Over 600 million users are surfing the Web with a potentially unsafe browser, according to a Swiss study released this week. Among the least compliant were users of Internet Explorer, which currently dominates the Internet browser market. The study was conducted by ETH Zurich, Google, and IBM, examined the Google logs of users browsing the Web between January 2007 and June 2008.

A total of 52.4% of all IE users had failed to upgrade to IE7, the latest version of Microsoft’s browser, according to the survey results. Moreover, merely 47.6% of IE users had all of the software upgrades and patches installed on their browsers needed for “safe” Internet surfing. In contrast, 83.3% of Firefox users were using totally updated browsers, followed by 65.3% for Safari and 56.1% for the Opera browser.

The data was collected in mid-June 2008. The users were scattered among 78 percent Internet Explorer users, 16 percent Firefox, 3 percent Safari, and 0.8 percent for Opera. Of these, 52 percent were running the latest version of Internet Explorer, 92 percent for Firefox, 70 percent for Apple, and 90 percent for Opera.

Web browsers are often a weak link in the security chain, as software vulnerabilities can make it easy for hackers to gain control of a PC. When that happens, hackers can perform malicious acts such as stealing personal data or turning PCs into spam-spewing drones.

What the researchers found is that although software vendors provide patches for security problems, it can take days, weeks or months before people update their applications. In the meantime, those users are at risk.

Source: PC Magazine

The current explosion of social networking will soon result in most websites having a social networking component.  As a result the big step in social networking isn’t going to be who creates the next MySpace, Facebook, or YouTube, but who creates a website or software to consolidate all the data that all these networks produce.

Flock is a browser based on Mozilla Firefox. Flock creator call it “the social browser” as it enhanced multiple automations for social networking and web 2.0 services like Flickr, Blogger, Twitter etc. Flock comes with a built-in RSS aggregator for keeping an eye on your favorite feeds and works with almost any of Firefox add-ons.

Flock automatically activates these services within its features:

• Flock can indicate when friends have updated their profile, uploaded photos or other things.
• Flock has internal features that allow sharing of text, links, photos and videos.
• Flock has its own system allowing preview of online videos and photos, and subscription to video feeds.
• Flock’s Feed Reader organizes Atom and RSS feeds.
• Flock’s Blog Editor allows direct posting into a designated blog, along with being a blog reader.
• Flock also allows for third-party add-ons, including a number of Firefox extensions

The 10MB download picks up bookmarks, history, passwords, and other settings from your existing installation of Firefox or Internet Explorer. Public beta (one) of Flock 2 is fast, manages memory better, and is more secure.

Source: Wikipedia

WebMynd, a firefox add-ons provides a visual interface for reviewing your browsing history. For the most part it runs in the background saving copies of every page you visit to WebMynd’s server. When you click the WebMynd button on your toolbar a page opens up showing your most recently visited pages plotted on a “reel.” You can scroll left or right to see other recent pages. Or you can click the Grid view to see a larger number of thumbnailed images. The basic add-on is free and keeps pages for a week. Users pay $10 for six months of history or $20 for a full year.

The service doesn’t save just an image of the page or the URL, but the full text site. That means you can also search those virtual pages later when you are looking for something. Users can turn off recording at any time, and can delete saved pages that they don’t want to have around for any reason. To see saved pages, you click on an icon at the top of the browser and the local saved copies pop up, along with a search bar.

The idea is that, like Gmail, good search means you don’t have to spend a lot of time bookmarking and tagging websites to find them later. WebMynd records everything in the background, and a quick search will locate the page.

You can also access webmynd history offline if you use Firefox 3. There is no visual playback available when you are offline. You must have access to the internet in order to view WebMynd visual playback.

WebMynd is currently supported with Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 beta on Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

Source: downloadsquad

The new version of the Firefox browser was downloaded over eight million times in its first 24 hours of release in what organisers claimed was a world record. But the success was overshadowed by reports that Firefox 3.0 contained a serious security flaw that potentially lets an attacker take over a PC if a user clicks on a booby-trapped link.

The bug was reported to Mozilla by Security Firm, Tipping Point, and no other details were released, in order to give the organization time to develop a patch. “Working with Mozilla on past security issues, we’ve found them to have a good track record and expect a reasonable turnaround on this issue as well,” TippingPoint said in a statement.

Another Firefox 3 vulnerability was posted Tuesday on a security mailing list hosted by security consultant Neohapsis. The brief posting warned of a buffer overflow bug in Firefox 3, but provided no details. It was not clear whether the flaw was the same as the one reported by TippingPoint.

Once the vulnerability is repaired, TippingPoint said it planned to publish the security advisory on the “Published Advisory” page on its Website.

Source: InformationWeek

Late Wednesday evening, a Mozilla spokesperson confirmed that the final edition of Firefox 3.0 is going to be available to the general public this upcoming Tuesday, June 17. The open source product is the second leading web browser on the market next to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer with roughly 18 percent market share.

