko rendering engine as in Firefox desktop, there’s also support for WebGL for compelling 3D graphics and asm.js which supercharges JavaScript in the browser, allowing developers to port high performance C++ games to the Web," the company said. "Hardware accelerated full HTML5 video is also supported, including open video formats like WebM and proprietary formats such as H.264."

Mozilla added that over the coming weeks, the company will be almost exclusively focused on improving performance and responsiveness. The company also points out that this is still a preview build, and while many of the features are nearly complete, expect some performance issues and bugs.

If for some reason Windows 8 refuses to set the aurora build as the default browser after the initial confirmation (meaning you're still kicked back to the desktop version), simple head into Firefox and load up the Options/Advanced/General panel to manually set it as the default program.

To try the new build of Firefox for the Windows 8 Start screen, head here.

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On Monday Foxconn Technology Group signed a deal with Mozilla to co-develop devices and apps based on Firefox OS, thus becoming the 19th member of the Firefox OS alliance. The company is reportedly already working on five devices, one of which may have been a Firefox OS tablet that was on display at a joint event in Taipei held by the two companies.

"Foxconn is extending past its origins in original design manufacturing to a combination of integrated software and hardware offerings, which extends its domain to the open operating platform and positively carries out its integration plan of hardware, software, content, and services," the company said.

Young Liu, the general manager of Foxconn innovation Digital System Business Group (iDSBG), said that the company is developing a brand new integrated approach to providing hardware, software, content, and services. Firefox OS fits perfectly within its vision of "eight screens, one network, and one cloud" because it's based on HTML5, a key component in developing applications that work on a number of devices and form factors.

“Because of our shared vision, we are excited to work with Mozilla," Liu said. "Firefox OS from Mozilla is based on HTML5 and open web technologies. The whole idea perfectly matches to the strategies promoted by Foxconn. We believe that the integration of software and hardware development will offer greater benefits to our customers and consumers."

Foxconn is reportedly setting up an Internet data center and an HTML5 app research and development center at the Kaohsiung Software Park, located in southern Taiwan, by the end of 2013. The company also plans to recruit 500 to 1000 software engineers by the end of the year.

“We are very excited about the cooperation with Foxconn and we are glad to see more partners supporting the Firefox OS and the open Web.” Dr. Li Gong, SVP of Mobile Devices, President of Asia Operations, and CEO of Mozilla Taiwan. "This cooperation demonstrates the full potential of Firefox OS, the open Web mobile operating system, to enable not only the smartphone but also a wide range of mobile devices."

During the D: Dive Into Mobile conference on Monday, Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs said that Firefox OS will begin rolling out in June across five countries: Venezuela, Poland, Brazil, Portugal and Spain. By the end of the year, the new mobile platform will be in an additional eleven countries, none of which will be the United States.

Unfortunately, North Americans looking to purchase a local smartphone packed with Mozilla's new Firefox OS won't see them on the market until 2014. Why? Because unlike the rest of the world, Silicon Valley sees everything through high-end devices, he said.

"In the short term, we’re launching in emerging markets where Firefox is particularly strong," he said. "It didn’t make sense for us to launch a version-one device around the world."

The comments were made during an on-stage Q&A with hosts Ina Fried and Walt Mossberg. During the session, Ina asked a very important question: why would someone choose a Firefox OS device over a low-end Android phone? Kovacs' response wasn't exactly direct, and came in the form of the rollout plan.

"In the early days -- by the way, we're talking about a version 1.0 product -- our whole mission is to stimulate the ecosystem, just like we did with the desktop browser," he said. "Once the standards were set, connected users exploded. In the short term, it'll be brand appeal -- we're launching in areas where Firefox has good brand recognition."

Thus, by the time Mozilla is ready to introduce Firefox OS to the North American market, the base ecosystem will be well established and maybe even competitive with Google's Android and Apple's iOS. The biggest advantage Mozilla's platform will have over the competition will be its heavy support for HTML5 apps which will communicate directly to hardware via JavaScript. HTML5 on Android and iOS is supported via Chrome and Safari.

As reported last week, Kovacs is stepping down as Mozilla's CEO later this year after filling the position for less than three. Mozilla will begin searching for a replacement immediately, and Kovacs said he would remain on Mozilla's board once he steps down as CEO.

"The project today is led by experienced teams, set on a strong foundation financially and operationally, and with a clear path to the future," he said. "It is my confidence in this team that makes this the right time for me to move on to the next phase of my personal journey. I will stay on as an active member of Mozilla’s board of directors — so I am staying within the family to help as much as I can."

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After serving as Mozilla's CEO for less than three years, Gary Kovacs will step down from his position later this year. The company made the announcement Wednesday morning in an internal letter acquired by AllThingsD, reporting that Mozilla will begin searching for a replacement immediately. Kovacs will remain on Mozilla's board once he steps down as CEO.

Kovacs joined Mozilla in late 2010 to lead the development and direction of the Firefox Web browser. He was also brought in to sever the company's reliance on the desktop by moving into the mobile operating system arena with the "Boot to Gecko" project which eventually emerged as Firefox OS. He also landed a number of commercial deals including Mozilla's partnership with Samsung to create Servo, a new ARM-based mobile browser engine built from the ground-up using the company's new Rust programming language.

