Mozilla & Google seal new Firefox search deal

Mozilla and Google today said that they had struck a new search deal that will provide "significant revenue" to the maker of Firefox.

 "We're pleased to announce that we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google," Mozilla said today in a statement. "This new agreement extends our long-term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years."

Under the deal, Mozilla will continue to offer Google as the default search engine in Firefox, which now controls about a quarter of the browser market. 

"Mozilla has been a valuable partner to Google over the years and we look forward to continuing this great partnership in the years to come," said Alan, Google's head of search.

Mozilla declined to provide details of the new contract, citing confidentiality requirements. Later, a spokesman refused to say whether the deal was comparable to the previous agreement.

In 2010, the last year for which Mozilla has released financial statements, the Google contract generated 84% of Mozilla's $123 million in revenues, or approximately $103 million.

Google's contribution to Mozilla's bottom line in 2009 was about $89 million, or 86% of the browser maker's annual income.

The Mozilla-Google deal expired last month, but Mozilla did not alter Firefox's default search provider or the browser's start page, which displays Google's search page.

Questions about Mozilla's dependence on Google have been raised since the latter launched its own Web browser, Chrome, in September 2008. According to Internet metrics firms

StatCounter, in November 2011, Chrome owned a 25.7% share of the global browser usage market to edge into second place ahead of Firefox's 25.2%.

Last week a research testing company accused Google of attempting to quash Firefox using a triple-threat campaign to deny it revenues, withhold anti-malware services and -- through a Google-sponsored report -- claim that Chrome is significantly safer.

Google denied the second and third charges, and with the announcement today, has made the first moot.

Mozilla has made only minor steps to wean itself from Google. In October, the open-source organization launched a customized edition, dubbed "Firefox with Bing," that uses Microsoft's Bing search as the default engine.

As recently as two weeks ago, Mozilla declined to confirm that it had renewed the lucrative Google contract, saying then only that it was still negotiating with its browser rival.

Because of Mozilla's financial disclosure timetable, the impact of the new contract won't be apparent until the fall of 2013, when Mozilla issues revenue numbers for 2012.

Mozilla speeds up Firefox 9.0 with a lion interface

Though Mozilla's Firefox has been overshadowed of late by competition from Web behemoth Google's Google Chrome browser, you can hardly say the totally non-profit and of course completely free software developer is sitting still. With a new technology called "Type Inference," Mozilla has sped up JavaScript performance in its New Firefox 9 Web browser by over 35 percent, as demonstrated by several industry standard benchmark tests.

The new release of Firefox, which was announced today on the Mozilla Blog, also adds better support for Apple's latest desktop interface, Mac OS X Lion, including support for two-finger swipe gestures and a more Lion-like interface design.

Firefox 9 throws many features for Web site developers too. Their sites can now deliver large amounts of data to the browser using its support for "chunking XHR requests, allowing Web sites to display content as it’s downloaded instead of waiting for the entire download to complete," the post in the blog said. Developers can also use JavaScript to query the user's Do Not Track preference, while the release provides improved support for CSS (especially for text overflow conditions), HTML5, and MathML.


In preliminary testing, the new browser version posted speed gains on the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, Mozilla's own Kraken benchmark, and Google's V8 benchmark. The improvements amounted to 9 percent, 32 percent, and 36 percent, respectively.

With this release, Mozilla has also updated Firefox for Android. New for the mobile browser is tablet optimization for landscape and portrait orientation. Thumbnails now appear alongside the screen for each open tab, and swiping is supported. Users can also add site bookmarks to their Android home screen for app-like access.

A new Action Bar menu lets Android users access Firefox Preferences, Add-ons, and downloads. It also sports back, forward and bookmark buttons, according to the blog post.

Finally, the Android version of Firefox 9 lets sites access the mobile device's camera and supports HTML5 Form Validation, "which automatically validates Web site form fields like numbers, emails and URLs without developers needing to write a custom code or use a third-party library."

It's anyone's guess as to whether Firefox will be able to stem the onslaught from Google, but it clearly won't be for lack of constant improvements from the Mozilla team. You can try out Firefox 9 for yourself and into enter into life of high speed Web, by heading to the Firefox download page. The New Version are available for Windows 7, Vista, and Windows XP; Mac OS X and Linux in dozens of languages.

Internet Explorer more secure than Mozilla Firefox, Says Study

The Microsoft is much much happy now as they have a second position in their hands. Microsoft's Internet Explorer does a better job protecting systems from attackers who already have gained some degree of access than Mozilla's Firefox, and Google's Chrome trumps both of them, according to a new browser security study from Accuvant.

They came up with those results by analyzing the security features of the three most popular web browsers, but have decided not to employ the usual metrics: numbers of patched vulnerabilities, the severity of the flaws and the time it took for the developers to fix them.

As for the raw details, Accuvant's study didn't just focus on the sheer number of published vulnerabilities that a browser has at the time of testing. Rather, Accuvant presumed that a browser vulnerability is going to be exploited in some fashion by a third-party: The security testing, therefore, focused on the strength of a browser's anti-exploitation measures after-the-fact—"the software with the best anti-exploitation technologies is likely to be the most resistant to attack and is the most crucial consideration in browser security," Accuvant wrote.

While Google's Chrome browser won the day in Accuvant's research, the browser didn't sail through with a perfect score. Accuvant noted that Chrome, along with the other two browsers in the test, failed to adequately offer up strong enough URL blacklisting to pass Accuvant's examinations—a daily comparison of roughly 6,000 malware-related URLs against either Microsoft's URL Reporting Service or Google's Safe Browsing List.

"Gathering intelligence about malware URLs is generally performed by running honeypots and spamtraps, and harvesting URLs from malware captured in the wild. Since no authoritative source exists, it is likely that each organization gathering data is getting one part of the overall picture," Accuvant wrote. "Based on Accuvant's analysis, no party is performing this data collection comprehensively."

And while all three browsers employ address space layout randomization (ASLR), data execution prevention (DEP) and stack cookies (GS), Firefox does not implement sandboxing (the separation of running programs), plug-in security and Just-In-Time hardening (preventing javascript located on websites from compiling code that can be run on the target system).
That said, Chrome's apparent excellence in sandboxing, plug-in security, JIT hardening, and Address Space Layout Randomization, among other features, was enough to win it top honors. But Mozilla isn't letting Accuvant have the last word regarding the security of its browser.

Microsoft Silverlight 5 Released

Microsoft released Silverlight 5, which could be the last major release of Microsoft’s application framework  for writing and running rich Internet applications.

Microsoft made available on December 9 for download the gold version of Silverlight 5, the latest version of its browser plug-in and Web, desktop and mobile development platform.

Silverlight Version 5 will be supported by Microsoft until 2021 — which is a much longer period of time than previous Silverlight releases have been supported.

• Download Silverlight 5 plug-in ~ Aprox. 7 MB
 

The version 5 release supports all the Previous platforms which it's previous versions of  Silverlight did: Windows, Mac.

 It also works with Safari, Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Silverlight 5’s  special  features include Hardware decode of H.264 media; extensionof the trusted application model to the browser; and graphics stack improvements with 3D support using the XNA programming interface on Windows.

Silverlight 5 was originally expected to be released to the Web in November 2011.

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