My Technology Guide

Mozilla has released the second beta version of its improved and redesigned Firefox 4 web browser. The new version can be downloaded from the release notes or official beta download page. It available for all supported operating systems (Linux, Mac, Windows) and now available in 24 languages. This second beta release also gives Apple Mac's the same tabs-on-top look as in Windows. The one orange main button is still isn't there in the Mac version, but the new toolbar formations are available now.

The most "talked about" new feature in Firefox 4 Beta 2 is "App Tabs", which looks like Google Chrome's "Pin Tab" feature. This "App Tabs" mode lets you keep an eye on sites you want to. Now, every tab in Firefox 4 has this new option "Make into App Tab," on right-click to convert it into an "App Tab".

Mozilla recently released a security update for their popular Firefox web browser, version 3.6.7. Firefox 3.6.7 fixes several security issues that were found in the 3.6.6 version. Over half of the vulnerabilities fixed in Firefox 3.6.7 were listed as "Critical," which is the highest danger level that Mozilla associates with security issues.

Mozilla has now done a quick update of Firefox 3.6.7 to Firefox 3.6.8, which according to The Mozilla Developer Center blog, "fixes a single stability problem that affected some pages with embedded plugins".

Mozilla developers have recently released the first beta of Firefox 4.0 web browser. Many new changes can be seen in Firefox 4.0. The most significant change in this version is the new user interface. Browser tabs are now located on top of the address bar by default (on Windows only - OS X and Linux will be changing when the theme has been modified to support the change) just like in Google Chrome web browser. But users do have the option to revert the user interface to the old Firefox design.

A second major change that cannot go undetected is the addition of the Firefox button on Windows Vista and Windows 7 that replaces the menu bar, and looks very similar to the One button present in Opera web browser. It will be shown if the user decides to hide the menu bar in the browser.

Mozilla has just released Firefox 3.6.6, less than a week after the release of the long-awaited Firefox 3.6.4 version. Firefox 3.6.6 fixes a stability issue in the web browser. This update addressed issues with the new plugin handler causing issues with the immensely popular Facebook game Farmville. See bug 574905 for full details.

Firefox 3.6.6 modifies the crash protection feature to increase the amount of time that plugins are allowed to be non-responsive before being terminated.

The developers have increased the time that plugins are allowed to be non-responsive before they are terminated by the browser. The timeout was set to 10 seconds initially and now has been increased to 45 seconds in this new release.

Mozilla has finally released Firefox 3.6.4, the latest security and stability release for Firefox. This release provides crash protection for Windows and Linux users by isolating third-party plugins when they crash. The feature is like that in Google Chrome as it runs plugins in their own process to increase browser stability and security.

Out-of-process plugins are enabled by default and make sure that a crashing plugin will not crash the browser itself as well. Firefox can now prevents Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime and Microsoft Silverlight crashes from bringing down your entire browser on Windows and Linux computers just like Google Chrome does. Read the Crash Protection FAQ for more detailed information about this new feature.

AVG Technologies has unveiled AVG LinkScanner for the Mac operating system. AVG LinkScanner for Mac is the first free AVG product designed for Mac OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard and supports Internet browsers Safari 3.x, Safari 4.x, Safari 5.x and Mozilla Firefox 3.x and higher.

According to AVG research, 99 percent of all malicious threats are delivered through the web and cannot be stopped with traditional antivirus software. These threats can come and go within hours and can live on familiar, big-name sites and even on third-party applications on popular social networking sites, without users even noticing. And with the growing popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and others, the bad guys are using these sites as their main vehicle for spreading malware.

Users of 64-bit operating system who always wanted to use a 64-bit edition of the popular web browser Firefox were previously restricted to using only the builds provided by their operating systems or, the ones available through the Mozilla-x86-64 project. Mozilla Firefox 64-bit builds for Linux, Mac and Windows is now available on the official Firefox Nightly FTP server. Mozilla plans to distribute the final version of Firefox 64-bit editions with the release of Firefox 4 later this year.

If you install the experimental version of Firefox 64-bit you will notice that most of the browser plugins are not compatible and only Java and a non-final Flash version are being supported.