"When I first joined Mozilla in 2010, it was clear that the Web was at a turning point," he told the Mozilla staff in the internal letter. "Competition on desktop was more intense than ever, smartphone adoption was on fire, and new challenges to openness were developing in both areas of these converging worlds. We needed to move faster, pivot hard to mobile, and scale globally. And we needed to change how we operated if we were to lead the Web through these market transitions. It was this challenge that lured me to Mozilla back in 2010, and it was this challenged that kept me engaged ever since."

In addition to replacing Kovacs, the company is currently shuffling around management. Mitchell Baker will take on the role of executive chairman and Brandan Eich will serve as Mozilla CTO and SVP of engineering. Current SVP of products Jay Sullivan has been appointed as COO, and VP of business affairs and general council Harvey Anderson is now SVP of business and legal affairs. Li Gong will now serve as SVP of mobile devices.

"The project today is led by experienced teams, set on a strong foundation financially and operationally, and with a clear path to the future," he said. "It is my confidence in this team that makes this the right time for me to move on to the next phase of my personal journey. I will stay on as an active member of Mozilla’s board of directors — so I am staying within the family to help as much as I can."

Prior to joining Mozilla in late 2010, Kovacs signed on with IBM in 1990 and eventually landed the role of Worldwide Program Director for the software division. After that, he served as President of Zi Corporation from 2000 to 2003, and then became Vice President of Product Marketing at Macromedia in 2003.

After Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005, he moved over to the role of Vice President and General Manager of Product Management and Marketing for Adobe’s mobile and devices division, and then General Manager of the entire division in 2008. Between 2009 and 2010 he served as Senior Vice President of Markets, Solutions, and Products at Sybase.

Kovacs will talk more about the Firefox OS project and the current changes taking place within Mozilla next week during the D: Dive Into Mobile conference in New York. In the meantime, the full memo distributed to the Mozilla staff can be read here.

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If you're an iPhone user hankering after Firefox on your phone, you're going to be waiting a while. Mozilla this week revealed that it won't be pushing out a version of Firefox for iOS until Apple changes its ways.

CNet cites Mozilla vice president of product, Jay Sullivan, as saying there is no Firefox for iOS in the works. Not only that, but Sullivan told attendees at South by Southwest that the company didn't have any plans to produce such an app because of Apple's strict policies on third-party browsers. According to CNet, the nonprofit doesn't feel it can build the browser it wants to build because it's not allowed to use the same rendering and javascript engines on iOS. Speaking in a statement to PCMag, Sullivan said that the decision was down to constraints with environment and distribution.

Firefox uses the Gecko engine while Apple's Safari uses WebKit. Clearly Mozilla is waiting until it can do things its own way. Unfortunately, anyone waiting for Apple to change its ways to accommodate others, particularly its rivals, might be waiting a long time.

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With Firefox 18 officially released, Mozilla, ever sticking to its rapid release schedule, hasn't bothered to take a breather and has put out Firefox 19 beta.

Though it's only been a matter of days since Firefox 18's launch, Firefox 19 already resolves a known issue with private browsing from Firefox 18.

Two of the most notable features about Firefox 19 are a new, built-in PDF viewer to ward off the potential for security exploits due to PDF reader plugins.

"For a number of years there have been several plugins for viewing PDF’s within Firefox," wrote Bill Walker and Brendan Dahl, Mozilla Engineering Manager and Software Engineer, via the Mozilla Future Releases blog. "Many of these plugins come with proprietary closed source code that could potentially expose users to security vulnerabilities. PDF viewing plugins also come with extra code to do many things that Firefox already does well with no proprietary code, such as drawing images and text. These problems, and the desire to push the boundaries of the HTML5 platform, led Andreas Gal and Chris Jones to start a research project they named PDF.js. The project quickly picked up steam within Mozilla Labs, where it grew into a full-fledged PDF viewer."

Walker and Dahl then went on to explain how the PDF viewer, because it was built with HTML 5, is powerful enough to render PDF files without issues and flexible enough to work across different platforms.

Firefox Android Beta has also been made available to download. This update features additional ARMv6 support, meaning that, Mozilla claims, Firefox is now accessible to over 15 million more phones. Most Android phones, so long as they meet the hardware requirements of 600 MHz, 512 MB of memory, and HVGA, should be able to run the beta.

The Android beta also allows easy customization via addons.mozilla.org, where users will be free to download a theme of their choice. The Google Search Widget has also now been integrated into the browser, allowing phone users to make a search through Firefox by adding a widget to their home page.

Firefox Beta is available via the Mozilla website and Android Beta via Google Play now.

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The latest version of Firefox, now up to 18, has launched, appearing on the FTP slightly ahead of the official launch date. The installer for Firefox 18 is now available via the front page of the official website and Google Play.

Mozilla has made the change log available. Here's what's new on the desktop version of the browser:

NEW:

• Faster JavaScript performance via IonMonkey compiler
• Support for Retina Display on OSX 10.7 and up
• Preliminary support for WebRTC

CHANGED:

• Experience better image quality with our new HTML scaling algorithm
• Performance improvements around tab switching

DEVELOPER:

• Support for new DOM property window.devicePixelRatio
• Improvement in startup time through smart handling of signed extension certificates

HTML5:

• Support for W3C touch events implemented, taking the place of MozTouch events

FIXED:

• Disable insecure content loading on HTTPS pages (62178)
• Improved responsiveness for users on proxies (769764)

The same page includes known issues with the new versions. Some of the more prominent ones include experiencing slower scrolling in the main Gmail window and preventing future updates for Firefox after using Window's System Restore, among others.

