“We believe a Mac OS X 10.5 minimum will allow us to provide the best experience possible to our users,” Mozilla Mac programmer Josh Aas said Tuesday in a mailing list announcement. Firefox is built on a browser engine called Gecko, and the upcoming version 1.9.3 will have technology for Mac OS X 10.4 and before removed, he said.

Mozilla is working on an update to Firefox 3.6, which uses Gecko 1.9.2, that puts plug-ins such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight into a separate memory location in an effort to increase stability. The group hopes to release a beta version of that Firefox version by the end of March.

Full article at CNET

Luckily for Mozilla, a relatively small sliver of the mobile phone-toting population actually has one of the two compatible devices, so there’s time to smooth out Firefox before it matures on another mobile platform. Windows Mobile is slated to be next, with Android to follow. You can download Firefox 1.0 for Maemo here, and read more details in Mozilla’s blog post.

Full article at CNET

This is often true of browsers and especially true of Firefox.

The team behind Mozilla’s browser is constantly adding little enhancements and changes to the user interface, and not all of them are welcome. The tiny tweaks sometimes get in the way of beloved behaviors that have been around for years. Luckily, Firefox is engineered to allow you to undo those changes and otherwise customize the browser to your heart’s content.

Here’s our guide to customizing Firefox 3.6.

Still blocked is the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) add-on, but Mozilla is working on an alternative for users.

“We’re hard at work on improving the experience for (especially enterprise) users who wish to override the blocking of the WPF plugin before we remove it from the blocklist, and I’m working on a post to clarify the events of the past few days,” Shaver wrote. “We (especially I) appreciate your patience and support as we work to keep our users safe and comfortable with all the tools at our disposal.”

Full article

6 of the reports, covering 11 of the vulnerabilities, are rated Critical. These include crashes with evidence of memory corruption, heap buffer overflows, and several updates of open source libraries with critical flaws. Three bugs are rated Moderate and 2 low.
Time’s running out on Firefox 3.0.x. Mozilla will be providing security and stability updates until January 2010 and they urge users to upgrade to 3.5.x.

One serious bug in the “BrowserFeedWriter” could be hit with malicious Javascript code to run an attacker’s command with elevated privileges. A second critical TreeColumns dangling pointer vulnerability, along with a third set of critical issues in the browser engine, could allow a bad guy to crash Firefox and run “arbitrary code,” which might be to install malware, on a vulnerable computer.

Both updates also fix a low-priority flaw in the Location bar that could be used to hide a URL by using certain Unicode characters, and 3.0.14 patches up a moderate hole involving PKCS11 modules that could “affect the cryptographic integrity” of a vulnerable browser.

Full Story: Firfox Update Fixes Critical Flaws

Mozilla is set to launch One Billion Plus You today, August 3rd. The site will have even more details and comprehensive statistics on the accomplishment.

Full Article at PC World

While the exchange may seem like just another instance of politicians being oblivious to a changing world, at least no one muttered anything about tubes, the Internets, or Web site numbers.

Read “State Department Asks Hillary Clinton for Firfox” at Switched.com

Specially when the changes are so minimal. Looking at the before and after images requires Sherlockian powers of deduction. [..] The changes are very subtle and, if you ask me, they are as good as the original intentions of the logo. I can’t say it’s an improvement because I don’t think there wasn’t anything in the previous one, merely two years old, that needed 14 iterations to improve. This is simply two ways of rendering a fox over a non-descript globe. You can make it more furry, you can make it less furry. You can have more land, you can have less land. You can have more shine, you can have less shine. Etcetera. Both options are perfectly acceptable.

Full article at Brand New

This makes Mozilla projects like Firefox a safe place for an open-source community to congregate, contribute, and win. For this reason, Microsoft and Google are going to struggle to compete with Firefox, because both have too much vested, corporate interest in steering the Web to their own parochial interests, whereas Mozilla can exist solely to make Firefox better for the world.

More information at CNET