Firefox 4 Beta Released To The Wild

Mozilla has released Firefox 4 Beta 1 into the wild with an apparent emphasis on speed and support for new and emerging web standards. New features as pointed out by Wired's Web Monkey are:

• Support for WebM video
• More support for emerging web standards like CSS 3, Canvas and Web Sockets
• Better page rendering performance, including a new HTML5 parser
• Crash protection that prevents bad plugins from blowing up the whole browser
• New add-ons manager
• Recently updated Jetpack SDK for new-style lightweight add-ons

Sounds great, but remember this is Beta release 1 so things are bound to be broken or at least a little unstable.

Personally, I'm a longtime Firefox user who recently made the switch to Chrome for all of my personal browsing. Speed was definitely a deciding factor. I am not so far down the Google path that Mozilla can't entice me back but I'll need to see some compelling reasons to do so. I'll give it a download and let you know my thoughts.

Also, as a teaser, tomorrow marks one month of using the iPad for me and I hope to put together my thoughts in a post later this week, so stay tuned. 

Firefox To Help Websites Home In On Your Location

Mozilla has released a new add-on technology for Firefox that helps websites detect the physical location of computers. The Geode project uses technology from Skyhook known as the Loki system which works out a computer's location from nearby wireless networks and can determine the location within seconds with an accuracy of about 10 to 20 metres. "Geode is strictly controlled by the user. When a website requests a location, a notification bar lets users decide whether to give their exact whereabouts, the neighbourhood or city they are in or nothing at all." The system will enable sites to serve up information relevant to the users location, such as news, weather, and of course ads, but also could be used for website authentication allowing people to log in from certain locations only. It's an interesting concept with obvious applications but it seems to me that it will only be a matter of time before the knowledge of our exact location is used against us for nefarious reasons. BBC story.

Firefox Plugin Infects Vietnamese Users Machines

Mozilla is increasing it's efforts to scrutinize user submitted plugins after it had discovered that a Vietnamese language pack on its official add-on page had been infected for months with rogue code. In mid-February the user submitted add-on passed Mozilla's scrutiny because the virus's signature was unknown at the time of testing. According to Wired's Threat Level blog "On Tuesday, a user named Hai-Nam Nguyen reported that anti-virus programs detected the Xorer Trojan inside the add-on. Firefox admins quickly confirmed the presence of the Trojan's code and removed the file the same day." It is unknown how many users actually installed the plugin but Mozilla says 16,667 people had downloaded the add-on since November 2007. The organization now intends to scan all of the user submitted add-ons each time virus definitions are updated, that seems a bit more proactive...