Mozilla claims that Firefox 18's new JavaScript compiler, IonMonkey, allows "Web apps and games perform up to 25 percent faster" and links to a game BananaBread as evidence for the performance boost. PCMag ran some benchmarks using Mozilla's Kraken benchmark and did find a significant performance boost, though it should be noted that benchmarks run with SunSpider produced "puzzling results, with the time taken to run the benchmark increasing on each subsequent run." So Mozilla's claims on IonMonkey's performance should be taken with a grain of salt.

Other significant changes to note are the preliminary support for WebRTC, allowing Web pages to access web cameras and microphones for voice chat without the need for a plugin such as Flash, and W3C touch events support in place of MozTouch, bringing the browser to the standard for touch events.

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The feature is currently integrated in the nightly builds of the browser, but not enabled by default.

While the addition only affects the Windows version of Firefox, Mozilla said that the feature allows Firefox to play H.264 video, as well as AAC audio in MP4 and M4A files, and MP3 audio files without having to rely on third-party plug-ins.

To enable the backend, enter about:config in the URL bar and change the entry "media.windows-media-foundation.enabled" to "true". The nightly build can be downloaded here.

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Firefox users can expect a considerable speed bump in complex JavaScript applications over the JaegerMonkey engine that was launched with Firefox 4 in early 2011. Mozilla currently claims that IonMonkey, which is similar in its architecture to Google's Crankshaft in Chrome, is not too far behind Chrome in the Kraken benchmark, and provides a substantial performance increase in Google's v8 benchmark.

Besides IonMonkey, Firefox 18 will not deliver much else. According to Mozilla's feature tracking, the browser will get per-site third-party cookie setting support as well as inline PDF support. The final version of the browser is scheduled for release on January 1, 2013.

The beta version can be downloaded here.

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Scheduled for release on January 1, 2013, Firefox 18 will bring a startup performance that is improved by 20 - 25 percent, according to Glek. In a blog post, he noted that half of the speedup was achieved by accelerated library loading.

It appears that Firefox 18 and 19 will deliver in comparison to Firefox 17, which will be released on November 20, more performance improvements. Glek referred to a streamlined tab strip in which the amount of tab closing animations taking more than 400 ms was reduced from a share of about 20 percent to just 3 percent. The overwhelming share of tab animation closings now has a time of about 150 ms.

The IonMonkey Javascript engine also appears to be on schedule for debut in Firefox 18. Mozilla currently rates the IonMonkey browser as the fastest JavaScript browser in the Sunspider benchmark, as a close rival to Chrome in Kraken and behind Chrome and Safari in Google's v8 benchmark.

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Mitchell Baker, chairman of the foundation, said that Mozilla settled with the IRS and agreed to pay $1.5 million. The organization froze $15 million in funds to cover any outcomes of the investigation.

"As a result of this settlement, $15 million in funds we had held in reserve pending the resolution of the audit are now available to support the Mozilla Foundation’s mission to support innovation and opportunity on the web," Baker wrote in a blog post. "I’m happy to note that we’ve settled the issues raised and the IRS recently closed the audit."

The audit was focused on the IRS investigating the tax status of the Mozilla Foundation as a nonprofit organization. The IRS looked a bit closer into the tax records since Mozilla declared its Google revenues as "royalties" and are therefore excluded from the public support test for public charity status. There was speculation that the IRS may view the revenues as advertising income, which may have switched the foundation's status to a "private foundation". Initially, Mozilla had set aside only $100,000 to cover this issue, but increased the reserved amount as the investigation continued.

Baker did not provide any further details, other than explaining that "the IRS chooses which organizations — taxable, tax-exempt, individuals, businesses — it wishes to understand better." Baker promised to share more details in the future.

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While HSTS has been supported since Firefox 4, Mozilla is now following Google's lead to implement a preloaded list of websites that are contacted using HTTPS by default:

"Our preload list has been seeded with entries from Chrome’s list of a similar function," wrote Mozilla's David Keeler in a blog post. "To build our preload list, a request is sent to every host. Only if a host responds with a valid HSTS header with an appropriately large max-age value (currently 10886400, which is eighteen weeks) do we include it in our list. We also see if the includeSubdomains value for the entry on Chrome’s list is the same as what we receive in the response header (if they do not match, we use the one we receive)."

The approach is designed to mitigate a potential vulnerability that would allow an attacker to prevent a browser from securely connecting to a site via HSTS. With forced HSTS, the browser will never connect to an included website via an insecure (HTTP) protocol.

Users of Google Chrome can go a step further and control individual sites via the interface at chrome://net-internals/#hsts, which enables users to add or delete HSTS websites.

The current Firefox Beta can be downloaded here.

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Occasionally the EU's rather aggressive stance with huge penalty threats may come across as being petty, but Microsoft's slip in complying with an order had some real world impact.

Mozilla's Harvey Anderson posted a chart of Firefox downloads, which visualizes the impact of Microsoft's decision and the fact that the browser choice was a no-show for about 15 months. Anderson claims that Firefox downloads plummeted by 63 percent to just 20,000 downloads per day, but increased by 150 percent to about 50,000 when the fix was implemented. As a result, Mozilla believes that it lost somewhere between 6 to 9 million browser downloads.

"After accounting for the aggregate impact on all the browser vendors, it seems like this technical glitch decreased downloads and diminished the effectiveness of the remedy ordered in the 2009 Commitments," Anderson wrote.

