The main changes of Firefox 3.0.9 are:

• Fixed several security issues.
• Fixed several stability issues.
• Many users experienced an issue where a corrupt local database caused Firefox to “lose” its stored cookies. (bug 470578)
• Fixed an issue where, starting with Firefox 3.0.7, inline image attachments on popular webmail services (like AOL and AIM) would not display. (bug 482659)
• Large forms would sometimes take a long time to submit. (bug 426991)
• In certain cases, new windows would not have proper focus. (bug 446568)

Links
Mozilla Firefox 3.0.9 announcement: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0.9/releasenotes/;
Mozilla Firefox 3.0.9 complete changelog: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?keywords_type=anywords&keywords=fixed1.9.0.9+verified1.9.0.9.

Firefox 3.0.8 fixes the following two bugs:
485286: XSLT should heap allocate all evalContexts;
485217: Exploitable crash in [@txMozillaXSLTProcessor::TransformToDoc ].

Links
Mozilla Firefox: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/firefox/;
Mozilla Firefox 3.0.8 release notes: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0.8/releasenotes/

Google releases Android code as Open Source

With the release, Google kept it promise since it was announced on the “Android’s roadmap” for the fourth quarter.

According to the download page the source is approximately 2.1GB in size and it need 6GB more to complete the build. At the moment only Linux and Mac OS systems are officially able to compile the code while Windows is not currently supported.

Dave Bort, a Google software engineer and author of the announcement, stated that: “Today is a big day for Android, the Open Handset Alliance, and the open-source community.  All of the work that we’ve poured into the mobile platform is now officially available, for free, as the Android Open Source Project”.

The announcement come a day before the the scheduled sale of the first Android-based smartphone: the T-Mobile G1 phone.

Links
Google Android: http://www.android.com/;
Google’s announcement: http://source.android.com/posts/opensource;
Google Android source code download: http://source.android.com/download.

One of the changes for example regards the Gecko layout engine with improvements in supporting Web standards like W3C Geolocation API, Java Script query selectors, and Web worker threads. Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 also includes support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties.

Regarding the interface, Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 will have a new tab switching shortcut and improved control over the smart bar.

While on the multimedia side Firefox 3.1 beta 1 will include the support for OGG Theora and OGG Vorbis on all platforms.
Firefox 3.1 beta 1 is currently available for download in more than 35 languages.

Links Firefox 3.1 Beta announcement: http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2008/10/14/firefox-31-beta-1-now-available-for-download/;
Firefox 3.1 Beta download: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html.

When the user enable this feature, every time he tries to send out an e-mail at the given hours, the Gmail interface will prompt some math quizzes; of course only if these quizzes are solved correctly in the given time, the e-mail can leave the server.

To activate “Mail Goggles” the user have to visit the “Labs” tab under the Gmail settings and enable it; after that, under the “General” tab there is a section for setup at which days and hours “Mail Goggles” will be actually active. Of course this nice feature only works if the user uses the web interface and not if he uses e-mail clients like Microsoft Outlook Express or Mozilla Thunderbird

Links
Google’s announcement: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-stop-sending-mail-you-later.html.

Firefox� 3.0.2 contains the following updates:

Fixed several security issues.

Fixed several stability issues.

Official releases for Sinhala and Slovene are now available.

Beta releases for Bengali, Galician, Hindi, Icelandic, Kannada, Marathi, Telegu, and Thai are available for testing.

Fixed a number of minor issues with the layout of certain web pages.

Fixed several theme issues that affected right-to-left locales.

Fixed issue that caused some users with customized toolbars to have their Back and Forward buttons go missing (bug 426026)

Add new Extended Validation (EV) roots to Firefox 3.0.2.

On certain IDN sites, the password manager would not fill in username and password details properly.

Fixed several hangs and crashes that occurred when using screen readers.

