Yahoo, Vodafone to Distribute Opera Mini

Just as competition is heating up among mobile browsers, Opera hopes to grow its user base through deals with Yahoo and Vodafone.

Yahoo plans to begin offering downloads of the Opera Mini browser from its Yahoo Mobile Web site, which will launch in March. Opera Mini is a very small browser that works in conjunction with back-end servers that shrink Web content for easier delivery to mobile phones.

The browser is already offered free and used by 20 million people, according to Opera. But a promotion on Yahoo's Mobile site will likely boost the number of users.

Yahoo Mobile, introduced on Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress, is a successor to Yahoo Go, an application that serves as a portal for applications and news for mobile phones. The Yahoo Mobile application will become available for iPhones in March and for Java-based smartphones in May.

Opera is likely to rack up additional users through a separate deal with Vodafone. Opera plans to develop a custom version of Opera Mini for Vodafone, designed for low- and mid-priced phones. Vodafone will preload the browser on phones sold in some markets and will target it at people who are likely to connect to the Internet for the first time on their mobile phones. The browser will be available across Vodafone markets in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa, the companies said.

Also at MWC, Opera said it has joined the LiMo Foundation, the group developing middleware for Linux-based mobile phones.

All of the deals could help Opera better compete in the mobile market as browser makers continue to work to improve mobile Internet access. Microsoft announced at MWC an update to IE Mobile with features that let users more easily zoom into portions of Web pages. Also, Mozilla continues progress on development of its Fennec mobile browser.

Google Chrome Password Manager Slammed

Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari browsers could do a better job of protecting passwords, according to a security researcher who released a study of browser password managers.

"Safari and Chrome are essentially tied for the worst password manager built into a major web browser," said Robert Chapin, president of Chapin Information Services, in his report, which looked at the types of security checks browsers used to make sure that they were sending username and password information to legitimate websites instead of clever hackers.
Two years ago Chapin reported a widely publicised password manager flaw in the Firefox browser, rated critical by Mozilla developers. The bug was used by attackers on the MySpace.com website who had set up a fake login page to steal account information from users of the social-networking site.

Firefox has now done a lot to improve its password manager, but all of these products are still far from perfect, Chapin said. "Should everyone put 100 percent implicit trust in every password manager?" he asked. "Not at all."

One problem is that today's password managers can be tricked into submitting different password credentials to different parts of the same website. That's what hackers did with the MySpace attack, posting a fake password entry form on a MySpace page. Because both the fake and real login forms were on the myspace.com domain, browsers like Firefox could be tricked into automatically sending login information to the fraudsters. That bug has been fixed in Firefox now, but Chrome and Safari are still vulnerable to similar attacks. Another problem is that browsers will send passwords meant for one domain, Google.com for example, to another domain - say Myspace.com - without warning the user, he said. That's because browser makers assume that the page asking for the password should be trusted, even if it is sending the password to another domain, he said.

Chapin says he uses the Opera password manager because it does a better job of letting him save passwords for specific web pages. He has posted an online test where users can test the security of their own password managers.

Robert Hansen, CEO of web security consultancy SecTheory, said that the security community has known for several years now that browser password managers are unsafe. This is mainly because the browsers themselves are vulnerable to so many different types of attack. "They aren't a great idea from a security perspective once they are integrated into the browser," he said via instant message. "The browser itself isn't designed to stop a large chunk of exploits that enable password manager theft. Without those exploits, password manager hacks wouldn't work."

Google Browser 'Chrome' Takes on Microsoft and Mozilla

Google is launching a beta version of its own Web browser today in more than 100 countries, the company announced yesterday in a blog posting.
The open-source browser, called Chrome, first appeared on an unofficial Google blog in the form of a comic book. "As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit 'send' a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome," the company said in the official announcement that appeared late Monday afternoon after the Internet began buzzing about the comic-book site. The blog posting was by Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, engineering director.

The browser window is "streamlined and simple," they said, describing in words what can be seen visually at the unofficial blog, Google Blogoscoped. "To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a tool to run the important stuff —the pages, sites and applications that make up the Web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go," the blog posting said.

Chrome will run Web applications "much better," they wrote, with tabs kept in an isolated "sandbox," which will prevent "one tab from crashing into another and provide improved protection from rogue sites." Better speed and responsiveness are also part of Chrome, which features "a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of Web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers."
Components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox are part of the open-source Chrome, they said.

Mozilla to Get Google Cash for Three More Years

Mozilla has renewed an agreement with Google that pays the browser maker for assigning Google's search engine as Firefox's default.
"This agreement now ends in November of 2011 rather than November of 2008, so we have stability in income," said Mitchell Baker, currently the chairwoman of Mozilla.