The value of 9 million missed browser downloads may be difficult to assess and since Mozilla is believed to receive a flat fee for the traffic it provides to Google. Much of the impact could be seen as additive to its declining market share, which hit a new low in October, according to StatCounter (22.32 percent). Google, was clearly not significantly impacted, even if one could easily argue that Microsoft's deletion of the browser choice screen helped soften the market share decline of Internet Explorer.

It's a blurry argument, but we know the EU follows through with investigations and the hefty fines it talks about. Breaking an agreement most certainly will not work in Microsoft's favor.

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Specifically, the paper sheds light on the submission and approval process prior to the introduction of the Firefox rapid release process and after. The lifespan findings are among the interesting data that was published and shows that the rapid release process has its advantages, despite the criticism.

The lifespan of a patch, which defines the time of submission to a status of landed, abandoned, or resubmitted has been 3.7 days or, according to Mozilla evangelist Paul Rouget, about the same as the lifespan of a common mosquito. For patches that actually landed in Firefox, the lifespan was 4.5 days before the rapid release process and 2.7 days after (for core developers). For cases of abandoned patches, the time span increased to 31.2 days (before) and 11.1 days (after), while resubmissions are listed with 3.8 (before) versus 2.5 days (after).

The review concluded that the review of patches has accelerated by about 34 percent following the introduction of the rapid release process.

The scientists said that their investigation was based on the review of the 1-year time frame prior to the rapid release process and one year after with 6,491 and 4,897 patches, respectively.

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In a move that should ruffle a few feathers at Google, Mozilla on Thursday opened the doors to Firefox Marketplace for Android device owners using the latest build of Firefox Aurora. This release, meant for "early adopters and testers", is a means for developers to get feedback on their apps as the Firefox Marketplace matures.

"Just last year, we started working to turn the Web into a viable apps development platform," the company said. "We created the Firefox Marketplace to allow developers to build, distribute and monetize rich, immersive apps that use Web technologies like HTML, JavaScript and CSS. We’ve made amazing progress developing Web APIs across platforms as we work to unlock the power of the Web on mobile, just as we did on desktop."

Already there are a large number of apps Android device owners can download and launch straight from the home screen spanning books/reference, business, education, entertainment/sports, games, health/fitness, lifestyle, music and news/weather. Six featured apps are showcased along the Marketplace top including Solitaire, Twitter and Jaunty.

Installation of the apps is rather straightforward, but they don't appear in Android's Settings / Apps menu when it comes time to delete them. To get these apps off the device, Firefox Aurora users must navigate to Tools / Apps. On this local page, users can long-press the listed app and choose Add to Home Screen (which they usually already are), or Delete.

"It’s still early days for Firefox Marketplace Aurora – we’ll be adding payments, ratings, reviews and more soon- stay tuned," Mozilla said. "The Firefox Marketplace will initially be available with Firefox for Android Aurora. Support for Firefox OS and Firefox on other platforms will come in the future."

To get started, follow these steps, straight from Mozilla:

1. Download Firefox Aurora on your Android phone
2. Open Firefox Aurora and in the Options Menu, and choose "Apps" (it was "Tools" then "Apps" for me)
3. Browse the Marketplace, install and use apps
4. Click Settings (in the Options Menu), then tap on "Feedback" to tell Mozilla what you think

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Mozilla's Firefox browser hit version 16 today, bringing with it a new feature called incremental garbage collection. Mozilla said that it has worked on this major feature for over a year and that it will improve performance in responsiveness as well as smoothness.

Firefox's garbage collection collects memory that JavaScript programs are no longer using. In earlier versions of Firefox, the garbage collection function would run for hundreds of milliseconds, essentially freezing the browser. Incremental garbage collection divides the work into smaller chunks.

"Rather than do a 500 millisecond garbage collection, an incremental collector might divide the work into fifty slices, each taking 10ms to complete. In between the slices, Firefox is free to respond to mouse clicks and draw animations," Mozilla wrote in a blog.

Download Firefox 16 from the links below:

Windows

Mac OS X

Linux

Linux x64

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Though not an official statement made by Mozilla, Côté says that Firefox 18 (with IonMonkey) is now 16 percent faster than Chrome 21 in Mozilla's own Kraken benchmark, while it remains behind Chrome in V8 and behind Chrome in Sunspider. Mozilla's own test page suggests that IonMonkey has improved from a time of 1991 ms with the first release of IonMonkey in Firefox in mid-August to currently 1933 ms. Chrome has improved from 2038 ms to 2019 ms in the same time frame.

Mozilla does not yet support Google's latest browser benchmark Octane in its comparison. In a recent evaluation on Mozilla Hacks, Alon Zakai argued that Octane has some flaws and that there may be, for example, too much emphasis on Mandreel, which Google uses in its Chrome Web Store but may not be so important on web pages overall.

Zakai noted that "Octane is an interesting new benchmark that, even with [some] problems […], does contain good ideas and is worth focusing on." Yet he points out that no single benchmark is perfect and we "should always be aware of the limitations of any single benchmark, especially when a single benchmark claims to represent the entire modern web."

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Designed as an alternative to OpenID or OAuth, Mozilla says that it is making the technology available to eliminate the need to remeber passwords for a number of sites. Persona is offered free of charge around the world. In this beta version, the technology already supports 25 languages.

The sign-up process consists of the user's email address and password and is done in less than a minute at https://login.persona.org.

