In December 2012 I bought an Asus Nexus 7 tablet. This was the 2012 Wi-Fi only model as they did come out with a cellular version later on in 2013. I had used the tablet for school, community service project as well as for looking up information at home from the comfort of my couch. Everything was going great, that was until Google pushed out Lollipop (Android 5.x) late in 2014 and my tablet became a very expensive paperweight. It was sluggish and would freeze randomly. Oddly enough, it worked fairly well when I was using it as in car…
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Currently Firefox users can go into the about:config and customize the preference browser.newtab.url to a specific web address (URL) or even set it to about:blank for a blank tab. However, so can malicious/unwanted software (McAfee, Ask, AVG, Babylon, Yahoo, etc.) by directly making changes the user’s prefs.js profile file. However, many novice Firefox users don’t know about or how to work within the about:config interface. Mozilla’s solution to this as purposed in Bug 118285 (The browser.newtab.url preference is abused and should be removed) is to only allow (approved) add-ons to change the behavior of the new tab page. This would be landed in Firefox…
Mozilla released an update for Firefox 38 regular and ESR versions on Thursday, May 14th with the Firefox 38.0.1 release. Fixes in this version include: Systems with first generation NVidia Optimus graphics cards may crash on start-up Users who import cookies from Google Chrome can end up with broken websites Large animated images may fail to play and may stop other images from loading Complete details can be found in the Firefox 38.0.1 Release Notes. Depending on their update settings, users will be prompted to update within the next 24-48 hours. Users can also manually update by going to the Firefox Help Menu…
Last night Mozilla announced on The Mozilla Security Blog: Deprecating Non-Secure HTTP. There’s pretty broad agreement that HTTPS is the way forward for the web. In recent months, there have been statements from IETF, IAB (even the other IAB), W3C, and the US Governmentcalling for universal use of encryption by Internet applications, which in the case of the web means HTTPS. After a robust discussion on our community mailing list, Mozilla is committing to focus new development efforts on the secure web, and start removing capabilities from the non-secure web. While they don’t specify in details as to “removing capabilities from…
Google, is starting panic. For the first time since 2008 their market share as dropped below 75%. The reason behind this sudden decline and panic is Mozilla’s decision back in November 2014 not to renew the agreement (default browser search engine) they had with Google, instead opting to sign a five-year deal with Yahoo. Not surprisingly, Yahoo’s market share has increased as a result of this deal to 10.6% (up 2% since the agreement started back in November). Well, Google is not too happy about this and is trying to get Firefox user back. While Google is still the clear market leader, it is…
Mozilla released an update to Firefox on December 1, 2014 with Firefox 34.0 and 34.0.5 (new install). US users who have not made changes to the search engine settings in Firefox can switch to Yahoo (with the new improved search bar) as the default search engine upon first run. Also for US users Wikipedia searches are now using the HTTPS protocol for improved security. Default search engine changed to Yandex for Belarusian, Kazakh, and Russian locales. There are several other new features and fixes for this release and these can be viewed in the release notes. Users may be prompted to update to…
Google researchers announced recently of the POODLE (Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption) Attack which hackers take advantage of sites (around 0.3%) still using the outdated (introduced in 1996) SSLv3 security protocol. Mozilla has announced that SSLv3 will be disabled, unfortunately it won’t be until Firefox 34 which will be released on November 25th. However, user can (and are urged to) install the SSL Version Control extension which will disable SSLv3 on the fly. I would not be surprised though if Mozilla pushes out Firefox 33.1 update to have SSLv3 disabled in the coming days or weeks. Google Chrome is already testing changes to disable…
Google has come out with a tool (beta) for Windows to help users identify and remove rogue extensions and toolbars that are secretly tracking you. When malicious programs are using your Chrome browser to collect data, serve you ads or cause overall sluggishness, there’s a quick way to find out what’s causing the issues. Google recently published the Software Removal tool for Windows that will scan for software that is causing issues with the browser. A few words of caution before you use this tool: It is still in Beta so you may want to create a restore point just…
Browsers extensions are great as they enhance the usability and your experience with your browser. However, there are some extensions out there that will actually do the opposite. This seems to be a bigger problem for Chrome but there are a couple known ‘spying’ extensions in Firefox. These ‘evil’ extensions may track you or as in the case with Scott Hanselman inject ads into sites you are viewing. My perspective on JavaScript-based browser extensions has been far too naïve until this point. We were all burned by bad toolbars or evil ActiveX add-ons in the past, so when I run IE I run it with…
One of our Facebook followers shared this on our Facebook Page today. MatchStick is Mozilla’s ($25) alternative to Google’s Chromecast. Mozilla is expanding beyond its Firefox browser and trying its hand in the suddenly hot streaming video business. Its take: the MatchStick HDMI streaming stick, which will sell for a limited time through Kickstarter at a starting price of $12 before it goes to retail. It’s final price of $25 sets its sights on the Chromecast, the $35 streaming dongle from search giant Google. Matchstick runs on Firefox OS, the open source mobile operating system built by Mozilla on Firefox’s…