Firefox 3.0 includes the follwing features:

• Updated address bar with integrated bookmarking functionality
• Standard themes that are consistent with the native UI of your Operating System (Windows, Mac, Linux)
• Revamped bookmark manager
• New Icons
• One-click site information
• Secure add-on updates
• Vista Parental Controls
• Revamped password management
• Full page zoom
• Scrolling Tabs
• One-click bookmarking
• Tags for bookmarks

While the memory issue has improved compared to Firefox 2, browsers such as Opera and Safari are handling sites that are loaded with AJAX, videos, music, and other heavy hitters much better than Firefox 3.

Source: ReadWriteWeb

In Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1, Mozilla hasn’t changed much about the browser’s basic look, but many usability are changed. The Release Candidate means the intermediate step between the Beta and final version.

Both history windows and the bookmarks window are displayed together in an Structured Query Language (SQL) database. Several new options are now available, including dragging an URL from the history column directly into a bookmarks folder. Also, a new Smart Bookmarks offers a complete categorization of the user’s folders, guided by the most frequently visited, recently bookmarked, and recently tagged web sites.

On the security front, the phishing site filter from Firefox 2, which uses a blacklist to block known phishing pages, now has the ability to block known malware-pushing sites as well. And faulty-fingered surfers everywhere will appreciate the revised password saver. Instead of having to decide between saving and canceling a password before you know whether it’s the right one, you can now decide after logging in.

Mozilla has improved Firefox’s memory management and speed. With four test sites (CNN, Netvibes, PC World, and Yahoo Mail) loaded, version 3 used less memory than Safari 3.1 did: 81MB to start and 85MB after an hour, versus 94MB and 95MB for Safari 3. It also perfomed well in the SunSpider Javascript test, with a score of 3.61 seconds; Safari 3.1 failed to break the 4-second barrier on this test.

Source: PC World

Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, launched at the NAB conference about a month ago, is being designed as a competitor to Adobe’s Flash. Silverlight is a proprietary cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in for running Rich Media Applications (RIA) on the web. You need Windows XP/Vista, 450MHz CPU, 128MB RAM, Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.8+ or Internet Explorer 6+ to run the application.

Silverlight 1.0 incorporates a larger subset of the .Net Framework and supports JIT-compiled C#, Visual Basic .Net, IronPython, and (eventually) IronRuby as well. It is largely straightforward enough that you could develop applications using free HTML and JavaScript editors if you wished, supplemented by a free XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) editor, such as XAMLPad from the Windows SDK or Charles Petzold’s XAML.

It integrates seamlessly with your existing Javascript and ASP.NET AJAX code to complement functionality which you have already created. Silverlight applications can be created using Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend.

Silverlight is almost 100% upward compatible with WPF. Animation, 2D vector graphics, media, text - they’re all present in Silverlight and the concepts you’ve learnt in WPF carry forward (although Silverlight is a subset - it doesn’t support WPF features such as 3D, data binding or templates). You can use the same tools (e.g. Expression Design) to generate content for Silverlight.

“The most significant thing about Silverlight is that it basically puts the… Windows Media Video format in the browser in a really seamless way. The reason we haven’t supported Windows Media Video until now is because we felt that the user experience wasn’t there,” said Adam Berrey, vice president of marketing and strategy at the company.

To conclude this, Silverlight is part of a larger revolution of the ways applications are designed, built, and delivered. With markup-based UI and flexible programming models, businesses will be able to offer better experiences on the right form factor for their customers.

Source: Infoworld

There are many tools available in the market for Web Development. These tools can greatly increase development speed, reduce debugging and testing time, and improve quality of the output. Some of them are described below:

• CSS Grid Builder: The CSS Grid Builder, developed by Yahoo is a simple web-based interface for quickly creating any number of layouts that rely solely on YUI’s CSS files. This gives you the advantage of easily and visually laying out designs without using tables, and they will work the same way in every popular browser.

• Blueprint: A CSS Framework: Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing. Please, See a sample website built with BP.

• logicss: CSS Framework: The Logic CSS framework is a collection of CSS files and PHP utilities to cut development times for web-standards compliant xHTML layouts.

• Clean AJAX : Clean is an open source engine for AJAX, that provides a high level interface to work with the AJAX technology. It can be plugged in any page or DHTML framework because it was designed in conformation with the separation of concerns principle, keeping focus on AJAX issues. Clean will help you to adopt AJAX saving your time and your code, reducing your learning curve and the code re engineering.

• Sajax: Sajax is an open source tool to make programming websites using the Ajax framework — also known as XMLHTTPRequest or remote scripting — as easy as possible. Sajax makes it easy to call PHP, Perl or Python functions from your web pages via JavaScript without performing a browser refresh.