Fixed Mac-specific issues:

• Keyboard shortcuts would stop working in some cases.
• Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Indic characters can not be entered (using IME) into text fields in Flash objects (bug 357670)

Firefox 3.0.1 could not be used when the user profile is stored on an AFP directory (bug 417037)

Links
Mozilla Firefox: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/firefox/;
Mozilla Firefox 3.0.2 release notes: http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0.2/releasenotes/

The first vulnerability, identified by Bach Koa Internetwork Security, is a buffer overflow that get triggered when a user saves a Web page containing a very long “title” tag. As usual when buffers overflow are exploited, an attacker could use it to inject malicious code to then have control of the victim’s computer.

The second vulnerability fixed is the “carpet bombing” flaw discovered by researcher Aviv Raff. The vulnerability is caused by the use of an outdated version of Apple WebKit by Chrome. The vulnerability causes Windows to download a dangerous Java archive file (JAR) and execute it without any warning to the users.

The vulnerable version released last week is the 0.2.149.27, while the new version is 0.2.149.29.

Links

Google Chrome: http://www.google.com/chrome;

Bach Koa Internetwork Security’s advisory: http://security.bkis.vn/?p=119;

Aviv Raff’s advisory: http://aviv.raffon.net/2008/09/03/GoogleMule.aspx.

As it is an “alpha” version, this version is intended for developers and users who are willing to accept the experience of bugs and want to report them.

Even so, this alpha of Firefox 3.1 contains many nice features over the 3.0 version released recently:

• Support for the HTML 5 <video> element;
• Initial support for web worker threads;
• You can now drag and drop tabs between browser windows;
• Ability to make use of Aero “Glass” in XUL;
• Support for CSS 2.1 properties: ::before and ::after, and white-space:pre-line;
• Support for CSS 3 properties: -moz-border-image, word-wrap: break-word, text-shadow, box-shadow and column-rule;
• Performance improvements and new preference values for color management profile support.

Future test versions of Firefox 3.1 will also include some improvement in handling JavaScript, with the new JavaScript engine called “TraceMonkey”.

The alpha release of Firefox 3.1 can be downloaded from Mozilla’s Web site

Links

Mozilla announcement: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/3.1a2/releasenotes/.

According to Google, Chrome’s objective is not to be only a normal web browser, but a platform to better run Web Applications. In order to achieve that objective Google developed Chrome with strong support of JavaScript and AJAX.

One of the various changes that Chrome implements, compared to other browsers, is that each tab behaves as a separate browser with the bookmarks bar, address bar, the menus and the icons inside the tab. Also in Chrome the tabs are grouped by relation. If the user open a new tab from a link in an active page that new tab appears next to the originating page.

The address bar and the search bar are actually merged together in order to save space.

Obviously since Google Chrome is still in beta, it is has many features that are still to be implemented. For example Google Chrome lacks of an interface to manage the saved bookmarks. Chrome is also lacking a progress bar to show how much of a Web page has loaded.

At first only the Windows version is available, but Google is developing a open-source version for Linux.

Links

Google Chrome: http://www.google.com/chrome.

The announcement has been made with a post to IEBlog, the official blog of Internet Explorer.

The privacy will be granted by “InPrivate”, a new technology created my Microsoft. When activated, this function will make all tracks (cookies, history, etc)� volatile; the IEBlog specify that:

• New cookies are not stored
  • All new cookies become “session” cookies
  • Existing cookies can still be read
  • The new DOM storage feature behaves the same way
• New history entries will not be recorded
• New temporary Internet files will be deleted after the Private Browsing window is closed
• Form data is not stored
• Passwords are not stored
• Addresses typed into the address bar are not stored
• Queries entered into the search box are not stored
• Visited links will not be stored

Internet Explorer 8 is currently in beta testing and it is expected to be available close to the end of this year.

Links

Microsoft Internet Explorer: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/download-ie.aspx;

Microsoft’s announcement: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/08/25/ie8-and-privacy.aspx.