Supported browsers include Internet Explorer 8 and 9, as well as the latest stable releases of Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera on the desktop; Mobile Safari on iOS 5.x and up; as well as Android's default browser 2.x and up; Chrome and Mozilla. Browsers that are explicitly not supported include IE 6 and 7, Google Chrome Frame, as well as third party browsers on iOS.

To work properly, browsers will eventually have to support Mozilla's navigator.id API. Until that happens, Mozilla is offering an implementation that can be used to work in all browsers mentioned above: Webmasters will have to use the https://login.persona.org/include.js file to start using Persona until native integrations of the API are available.

Websites that begin using an integration of Persona can also take advantage of a capability to integrate a fall-back ID provider, should the login of their users fail.

The new JavaScript engines just showed up in the first nightly release and could make it into the final version of the browser on January 1, 2013.

IonMonkey will upgrade the current JaegerMonkey, which was introduced with Firefox 4 in March of 2011, and bring Mozilla closer to Google's Crankshaft that is used in Chrome. The progress of IonMonkey can be seen at arewefastyet.com, which shows that, at least on Mozilla's test platform, IonMonkey is faster than Google's Chrome in Mozilla's Kraken benchmark, but still has some catching up to do in Sunspider, and rivals Safari's score in Google V8 benchmark.

Mozilla said that IonMonkey is optimized for long-running applications, while short applications will use the still intact JaegerMonkey. According to Mozilla's David Anderson, IonMonkey introduces loop-invariant code motion, sparse global value numbering, linear scan register allocation, dead code elimination as well as range analysis to the JavaScript engine.

The IonMonkey Firefox can be downloaded from Mozilla's nightly channel now. The Aurora developer version is due on October 9, while the Beta channel is likely to see IonMonkey on November 20, if Mozilla can move IonMonkey through its developer process smoothly.

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The Firefox crash report published by Mozilla suggests that most of us cannot access Firefox's hardware acceleration.

The reason for this circumstance is simply outdated hardware and outdated drivers. Just because Firefox supports hardware acceleration does not mean that everyone will get it. A prerequisite for this feature is a driver from Nvidia and AMD that is at least from June 2010 or newer (Intel is a bit more complicated, but described in Mozilla's driver blacklist).

The bottom line is that currently only 30 percent of Windows Firefox users can access hardware acceleration and 49 percent can access WebGL. Predictably, the more recent the OS release, the greater likelihood of GPU support. For example, 67 percent of Windows 8 users can use Firefox hardware acceleration, versus 47 percent of Windows 7 users, 17 percent of Windows Vista users, and 13 percent of Windows XP users.

It may be somewhat surprising that just about 100 percent of Mac OS X users are supported, but then we have to remember that this feature arrived only in a Firefox version for Mac OS X 10.6 and higher – and naturally most machines that shipped with that OS have sufficient hardware to run hardware acceleration.

It's hard to say if these numbers apply to other browsers as well. Microsoft's only browsers with hardware acceleration are IE9 and IE10, which are supported from Windows Vista SP2 (IE9) and up (IE10 requires Windows 8). Chrome added the feature in Chrome 7 (developer version) and it is still incomplete today. Google does not release any data on how many people actually use this feature and what requirements Google may have. However, Mozilla's data is based on 300,000 to 800,000 monitored crashes today, which is rather substantial. This would at least suggest that most computer users today to do not have the necessary equipment to run browser hardware acceleration by Mozilla's standards.

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Firefox developer Mozilla updated its blog with news of BananaBread, a first-person shooter that runs within a browser without the need to install plugins. To make the demo happen, the team said it ported a complete C++ game engine -- the open-source Cube 2: Sauerbraten -- to JavaScript and WebGL using Emscripten. The project required very few code modifications to the original game, the team said, which demonstrates that porting games to the Web does not have to be difficult.

"The project has several goals," reads the BananaBread blog. "First, to serve as a testcase for running a demanding 3D game in browsers: Having a working testcase lets us try out new browser features and to profile performance in order to make browsers faster. Another goal is to prove that games of this nature can run in JavaScript and WebGL, which many people are skeptical about. Finally, all the code in this project is open (and practically all the art assets), so others can learn from this effort and use this code to create their own browser games."

Here are all the technologies that Mozilla's Firefox 15 is now using to bring top-notch games to browsers:

* Game focused performance improvements to JavaScript, many inspired by games and demos that we saw on the Web or that developers sent to us for testing
* Wide range of WebGL performance improvements
* High precision timing
* Compressed texture support on desktop
* Smoother JavaScript execution on large code bases
* Hardware acceleration of 2D canvas on desktop
* FullScreen API
* PointerLock API (special thanks to David Humphrey and students at Seneca College)
* OrientationLock

"One of the main goals of the Mozilla Community working on games is to not only drive game development on Firefox but across all browsers," Mozilla said. "Any browser that has implemented the necessary modern Web standards used by the BananaBread demo can run it. These efforts help us stay in touch with how HTML5 is coming together and see opportunities where we can make developers’ lives easier. Hearing directly from the HTML5 game developer community is a key part of how we learn what needs to be done."

