Mozilla has postponed blocking third-party cookies by default in Firefox 22, "to collect and analyze data on the effect of blocking some third-party cookies."

The nonprofit organization is, however, not softening its stand on protecting privacy and putting users first, Brendan Eich, Mozilla's CTO and senior vice president of engineering, wrote in a blog post Thursday.

Mozilla has been testing a patch from Jonathan Mayer, a graduate student at Stanford University in computer science and law and online privacy activist, which like Apple's Safari browser allows cookies from websites already visited, but blocks cookies from sites not visited yet.

A pre-build version of the browser, called Firefox Aurora, was released on April 5, and included the patch to only allow cookies from sites visited. Aurora is a preliminary stage in the development cycle before Beta and Release of a version of Firefox.

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Google has shown off new features that can reduce data consumption and improve Web performance on Android-powered mobile devices, drawing partly from capabilities already supported in the Chrome desktop OS.

The improvements include new file compression formats for images and video, and a new commerce system that makes shopping easier on mobile devices, Google said at its I/O developer conference Wednesday.

The idea is to bring some of the capabilities that Chrome offers on the desktop to the Chrome mobile browser, said Sundar Pichai, head of the Android and Chrome operating systems at Google.

“Our goal is to make the Web better, both on the desktop and mobile,” said Linus Upson, VP of engineering for Chrome.

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Google called its Chrome browser “the most popular browser used in the world” during Wednesday’s Google I/O keynote. And the company used that occasion to present updates to Chrome on both desktop and mobile, as well as new developer tools for Chrome.

While Chrome OS was mentioned, Sundar Pichai—Google’s senior vice president of Android, Chrome, and Apps—said that Google would have more news to share on that operating system later this year. That said, he did describe the platform as “an ecosystem play,” and gave every Google I/O keynote attendee a free Chromebook Pixel.

Turning back to the browser, Pichai said that Chrome now has 750 million active monthly users—an increase of 300 million users from last year. Much of that growth is happening on phones and tablets: Chrome works on both Android and iOS, and Pinchai stressed that its goal is to “move the mobile Web forward.”

The power of Chrome

Linus Upson, Google’s vice president of engineering, stressed that the company wants the Web experience to be the same everywhere, across all devices, and “personalized for you.” Upson described how Chrome’s successful implementation of technologies like WebGL and Web audio APIs makes it possible to create powerful Web-based experiences that work across platforms and devices, wherever anyone can use Google Chrome.

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Mirror, mirror on the wall, what browser blocks malware best of all? The answer to that question is Microsoft Internet Explorer 10, at least according to the latest test results released by NSS Labs.

In tests performed on the five top browsers on the market—IE 10, Google Chrome 25/26, Apple Safari 5, Mozilla Firefox 19 and Opera 12—NSS researchers found that IE 10 blocked more than 99 percent of the malicious downloads thrown at it.

Finishing behind IE 10 was Chrome with a block rate exceeding 83 percent. That was more than a 10 percent improvement over its performance in past tests, NSS said.

The security research company asserted that a key to Chrome’s improved performance was the addition of a safe browsing API. “Google’s Safe Browsing API v2 includes additional application reputation-based download protection that has been integrated into Chrome, but not into Firefox or Safari and the results speak for themselves,” NSS said.

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Just 11 days after issuing an advisory, Microsoft has released a patch for a bug in Internet Explorer 8 that bedeviled the U.S. Department of Labor earlier this month.

Microsoft’s speedy release of this patch “is an outstanding example of Microsoft’s responsiveness to the security community and their users,” wrote Andrew Storms, director of security of operations for security software provider Tripwire, in an email statement.

This IE8 security bulletin (MS13-038) is one of 10 that Microsoft released Tuesday as part of its “Patch Tuesday” release of bug fixes and security bulletins that the company routinely issues on the second Tuesday of each month.

Microsoft marked MS13-038 as critical and the company, along with other security firms, are advising those still running IE8 to apply the fix immediately. Using an altered Labor Department Web page, attackers used this vulnerability in an attempt to install malicious code on any visitor’s machine running IE8. Microsoft issued a temporary fix for this vulnerability last week.

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It's been about six weeks since the release of Firefox 20, so assuming Mozilla stays on its usual schedule, Firefox 21 will make its debut on Tuesday.

This next version of the popular open source browser has already attracted attention for the changes brought in early versions to Firefox's “Do Not Track” capabilities, but those are by no means the only interesting additions we'll see.

Several changes and new features are slated to arrive in the final version of Firefox 21, in fact. Here's a quick rundown of some of the highlights you can expect to find.

