If everything goes according to the plan, Rust, Mozilla’s experimental programming language that has been in development since 2006, could slowly replace C++, which is currently used by the open source organization.

Just like Google’s Go programming language, Rust syntax is similar to that of C and C++ and destined to provide memory safety, greater security and good concurrency support.

Although Mozilla still has a long way to go, if you are curious enough, feel free to download the alpha version of Rust 0.1 compiler, which has been just released.

With Google, Mozilla and Microsoft developing their own programming languages, it looks like the future of web browsers will be very exciting.

According to Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla’s Director of Firefox Engineering, the company has been quite busy at brainstorming and implementing new ideas to improve Firefox’s security,

First in the list is the JIT (just in time) compiler hardening, which should protect users against JIT spraying attacks.

“The reality is that the way our JIT engine is built makes it somewhat resilient to JIT Spraying attacks,” Johnathan said. “But there is still work we can do on that class of vulnerability to just get it out of the realm of even the theoretical — and that work is ongoing.”

In addition to that, it looks like Mozilla is looking at the Google’s Chrome sandboxing feature, which significantly browser’s security. However, the mentioned term usage has been somewhat vague and with no mention in implementation date,

“Sandboxing has some real benefits, but it’s not a silver bullet, it is something that our platform team is looking at really closely.”

As far as updates go, Nightingale has stated that Mozilla will be improving the way Firefox handles security updates, which should require little to no interaction from the end user aka Silent Updates, which we detailed sometime last year.

So here you have it folks and in case you are wondering about the release date of Firefox 10, which will not include the mentioned features, it’s January 31st.

[Thanks, Ichan]

[Via: eSecurityPlanet]

With the Firefox 10, Opera 12 and Internet Explorer 10 releases just around the corner, guys from TomsHardware have decided to test the latest stable builds of the top 5 web browsers on both Windows 7 and Mac OS X Lion.

How did your favorite web browser perform? Let’s find out.

Tested versions

Internet Explorer 9
Firefox 9
Google Chrome 16
Opera 11.60
Safari 5.1.2

Startup Time Performance Benchmarks

JavaScript Performance Benchmarks

HTML5 Performance Benchmarks

Harware Acceleration Performance Benchmarks

Conclusion

Even though Firefox did not beat other browsers most of the time, its consistency and strong score average has demonstrated how solid Mozilla’s web browser actually is. Therefore, as concluded by the TomsHardware journalists, the winner this time is Firefox 9, followed by Google Chrome 16 and Opera 11.60.

As far as Mac OS X benchmarks go, Safari still remains the web browser of choice.

[Thanks, Ichan]

Available as a separate add-on as well.

Depending on how smooth things will go with Firefox 11 development, Mozilla plans to include a 3D web Inspector, which is already available in latest Firefox 11 (Aurora) builds.

Tilt 3D, a Firefox extension developed by the Mozilla itself, allows developers to render the 3D version of selected web page when required.

While it might sound like a waste of time, Tilt 3D can be actually pretty useful. “Since the DOM is essentially a tree-like representation of a document, this tool layers each node based on the nesting in the tree, creating stacks of elements, each having a corresponding depth and being textured according to the webpage rendering.”, said the authors.

However, since Tilt 3D is based on WebGL, not every video card is supported.

What else can you expect from future Firefox releases? See the following page.

Tild 3D extension page
Download Firefox 11 (Aurora)

Although more details were not revealed that day, one of the unnamed sources now claims that Google will pay Mozilla almost $300 million for every year or nearly $1 billion in total.

This is a significant increase, considering that Google was responsible for a 84 percent of Mozilla’s revenue in 2010, which was $123 million.

Why so much? Apparently, Microsoft and Yahoo were also interested in search deal, resulting in a bid war, which Google has won.

[Via: AllThingsD]

Despite continuous drama between Google Chrome and Firefox, business is as usual at Silicon Valley.

After negotiations that were reported more than few months ago, it looks like both companies have finally come to an agreement, as Google and Mozilla have renewed their search deal for another 3 years.

What does that mean?

It means that Google will continue to be the default search engine of Firefox for years to come.

As usual, additional details were not revealed but hey, a deal is a deal right?

Although it’s not yet publicly announced and can’t be downloaded from the “official” site, some users have managed to find Firefox 9 in the official Mozilla Nightly servers and that’s exactly where you can download it.

So what’s new? There are actually a few neat things, from improved web standards support to stability fixes, but the most important one is the Type Inference, which drastically improves JavaScript performance.

How much? While we wait for the final build benchmarks, you check the following graph from our previous post to see what you can expect:

Firefox 9 Final Changelog

• 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

Download Firefox 9 Final

We will update download links upon official release.

Accuvant, the US based research, firm has published a new study, which compared security features of the three most popular web browsers: Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Firefox.

As it turns out, the search giant funded study has made a conclusion that Google Chrome is the most secure browser out there, followed by Internet Explorer and Firefox.

After such claims, Mozilla has decided to respond with the following statement:

“Firefox includes a broad array of technologies to eliminate or reduce security threats, from platform level features like address space randomization to internal systems like our layout frame poisoning system. Sandboxing is a useful addition to that toolbox that we are investigating, but no technology is a silver bullet. We invest in security throughout the development process with internal and external code reviews, constant testing and analysis of running code, and rapid response to security issues when they emerge. We’re proud of our reputation on security, and it remains a central priority for Firefox.”

So here you have it folks. Despite continuous IE bashing in various communities, it still managed to beat Firefox in a non-biased study.

What do you think?

[Via: Forbes]

Web Browsers as Famous Girls,
Girls as Browsers and
If Browsers Were Women

Here is another one from the Mother Russia itself.

Source: Spynet.ru

While there is no mentioning of a specific timeline or any future date, according to Lawrence, multi process implementation requires a lot of time and resource investments, which is not exactly what Mozilla wants at this moment.

Instead of focusing on time consuming tasks, Firefox team will work on smaller initiatives that will be delivered in a shorter timeframe and should improve overall Firefox responsiveness.

What can you expect from the future Firefox releases? Here are some of the improvements: out of process plugins, places optimizations and incremental garbage collection.

[Thanks, Blake]