Category: Mozilla
Firefox Brand Used To Cover Spyware
Mozilla isn’t too happy about it.
According to a report by Citizen Lab, Gamma International, a UK based firm that produces surveillance software (FinFisher), is tricking people into installing their spyware on their machines, which is later masked as Firefox.exe.
As noted in the Mozilla’s blog post, “when a user examines the installed spyware on his/her machine by viewing its properties, Gamma misrepresents its program as “Firefox.exe” and includes the properties associated with Firefox along with a version number and copyright and trademark claims attributed to “Firefox and Mozilla Developers.”
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HTML5: Epic Citadel On Unreal Engine 3
After Mozilla’s partnership announcement with Epic Games earlier this year, both companies have finally demonstrated the capabilities of HTML5 and JavaScript in a new video, which shows a web version of “Epic Citadel” demo that does not require any plugins to run.
The best part? According to the video, it took them only 3 days to do so, thanks to asm.js and Emscripten, which first appeared in Firefox 22 Alpha.
Opera Sues Its Ex-Employee For $3.4 Million
Claims he took trade secrets to Mozilla.
Now here is a new drama for you. Apparently, Opera Software is suing one of its visionary ex-employees, Trond Werner Hansen, who joined the company in 1999 and worked till 2006, then left shortly after only to join for another year from 2009 to 2010.
Why visionary? According to the claims, he was behind a lot of innovations that everyone loves, including tabbed browsing, speed dial, mouse gesture and integrated search.
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Firefox’s Usage Stats (Telemetry) Are Not Anonymous
Your personal information will be shared with 3rd parties.
We won’t blame you if you never read Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and other “useless” information. However, there is one guy who did so and as it turns out, Mozilla’s telemetry data policy got some disturbing details.
In fact, the open source organization states that their policy is to “make Personal Information, such as your name and email address, and Potentially Personal Information, such as the URL of the site you last visited, only available to its employees, contractors, and selected contributors who signed confidentiality agreements that prohibit them from using or disclosing such information other than for approved Mozilla purposes.”
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1,000 Firefox OS Phones Ordered Within Few Hours
Already out of stock.
Now here is something that will make Mozilla’s Firefox OS fans happy. According to the recent report, the open source organization sold out all their phones in just a few hours.
Although Geeksphone manufactured a total of 10,000 FOS phones (mostly for Mozilla employees and other partners), only 1,000 of them were shipped, which caused the supply issues. Interestingly enough, Geeksphone founder and CEO Javier Aguera said that they were surprised at the quick reaction and the number of people who were trying to buy a Firefox OS phone.
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Q&A With Mozilla’s Security Community Hints At Electrolysis Re-Evaluation
Seeing that today is a slow news today we’ve decided to dig around the web and see what kind of glittery magic you can find there. As it turns out, Mozilla has recently did the IAMA session on reddit, which can be found on the following page.
Interestingly enough, the open source organization has revealed that they are re-evaluating Electrolysis (e10s), the multi-process architecture that they canned back in 2011. What was the point of it (other than process isolation)? Offer better UI responsiveness, stability and performance on multi-core machines.
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Firefox OS Phones Coming In June
If you’ve been waiting for something more specific than “sometime in 2013”, then we have some good news for you. As learned in AllThingsD conference “D: Dive Into Mobile”, first Firefox OS smartphones will be launching in June in the following regions: Venezuela, Brazil, South Africa, Spain, Portugal and Poland.
If your country is not in the list, chances are you will have to wait till the end of 2013, unless you are from the US, in that case don’t expect any Firefox OS smartphones this year at all.
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Mozilla Wants To Integrate Payment System Into Firefox OS
Draws inspiration from Google’s One Pass.
With the impending launch of Firefox OS, it looks like Mozilla is working on a new payment system API, which aims to simply and secure the process.
By modifying Google Wallet’s in-app purchase API, they have built a system where a payment will start and finish in the client but any further processing and notifications happen server side, which means that the payment side does not know about the product that the user has purchased.
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Mozilla And Samsung To Develop A New Rendering Engine
Hopefully, it’s not made out of cheap plastic.
It seems like a new generation of rendering engines are breeding, which means pretty exciting times ahead, at least for the web browser enthusiasts like ourselves. Developers on the other hand are likely to tremble in fear.
Earlier this week, Mozilla has officially announced a new rendering engine called “Servo”, which (as we wrote back in December) is built using Rust, Mozilla’s own programming language, targeting multi core hardware.
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Mozilla Considers Limiting Customization Options
Doesn’t want to frustrate consumers.
After reaching the point where average Joe now heavily influences the overall direction of the product, you will hear tech enthusiasts complain that companies are “dumbing down” everything just to please the masses.
Now, Alex Limi, Mozilla’s head of project design strategy, has raised an interesting point: should you have that many customization options that can often break sites?
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