1. Three 'Do Not Track' options

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Earlier today my dad called the Hassle-Free Hotline (also known as my home phone number). The poor guy seems to encounter more than his fair share of inadvertant computer problems.

For example, somehow, while using his laptop's touchpad, he'd made everything in his browser bigger. Consequently, he had to scroll pages left and right, not just up and down.

Welcome to the Curse of the Multitouch Touchpad. Most laptop owners know that dragging a finger across the touchpad moves the cursor. On some systems, dragging two fingers up and down enables scrolling. But there's another "gesture" that's easy to perform by accident, and the results often leave users scratching their heads.

It's the pinch-zoom gesture, which works just like on a smartphone or tablet: you pinch two fingers together to decrease the zoom (i.e. zoom out), or pinch them away from each other to increase the zoom (i.e. zoom in).

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Firefox for Windows 8’s “Modern” user interface (UI) will likely wrap up development in November, Mozilla said on its website, in a best case-worst case schedule.

A new addition to a Mozilla Wiki noted that the browser will be completed Oct. 2, 2013, at the earliest, or nearly a year after the launch of Windows 8. But the project could be delayed until March 20, 2014. The most probable finish date—based on programming pace so far—is closer to the former than the latter: Nov. 19, 2013.

According to Mozilla, it’s a third of the way through development of Firefox for the Modern UI.

Mozilla started work on a Modern edition of Firefox, one that would run in the UI formerly known as “Metro” on Windows 8, more than a year ago. The open-source developer released a Windows 8 Firefox preview last October.

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Microsoft has released a temporary fix for a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8, which was used by hackers in a prominent attack against the U.S. Department of Labor’s website.

The problem is particularly dangerous since it can allow an attacker to install malware merely by visiting a tampered webpage. Microsoft is still working on a patch, wrote Dustin Childs, group manager for the company’s Trustworthy Computing division.

“Customers should apply the Fix it or follow the workarounds listed in the advisory to help protect against the known attacks,” Childs said in a statement.

The vulnerability is described as a problem in the way IE “accesses an object in memory that has been deleted or has not been properly allocated.” IE versions 6, 7, 9 and 10 are not affected.

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Google's move to make it easier for Chrome browser users to find "packaged apps," Chrome OS's souped-up Web apps, is part of its strategy to turn any Internet-capable device into a Chromebook wannabe loyal to the company's ecosystem, an analyst says.

In a Wednesday announcement, Google said that users of Chrome 28 on Windows, currently in the "Dev" channel, and thus the least-polished version of the browser, can locate packaged apps in a special section of the company's Chrome Web Store, the distribution mart for Chrome OS and Chrome (the browser) software.

Previously, users had to know the URL of a packaged app -- with that URL usually provided by the developer -- to retrieve it. Now the "Apps" category of the store shows only packaged apps to those running Chrome 28 on Windows.

Google

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Hard on the heels of the news that the Linux kernel itself has now added Chromebook support, other reports this week suggest that the ongoing popularity of devices that use Google's Linux-based Chrome OS operating system will likely continue unabated throughout the year.

We've already seen PC makers including Lenovo, Samsung, HP, and Acer join the Chromebook fray, and now it looks like a slew of new devices based on Web-centric Chrome OS are planned for release this year, including brand-new devices from Asus and Acer.

Specifically, both Acer and Asustek are “optimistic about the long-term prospects of Chromebooks” and plan to launch new models in the second half of this year, according to Digitimes, which cites “sources from the upstream supply chain.”

A flurry of Chromebooks

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Microsoft's Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) doubled its usage share last month, and now accounts for nearly 11 percent of all copies of IE in use, a Web measurement company said today.

IE10, which Microsoft launched last October for Windows 8 and in February for the far-more-popular Windows 7, doubled its usage share within IE from 5.3% to a month-ending 10.8%, data published by Net Applications showed.

The browser's quick rise—as recently as January, it accounted for only 2.3 percent of all copies of Internet Explorer—was triggered by the start of an automatic update from 2011's IE9 to this year's IE10 on Windows 7 PCs.

IE10 was the first browser released by Microsoft since it changed its upgrade policy in late 2011. Rather than seek user approval before upgrading IE—the previous practice—Microsoft adopted a Google Chrome-like "silent" scheme that automatically installs the newest browser suitable for that version of Windows.

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Google has apparently rethought a change to its Chrome browser that had users up in arms and has restored an older design of its popular New Tab Page in the newest beta of Chrome 27.