Mozilla's new BananaBread demo offers three playable maps against bots: Arena, Two Towers and Lava Chamber (Quake fans, are we?). If the demo isn't loading even though Firefox 15 has WebGL enabled, then the browser might have your GPU blacklisted anyway. Mozilla will blacklist a specific GPU based on its driver version:

Nvidia: requires driver numbered 8.17.12.5721 or greater
AMD: requires driver numbered 8.741.0.0 or greater
Intel: requires driver number 6.14.11 on XP, 7.15.10 on Vista, and 8.15.10 on Windows 7

OF course, this becomes a problem when hardware vendors and OEMS stop producing drivers for legacy products (older cards, laptops, etc.). There's a workaround/blacklist bypass in Firefox, but proceed at your own risk -- we don't take responsibility for any flaming GPUs. Simply click on the address bar in Firefox and type about:config. After that , make the following three changes:

* To enable WebGL, set webgl.force-enabled to true
* To enable Layers Acceleration, set layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true*
To enable Direct2D in Windows Vista/7, set gfx.direct2d.force-enabled to true

If the demo performs like you're moving against a nasty rip current (below 20fps), then there's probably a good reason why Mozilla blacklisted your GPU.

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Mozilla continues its torrid pace of releasing new versions of Firefox. Not scheduled for release until tomorrow, what appears to be a final version of Firefox 13 has appeared online.

New features and changes include:

• When opening a new tab, users are now presented with their most visited pages
• The default home page now has quicker access to bookmarks, history, settings, and more
• SPDY protocol now enabled by default for faster browsing on supported sites
• Restored background tabs are not loaded by default for faster startup
• Smooth scrolling is now enabled by default

See the full release notes for more.

Grab the download for your platform: Windows, Mac, and Linux

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Originally released on January 21, 2010 as "Namoroka", the browser is phased out with version 3.6.28. Mozilla offered the first replacement for 3.6 with Firefox 4, which was released on March 22, 2011. According to StatCounter, Firefox 3.6 has still a market share of about 2.9 percent.

Mozilla has been entangled in a controversy of browser support time frames when it introduced its rapid release schedule with Firefox 5, which schedules a new browser version every six weeks. Businesses complained that they would not have the ability to update their corporate users as well as software manuals at this pace. The browser maker recently addressed these concerns with the release of extended support release (ESR) versions of Firefox, which provides a 54-week support period for a browser release. While updated every six weeks, these releases only receive security updates and not the feature updates that are included in the regular desktop browser updates.

The current ESR release is Firefox 10.0.4 ESR, which will be supported until February 12, 2013 as version 10.0.8. Mozilla will launch the next ESR version as Firefox 17.0 ESR on November 12, 2012, which provides businesses ample time to transition to the new browser version.

There's nothing more annoying than loading up a web page and an embedded video -- typically commercial spots -- starts playing automatically. Sometimes the spots are hidden so well that they're hard to locate and pause, thus waking up the neighbors because the volume was cranked up even before the web page was accessed.

Honestly, there should be a law against this, but Mozilla seems to be developing a way for users to opt-in first before Flash ads, Java scripts and other content that uses plugins to automatically play. Mozilla's opt-in method could even help reduce threats like zero-day attacks that stem from exploiting security vulnerabilities in plugins.

"Whether you hate them or love them, content accessed through plugins is still a sizable chunk of the web. So much so, that over 99-percent of internet users have Flash installed on their browser," writes Mozilla software engineer Jared Wein in a blog.

According to Wein, the "click-to-play plugins" option was included in the nightly build of Firefox for desktop just days ago. Users wanting to take advantage of this feature immediately must download and install a nightly build, then go into about:config and enable the plugin.click_to_play flag.

"When plugins.click_to_play is enabled, plugins will require an extra click to activate and start 'playing' content," he reports. "This is an incremental step towards securing our users, reducing memory usage, and opening up the web."

Wein adds that he's currently working on implementing the ability for plugin activation settings to be remembered on a per-site basis. "I hope to get these changes landed within the next week before the deadline for Firefox 14," he says.

First-party support for a click-to-play option will be a welcome addition to Firefox. Currently there are third-party solutions that provide a similar service including the NoScript extension which blocks Flash, Silverlight, JavaScript, Java and other content by default. There's also Flashblock which blocks content with a static image which users must click if they want the media to play.

"Plugins are the most common source of user compromise, so not running them by default provides a defense against drive-by attacks, while still enabling them to run on sites where the user desires(YouTube, intranet, whatever)," states the Mozilla wiki. "Plugins can be installed without user interaction or consent, causing potential security and stability issues."

The Mozilla wiki also points out that plugins consume significant resources, both individually (i.e. Java starting because a given page requested it), and in aggregate (i.e. Flash consuming 30-percent of the CPU because of many ads and movies). Why an opt-in option hasn't been implemented by default before now is unknown given some mobile web browsers already offer this feature for faster web browsing.

Firefox director of engineering Jonathan Nightingale posted a few thoughts that appear to be a preparation for "some adjustments" that are seemingly published to avoid Mozilla being accused of delaying Firefox releases. There is no clear information if and when such "delays" may happen, but Nightingale noted that 40 days or 44 days for release cycles make just as much sense as 42 days.

Of course, it was Mozilla that published release dates for Firefox more than one year in advance, following exactly the 6-week release cycle process for the Nightly, Aurora, Beta and Stable release versions. While this strategy almost certainly will cause media reports of a delayed release date should Mozilla miss one of its own given dates, it is unlikely that anyone would care if Firefox would be released two days earlier or later. Google, for example, has transitioned to a 6-week release cycle in fall of 2010, but never published release dates in advance. Nightingale now says that Firefox will be released when it is ready, which is much more reasonable than sticking painstakingly close to the 42-day release goal.

