Mozillla announced that it will soon start prompting Firefox users to upgrade select old plugins. This means that Firefox users who have outdated versions of the most popular plugins will soon see a notification urging them to update when they visit a web page that uses them.
Old versions of Silverlight, Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash on Windows are covered by this. In addition to this Firefox also automatically disables outdated version of Java for your safety.
Mozilla strongly recommends that you go to our Plugin Check page and update them as soon as possible. Old plugin versions can cause stability problems and are potentially insecure.
Flash, Acrobat Reader, and Java flaws account for most of the malware installs, and most users are bad at keeping these things up to date. Running a stack of update utilities is irritating to advanced users and confusing to novice users. Most people just want the same thing they used yesterday to work today, and are really annoyed when what worked yesterday starts nagging them to upgrade today. All this does is make the malware industry happy.
I noticed during weekend that my Firefox on several computers automatically opened Plugin Check page for me when I started it. And the result made me to update some of the plugins that were marked to be out of date. I recommend that you also check your plugins and update them to up-to-date versions.
It is also a good idea to check your Firefox Add-ons ass well. Keep them up to date and disable ones you don’t need.
6 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
HTTPS Everywhere plugin from EFF protects 1,500 more sites
The browser extension makes it easier to connect to encrypted websites.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/10/https-everywhere-plugin-from-eff-protects-1500-more-sites/
Members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation have updated their popular HTTPS Everywhere browser plugin to offer automatic Web encryption to an additional 1,500 sites, twice as many as previously offered.
A previous update to HTTPS Everywhere introduced an optional feature known as the Decentralized SSL Observatory. It detects and warns about possible man-in-the-middle attacks on websites a user is visiting. It works by sending a copy of the site’s SSL certificate to the EFF’s SSL Observatory. When EFF detects anomalies, it sends a warning to affected end users.
Tomi says:
One in four don’t clean their stinky old browsers – especially Firefoxers
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/12/outdated_browser_software_kaspersky/
Nearly one in four netizens are using outdated web browsers and are therefore easy pickings for viruses and exploit-wielding crooks.
Firefox users tend to be the worst for keeping up to date with new software releases, according to the survey by security biz Kaspersky Lab. The proportion of users with the most recent version installed was 80.2 per cent for Internet Explorer and 79.2 per cent for Chrome, but just 66.1 per cent for Firefox.
“Our new research paints an alarming picture. While most users make a switch to the most recent browser within a month of the update, there will still be around a quarter of users who have not made the transition. That means millions of potentially vulnerable machines, constantly attacked using new and well-known web-born threats.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mozilla: The problem is mobile, not money
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57550227-93/mozilla-the-problem-is-mobile-not-money/
The organization generated $163.5 million in 2011, mostly from searches performed with Firefox. But it still lacks a strong foothold the world of smartphones and tablets.
With more than 400 million Firefox users, Mozilla doesn’t have a problem with relevance.
But it does have a problem with mobile.
So concludes Mitchell Baker, leader of the organization behind the open-source Web browser and other projects designed to keep the Internet free from proprietary constraints. Firefox, which just celebrated its eighth birthday, is the main lever that Mozilla uses to try to keep the Internet open. But Firefox is largely absent from the explosive growth in the mobile world of smartphones and tablets.
“The current state of the mobile ecosystem concerns us the most,” said Mitchell Baker, who has led Mozilla since it was spun out of the Netscape browser project. Mozilla can’t bring its full browser technology to iOS, Windows Phone, and Windows RT, and people do things with native apps on mobile device that they might do with a Web browser on a PC.
“The stage we’re in with mobile devices — with different hardware, software, and user experience — is much more closed. It’s lacking many of the freedoms of the Web,” Baker said. “In the mobile space, we have less impact, and more computing time is moving in that direction.”
The bulk of Mozilla’s funds come from search-ad revenue shared by partners including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon, and eBay. “Most of that is from Google,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mozilla quietly kills Firefox 64-bit for Windows, despite an estimated 50% of testers using it
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/11/22/mozilla-quietly-kills-firefox-64-bit-for-windows-despite-an-alleged-50-of-testers-using-it/?fromcat=all
Mozilla Engineering Manager Benjamin Smedberg last Friday quietly posted a thread over on the Google Groups mozilla.dev.planning discussion board titled “Turning off win64 builds.” By Wednesday, Smedberg had declared that the 64-bit version of Firefox for Windows would never see the light of day, unless Mozilla decides to revert the decision at some point in the future.
Mozilla is still making a troubling decision here. The company may end up alienating a good chunk of its enthusiasts, or at least those that haven’t yet fled to Google’s Chrome.
Indeed, the decision has resulted in a huge uproar from 64-bit for Windows users, as noted on a Hacker News thread pointing to another discussion board. A few users have even shown off screenshots of Firefox using huge amounts of memory, specifically more than Windows 32-bit can address.
Firefox users are thus left without much of an option. They can switch to OS X or Linux, both of which have full versions of Firefox 64-bit. Windows 64-bit users meanwhile can only consider Internet Explorer and Opera, since both Chrome and Safari don’t offer 64-bit flavors.
Tomi Engdahl says:
64-bit Firefox is back
Firefox 64-bit version of Windows was buried in November. Now, Mozilla, however, indicate that the browser version makes a comeback. The reason is that the 64-bit version of cessation of causing a negative feedback to burst.
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/uutiset/64_bittinen_firefox_tekee_paluun_syy_on_erikoinen
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