Users were overwhelmingly against a revision of Chrome's New Tab Page (NTP) that debuted in Chrome 27 in early April. The new NTP reduced the number of thumbnails of recently visited websites from eight to four, inserted a large Google search box, shifted the Web apps view to a new button near the top of the browser window, and dumped other features, including the ability to view recently closed tabs, from the NTP.

Google announced the NTP redesign in December, when it began replacing the existing page in the "Dev" channel, the least-polished of the three builds it maintains for each edition. On April 4, it pushed the revision to the beta of Chrome 27.

Comments on various Google blogs and product discussion forums were almost universally negative from the start.

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Google Drive users no longer have to worry about accessing their documents without an Internet connection—as long as they’re using Google’s Chrome browser.

Chrome now supports automatic offline syncing for Google Drive, allowing you to read and edit any document, spreadsheet or presentation even when the Internet is down. To use this feature, you must Drive’s Chrome Web App installed, and you must enable offline access in the dialog box that appears.

Chrome previously allowed offline editing for individual documents, but that meant you had to plan ahead and choose which files to sync. Now, the Drive app for Chrome syncs all files automatically.

If you edit a document while offline, those changes will appear in the online version once the Internet connection is restored.

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The U.S. online advertising industry has not lived up to a promise to stop the online tracking of Internet users who ask advertisers to do so, a senior U.S. senator said Wednesday.

Senator John “Jay” Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, blasted the online advertising industry for not meeting its promised deadline to implement a do-not-track program by the end of 2012. The Digital Advertising Alliance, a coalition of online advertising groups, committed in February 2012 to honor do-not-track requests by the end of the year, but advertisers and data brokers appear to be “dragging their feet,” Rockefeller said during a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing.

Consumers are still waiting for a do-not-track system that works across the Internet, said Rockefeller, the committee chairman.

“I personally have long expressed skepticism about the ability, or the willingness, of companies to regulate themselves on behalf of consumers when it effects their bottom line,” said Rockefeller, sponsor of a bill that would create do-not-track regulations. “I do not believe that companies with business models based upon the collection and monetization of personal information will voluntarily stop these practices if it negatively affects their profit margins.”

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A recently patched Java remote code execution vulnerability is already being exploited by cybercriminals in mass attacks to infect computers with scareware, security researchers warn.

The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2013-2423, was one of the 42 security issues fixed in Java 7 Update 21 that was released by Oracle on April 16.

According to Oracle’s advisory at the time, the vulnerability only affects client, not server, deployments of Java. The company gave the flaw’s impact a 4.3 out of 10 rating using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) and added that “this vulnerability can be exploited only through untrusted Java Web Start applications and untrusted Java applets.”

However, it seems that the low CVSS score didn’t stop cybercriminals from targeting the vulnerability. An exploit for CVE-2013-2423 was integrated into a high-end Web attack toolkit known as Cool Exploit Kit and is used to install a piece of malware called Reveton, an independent malware researcher known online as Kafeine said Tuesday in a blog post.

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If you like to shop online, you may like Perk, which is a new browser that lets you rack up reward points for surfing, searching, and shopping online.

Perk is based on the same technology underlying Google’s popular Chrome browser.

Rewarding netizens for their online behavior isn’t new. Microsoft, for example, had a program that paid people for searching with its Bing search engine . Google, too, had a program for paying users of its Chrome browser if they allowed the company to track their browsing habits.

Up to now, these programs have had one thing in common. They failed to gain any traction with the online community.

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Google has beefed up the administration and management controls that IT staff have over their users' Chrome browsers.

Google has added the ability for IT departments to apply the workplace configuration of Chrome browsers to Chrome browsers installed on employees' home computers.

That way, users working on their home computers can have access to their work Web apps, custom themes and app store by logging into Chrome with their Google Apps for Business or Google Apps for Education accounts, the company said Tuesday.

"With cloud-based management, IT administrators can customize more than 100 Chrome policies and preferences for their employees from the Google Admin panel," wrote Cyrus Mistry, senior product manager, Chrome for Business & Education, in a blog post.

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Despite predictions that the PC is on a path toward extinction, the folks at Rockmelt, makers of a "social browser" of the same name, are betting those forecasts are overblown.

While the company that's already had $40 million sunk into it by investors—including Marc Andreessen, multi-millionaire and co-author of the original Web browser, Mosaic—acknowledged last week it is deserting the browser business, it also announced that it will build a Web presence called Rockmelt for Web.

The move suggests that Rockmelt sees plenty of life left in the PC market and is staking its future on that notion.

Builds on social browser

When Rockmelt announced its browser in 2009, its founders believed the software would ride the social networking wave to success. Social apps were changing people's online behavior, they reasoned, and folks needed a new kind of browser to meet the needs of that behavior.