It may be more important to note that Mozilla recently announced that Firefox 3.6 will finally reach the end of support on April 24, with Firefox 3.6.28 being the last release for the browser. The minimum requirement for running a supported version of Firefox will be Windows XP SP2 following the discontinuance of Firefox 3.6.

_{Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...}

_{Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?}

_{Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.}

_{Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?}

_{Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?}

_{Marty DiBergi: I don't know.}

_{Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?}

_{Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.}

_{Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.}

_{Marty DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?}

_{Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.}

That's the classic exchange from the 1984 film "This is Spinal Tap." Now Firefox has gone to 11.

For this new version, Firefox has learned some new tricks. The new Firefox will now support migration of bookmarks, history and cookies from Chrome. With Sync, now add-ons can be synced across all signed-in computers – no need to go hunting for each and every one on a fresh install.

Check out all the changes in the release notes here. Find the downloads at the links below:

Windows

Mac OS X

Linux

Linux x64

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One of the biggest changes coming from Windows 8 will be the Metro interface theme. It will bring Windows to a new form of computing.

Mozilla intends to be there to serve this new tablet and touch market with a version of Firefox that's made just for Metro. While Microsoft will surely make its version of Internet Explorer optimized for Metro, Mozilla wants to present the alternative choice. Given that some Windows users are basically trained to seek an alternative browser, this could be a good thing for Mozilla.

The project is now listed as "in progress" in the Mozilla wiki. Here are some of the project notes:

• Firefox on Metro, like all other Metro apps will be full screen, focused on touch interactions, and connected to the rest of the Metro environment through Windows 8 contracts.
• Firefox on Metro will bring all of the Gecko capabilities to this new environment and the assumption is that we'll be able to run as a Medium integrity app so we can access all of the win32 Firefox Gecko libraries avoiding a port to the new WinRT API for the bulk of our code. (Though we will need to have a pan and zoom capability for content.)
• Firefox on Metro is a full-screen App with an Appbar that contains common navigation controls (back, reload, etc.,) the Awesomebar, and some form of tabs.
• Firefox will have to support three "snap" states -- full screen, ~1/6th screen and ~5/6th screen depending on how the user "docks" two full screen apps. Our UI will need to adjust to show the most relevant content for each size.

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Mozilla is ringing in the new year with another timely version update of its browser. Released today is Firefox 10, allowing it to join the ranks of that other browser with double digit version numbers – Chrome.

Here are the new additions:

·  The forward button is now hidden until you navigate back

·  Anti-Aliasing for WebGL is now implemented (see bug 615976)

· Full Screen APIs allow you to build a web application that runs full screen (see the feature page)

· CSS3 3D-Transforms are now supported (see bug 505115)

·  HTML5 New element for bi-directional text isolation, along with supporting CSS properties (see bugs 613149 and 662288)

·  DEVELOPER Inspect tool with content highlighting, includes new CSS Style Inspector

·  DEVELOPER We've added IndexedDB APIs to more closely match the specification

·  FIXED Some users may experience a crash when moving bookmarks (681795)

Of note is that Firefox 10 is the first with an Extended Support Release (ESR) that will only make a major version jump every 42 weekss. The ESR version is meant for use by enterprises, public institutions, universities and other organizations so that they don't need to support a new version bump every six weeks in the normal release. The ESR version, however, will still receive all security-related updates.

Grab the download from the links below:

Normal Release

• Windows
• Mac
• Linux
• Linux x64

ESR (Extended Support Release)

• Windows
• Mac
• Linux
• Linux x64

That strategy has not changed and it is clear that Google will be steamrolling its weight into this market to compete with Microsoft for cloud app market share. What has changed however, that Mozilla is now quite apparently also thinking about its chances in this segment and if gaming is a fitting app environment for Firefox.

Mozilla quietly launched the developer preview of its Apps project, which outlines some guidelines how developers can create apps to run in Firefox. It's Mozilla's version of web apps, but it's all done in the open and other browser makers (if they matter) could adopt the idea. What is noteworthy is the gaming and entertainment component that was outlined by Rob Hawkes in a Mozilla Hacks post. If you have been following this topic, there is not much news and you may very well be aware that there is a Full Screen API, the Mouse Lock API, the Gamepad API, Websockets and WebRT than can be leveraged for online gameplay within the browser window. Hawkes, however, also states that BrowserID can be used to identify players. Even more importantly, it is the first time that Mozilla publishes, for the first time, ideas how the browser, in this case Firefox, could become a game platform.

Of course, feature such as the gamepad API are not yet available in Firefox (Chrome already supports this API) and Firefox lacks a certain standout feature to attract gamers and create the kind of buzz Chrome currently owns. We should notice, however, that Mozilla has gaming in its sights and given Firefox' HTML5 capabilities, it is a smart and necessary move. Of course, the strategy will only work if those features that are supporting online gaming will be available rather sooner than later.

Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs seemed to be especially happy about the deal as he tweeted that it is "a great day for the web."

Given the fact that Mozilla's livelihood depends on Google's search revenues, it is good news that Mozilla was able to renew the agreement. There is no information how much money Google paid to Mozilla in 2011, but we know that 84 percent of $121.1 million in licensing fees in 2010 came from Google. There was some speculation that Google may have ditched Mozilla, but Firefox still holds somewhere between 20 and 25 percent browser market share and it would be foolish for Google to let that go and allow Microsoft to pick up that share for Bing. Search remains Google's core revenue source and as long as Mozilla has substantial share it is unlikely that Google will drop Mozilla.