• JavaScript Code Improver: With JavaScript Code Improver you can make any JavaScript clear, easily comprehensible and ready for printing thus saving the time you spend on editing, debugging and modifying it.

• Venkman: JavaScript Debugger: Venkman is the code name for Mozilla’s JavaScript Debugger. Venkman aims to provide a powerful JavaScript debugging environment for Mozilla based browsers.

• JSUnit : JSunit is a unit testing framework for JavaScript. Testing JavaScript manually is time-consuming and prone to errors, but JSUnit provides the developer a simpler, automated way of doing unit tests to ensure thorough testing at a fraction of the time it would take to test manually.

• Pingdom Tools: This is a web based free set of utilities for webmasters to complement our up time monitoring service. First out is the Full Page Test, which tests the load time of a web page including all its objects (images, scripts, CSS files, etc).

• Test plugin for JavaScriptMVC: This Test plugin lets you simulate every major DOM event, as well as some combination events like Write and Drag, simulate Ajax, and use assertions. It runs functional and unit tests in a separate console window. Another nice feature is that if you use it with the Controller plugin, helper methods are automatically created that simulate each controller action’s event, such as TodoClick.

• Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar : It allows validating of CSS and HTML, previewing page layout at various resolutions, and also offers a ruler (measuring in pixels) to aid in positioning the elements. It allows viewing the source of the entire page, color coded for ease of navigation, or selected elements of it, as well as view the DOM source and the CSS selectors that were applied to the element.

• Firebug : Firebug is a Mozilla Firefox extension that gives you plenty of web development tools and features. Firebug has a built-in JavaScript debugger that lets you step through your script as well as allowing you to perform benchmarks to see why your script is slow/sluggish.

• Yahoo! Design Pattern Library : The pattern libraries form a solution language that can enhance our ability to communicate design ideas. They provide us a context in which to discuss a number of associated issues: the thinking behind a solution; issues around accessibility, and de-gradeablity; other related patterns; examples of usage; and code samples etc..

Source: Digg

If you are a die-hard Firefox user then I am sure you are always on the look-out for tips to get more out of Firefox in less time and hence be more productive. Here are six ways you can keep yourself organized when taking notes on web pages.

1. Diigo
It’s really a bookmarking powerhouse with note-taking capabilities. When you’re on a Web page select the text/image you want to highlight and click the highlight button on your Diigo toolbar. Doing so will highlight that content as well as keep a copy of it in your Diigo account. You can also add notes to any content on a page. The next time you return to that page, there will be your notes as you left them, so no need to figure out where you left off.

2. Google Notebook
It is going to give you a reminder about blog article ideas. Google Notebook fits easily in Firefox browser. Just select the content on a page, and “clip” it to your account.

3. Internote
A simple, but effective way to manage notes on any Web page you view. Just like Diigo, but much more simplified in that it keeps your notes on the page when you return to it. No bookmarking, just notes.

4. Dappad Notebook Sidebar
This tool will let you keep all sorts of content in your Firefox sidebar. You can even share the information you save with friends, make private, or share with the public at large. Just copy from Word or Excel and put it in here if you wanted. Also, the tagging feature makes it more user friendly.

5. MyStickies

A colorful way for you to add your notes in boxes all over a Web page. Move them around to your liking. Return to that page, and your notes are waiting for you.

6. Notefish
It is pretty much the same as above, but the information is collected on your account page instead of on the Web page you’re on. So you can rearrange or colorize the stuff over there for further convenience.

All of the above tools are free to download.

Source: InformationWeek

The latest version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution was officially released to the public today after the beta-test period. This version is designated “LTS,” for “long-term support,” which should make it attractive to business customers who prefer a longer upgrade cycle for their operating systems.

As is customary for Linux distributions, Ubuntu 8.04 includes incremental updates to many of the software packages that make up the system, from low-level details like the window manager and graphics subsystem, all the way up to the bundled OpenOffice.org productivity suite.

Here are some of the additional feature of the new release:

• Firefox 3 beta is the default web browser
• Install Ubuntu from within Windows using Wubi
• Updated Linux kernel and new versions of Gnome and KDE desktops, with the option of using KDE 3.5 or KDE 4 as the default desktop for Kubuntu
• New BitTorrent Client
• New VNC client
• Virtualization software built into the kernel

If you’ve never tried Linux before, Ubuntu comes as a LiveCD. That means you can check out the operating system without harming your current OS and file system by burning the disc image to a DVD and booting your computer from the disc.

“Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition is a very significant release as it will take Ubuntu squarely into the business environment. Our business and home users have told us that they want a longer support cycle to make Ubuntu a better deployment option. We have responded to that and added a commitment to much broader software and hardware support that we and our partners are excited to deliver,” said Jane Silber, COO of Canonical Ltd., Ubuntu’s commercial sponsor.

Source: PC world