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Now that I'm running Windows 8 for at least part of my workday (much to my chagrin), I'm doing my best to make it hospitable. And for me, the first step is installing Google Chrome, my preferred Web browser.

So I dropped into Desktop, fired up Internet Explorer, downloaded and installed Chrome, and set it as my default browser.

Then I ran it, signed into my Google account, and smiled as my synced bookmarks appeared like magic. This is how the world should work.

But, wait, what's this? Something's missing. Three somethings, in fact. When I went to minimize Chrome, I discovered that the Minimize button was gone. And so were the Maximize and Close buttons. That whole area in the upper-right corner of the browser? Empty!

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If you're a Firefox user, you may have noticed a few changes in the latest version of Mozilla's browser, which "turned 20" last week.

Among them: a new Download Manager. It's a small tweak, and I'd say one for the better, but as I noted in Monday's post about Google Chrome's bookmark spacing, not everybody appreciates sudden and unrequested changes.

First, let's talk about what's new. At the right edge of the search bar, alongside the Home button (unless you've moved it), you'll see a new Downloads button.

When you're downloading a file, that button changes to a progress meter, showing you the time remaining. And if you click it, you'll see a drop-down menu with your three most recent downloads. That's pretty handy, in my opinion.

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If you're a Google Chrome user, you may have noticed a recent change in your browser. About a week ago, Google pushed out an update that increased the spacing between bookmarks.

Specifically, when I click one of the folders in my Bookmarks Bar, I get a drop-down list of all the links in that folder. But now I see fewer bookmarks in that list because there's extra white space between each one.

In other words, to use a word-processing analogy, it's like Google bumped up the line spacing from single to double.

No like!

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“Do Not Track” capabilities have been controversial ever since they first appeared in Firefox 4 back in 2011, but earlier this year the battle became even more intense when Mozilla announced that it planned to begin blocking third-party cookies by default.

Two groups representing the online ad industry spoke out in bitter protest, charging that the move is "really little more than one company imposing its will in order to control its consumers’ online experience," as the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) put it.

Mozilla appears undaunted, however, and on Friday its free and open source Firefox 22 browser appeared in the early, pre-beta Aurora channel as planned, complete with the auto-block privacy features that were so hotly protested.

Mozilla

Three options

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When Opera announced in February that it would switch to the WebKit browser engine, the same basic technology that powers Chrome and Safari, critics wondered if this was a bad move for the open Web.

The worry was that browser vendors were putting too much power in the hands of one rendering engine. Many, no doubt, were recalling the years when Internet Explorer dominated browser usage requiring Web developers to cater to IE's peculiarities.

Fears of a so-called WebKit monoculture may be over now that the Chromium Project is splitting with WebKit, an open source project created by Apple in 2001. Google will instead work on its own rendering engine called Blink, taking the new engine’s initial codebase from WebKit, a practice called forking. Chromium is the Google-led open-source browser project that supplies the code for the company's Chrome Web browser.

With the addition of Blink, there are now four major Web engines including WebKit, Mozilla's Gecko engine powering Firefox, and Microsoft's Trident for Internet Explorer.

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Four weeks after the launch of Google's Chrome 26browser into beta, the final version debuted on Tuesday.

The most notable enhancements in Chrome 26 include a new spell-checking engine, as we saw when the beta version arrived, but also included are several other new features and a few key security fixes.

The software, version 26.0.1410.43 for Windows, Mac and Linux, is being delivered as an automatic update to those already using Chrome, but it's also available as a free download. Here's a rundown of what you'll find.

1. Improved spell-checking

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Most browser installations use outdated versions of the Java plug-in that are vulnerable to at least one of several exploits currently used in popular Web attack toolkits, according to statistics published by security vendor Websense.

The company recently used its threat intelligence network, which monitors billions of Web requests originating from “tens of millions” of endpoint computers protected by its products, to detect the Java versions that are installed on those systems and are available through their Web browsers. Websense provides Web and email gateway security products for businesses, but it also has a partnership with Facebook to scan links clicked by users on the social networking site for malicious content.

The Java telemetry data gathered by Websense showed that only 5.5 percent of Java-enabled browsers have the most up-to-date versions of the software’s browser plug-in—Java 7 Update 17 (7u17) and Java 6 Update 43 (6u43)—installed. These two versions were released on March 4 in order to address a vulnerability that was already being exploited in active attacks at the time.

According to Websense, an exploit for that vulnerability has since been integrated into the Cool Exploit Kit, a Web attack toolkit used by cybercriminals to launch mass drive-by download attacks that infect computers with malware when visiting compromised or malicious websites.

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