Mozilla said it signed a "significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google." Gary Kovacs added that "this new agreement extends our long term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years." There was no information on the financial terms, but it seems that Mozilla's funding has been secured until the end of 2014, which should give the organization breathing room to build up its browser platform strategy.

Can you believe that we entered summer with only Firefox version 4.0, and now we're going to close out the year with version 9.0? Firefox is definitely eating its Wheaties.

Here are the changes for Firefox 9.0:

• Added Type Inference, significantly improving JavaScript performance
• Improved theme integration for Mac OS X Lion
• Added two finger swipe navigation for Mac OS X Lion
• Added support for querying Do Not Track status via JavaScript
• Added support for font-stretch
• Improved support for text-overflow
• Improved standards support for HTML5, MathML, and CSS
• Fixed several stability issues
   

Find the Firefox download links below, or use the update function in your browser.

Windows

Mac OS X

Linux

NSS Labs, a provider of quarterly browser security reports, thinks so, as it states that the report was heavily skewed in Google's favor.

According to NSS, Google has taken unreasonable influence on the methodology of browser security testing, favored Google features over features in other browsers, did not showcase diligence in testing, and withheld important information in its blacklisting feed to discredit Firefox' ability to block malware.

NSS Labs criticizes the nature of this sponsored report, even if it was accused itself not too long ago to have taken funding from Microsoft for its reports, which usually present IE in a much better light than any other browser and typically focus on social malware exploits. Funded and commissioned studies always carry the inherent danger that a report could be skewed in on direction, which is, in fact, a reasonable assumption. Such studies are frequently funded to not only provide research data, but become marketing material.

Google engaged in a behavior that is common in the industry and some could claim that a focus on testing methodology may simply be a question of philosophy which features may be important and which not. In individual cases, this may be largely irrelevant. Even if you use the most secure browser, irresponsible behavior on the Internet can open doors to successful malicious attacks. However, if Google asked Accuvant to deliberately disable security features in Firefox (and other browsers), there is a clear problem and NSS has every right to spotlight Google's ugly strategy.

NSS noted that it analyzed Accuvant's study on request of some of its customers. I will leave it up to you to speculate which customers may have asked for that (unpaid?) favor.

Version 12 is not scheduled for a final release until April 24 of 2012. According to the recent platform meeting minutes, the removal of the OS security dialog in Windows was moved out to version 11 and background updates were moved to version 12. "Risk" was the reason for both delays.

While silent updates are a somewhat controversial feature that could alienate some Firefox users who want to retain control over the browser by default, there is no doubt that the mainstream user actually prefers silent updates. Chrome has benefited from silent updates since its launch in 2008 and has since then changed the perception of silent updates being "forced" updates to "convenient" updates.

The delay on Mozilla's side raises concerns about the overall competitiveness of the browser, given a recent development that saw Firefox' market share dropping from second to third rank - behind Google's Chrome. Mozilla can't afford any delays in its product roadmap and this one could have impact on Firefox' market share in 2012 as well as chances at a successful comeback.

The history of browser market share has shown that new features in browsers typically require a setting time of about four to six months to show effect. Other new features waiting in the pipeline include Chrome migration tools and the Home Tab App.

A "royalty" contract, which is based on advertising revenue generated by searches from Firefox ended in November and there has been no news from Mozilla whether that contract has been renewed or not. Typically. Mozilla chairman Mitchell Baker blogs about any critical announcements and since there has been no news from Baker in almost a month. The speculation is that Google may have told Mozilla to take a hike.

However, German website heise.de reports that, according to Google, there is a still a contract in place. Google royalties are critical for Mozilla to survive as 84 percent of the foundation's funds were provided by the Google deal in 2010 - more than $100 million annually. Common sense would suggest that supporting Mozilla would still support Google's ad revenue base as Firefox still holds about 25 percent of the market and those search revenues are nothing to sneeze at. However, a decline in market share hurts Mozilla's negotiation leverage with Google and it may be a good idea for Mozilla to diversify its revenue base.

Microsoft may be inclined to give Mozilla a good deal if it decided to promote Bing in its browser by default - and not just in a special version that is released on the side.

Mozilla said that this release will focus on HTML5 enhancements, giving us the feeling that the silent update feature will be pushed to version 11.

Aurora 10 will get WebGL anti-aliasing, support for the HTML5 Visibility API, 3D Transforms, some additions to its developer tools, web workers, DOM and Javascript functionality such as the addition of the battery API. However, we were surprised to see that Mozilla does not list the silent update as a feature for Aurora (Firefox) 10. In its feature tracker, the silent update has been marked as "at risk" and may not make it into version 10 as a result. As controversial as the silent update is among enthusiast Firefox users, there has been little doubt that the mainstream would like to make the update process more convenient, which possibly could convince more users to stay with Firefox.

Another much anticipated feature is not mentioned either - a tool that would automatically import Chrome bookmarks and settings to Firefox. It appears as if this feature will also not surface until version 11 - and is even mentioned as "at risk" for version 11. These two features, as well as a the new home tab (also marked as "at risk" for version 11) are features that Firefox would have needed need yesterday rather than tomorrow to be able to be more competitive with Chrome. At least the silent update support is a must-hit target for version 10.

If you're feeling a little adventurous, but not too much, then check out the download for Firefox 9 beta here.