Mozilla generates the bulk of its income from ties to Google, according to the company's latest financial results. For the 2006 tax year - the most recent numbers make public by Mozilla - 85 percent, or about $57m of the company's $67m in annual revenues for the year, came from Google.
Firefox assigns the Google search site as the default for the browser's search bar; users can, however, change that to a rival search site if they wish. The browser also defaults to a Google URL for its home page.
Mozilla and Google last inked a two-year deal in 2006 that was to expire in November.

 

Security the New Keyword for IE 8 in Beta Version 2

Microsoft's updated browser, Internet Explorer 8, promises an assortment of new features, with the goals of making Web browsing with IE safer, easier, and more compatible with Net standards. We looked at Beta 2. On the surface, IE 8 seems to be a lot like IE 7, but Microsoft has made a good number of changes. However, you may have seen some of the new features in its no-longer-upstart competitor, Mozilla Firefox 3.

If you accidentally close a browser window in IE 8, you can opt to restore it when you reopen the program (just as you can in Firefox). But IE 8 will group related tabs together using color coding. If you open a link from pcworld.com in a new tab, for example, it will open adjacent to the original tab, and the tabs themselves will have a matching color. You can move tabs from one group to another, but if you have three unrelated pages open, you cannot create a group out of them.

Perhaps the most novel addition in IE 8 is what Microsoft refers to as tab isolation. The feature is designed to prevent a buggy Web site from causing the entire program to crash. Instead, only the tab displaying the problematic page will close, allowing you to continue browsing.

Of course, IE 8 Beta 2 retains some of the features introduced in the first beta, including WebSlices and accelerators.

If you enable IE 8's InPrivate feature, the browser will not save any sensitive data--passwords, log-in info, history, and so forth. It would be as if your browsing session had never happened. This feature is very similar to Private Browsing in Apple's Safari browser, except that an icon in IE's address bar makes InPrivate's active status more obvious.
The browser's phishing filter—called SmartScreen— improves upon its predecessor's filter with such features as more thorough scrutiny of a Web page's address (to protect you from sites named something like paypal.iamascammer.com and a full-window warning when you stumble upon a suspected phishing site. SmartScreen relies largely on a database of known phishing sites, so a new, unknown phishing site may be able to slip through the cracks.

IE 8 displays sites' domains in a darker text color, so you can more easily see whether you're actually visiting an ebay.com page, say, or in reality a page on some site you've never heard of. Microsoft could still put a little more emphasis on the domain name (using a different color background, for example), but the highlighting is a welcome addition.

Creating a site that looks identical in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari can be a challenge. IE 8 Beta 2 offers better support for W3 Web standards —a set of guidelines developed to ensure that a Web page appears the same in all browsers. The downside is that IE 8 will break some pages designed for earlier Internet Explorer versions.
To counteract this, Microsoft has added a compatibility mode: Click a button in the toolbar, and IE 8 will display a page the same way that IE 7 does. In my testing, I found that most pages worked fine with the standard (new) mode, and that most errors were minor cosmetic ones. Unfortunately, the Compatibility Mode toggle button may not be obvious to most users, because it's pretty small; a text label would have helped.
While it likely won't convince many Firefox users to jump ship, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 may be worth considering for people who have not yet solidified their browser loyalties.

from: http://www.pcworld.in/india/news/Internet/Security_the_New_Keyword_for_IE_8_in_Beta_Version_2/5636170/9

New Firefox to Boost Open-source Video Software

Mozilla is edging closer to releasing a new version of Firefox that could increase the use of open-source video software.

Firefox 3.1, the next major release due by early next year, will likely include support for a new HTML tag specifically for embedding video in web pages. Firefox 3.1 will also support royalty-free video codec Ogg Theora.

Firefox developers at a summit last week in Whistler, British Columbia, said they had started working on native Theora support, and test builds of the browser incorporating the new feature are available.

The code committed so far is a work in progress, wrote Chris Double, a Mozilla engineer who has been handling the project, "but it's a start towards using a common codec across all platforms and will improve as we get towards the 3.1 release".

When the upgrade is finalised, Firefox users won't have to download a plug-in to play Theora content. Another cited advantage is that web developers can just use a tag to mark content, rather than needing JavaScript to launch a video.

Video on the web these days is a jumble of different software formats and products, with major ones including Apple's QuickTime, Microsoft's Windows Media, Adobe's Flash and RealNetworks' RealPlayer multimedia players. The plug-ins are free. The companies make money by selling streaming servers and encoding software.

Some see that commercial interest as potentially harmful to the internet, since content locked up in a particular format could become inaccessible due to a change in a vendor's product development plans.

Videos in formats such as .AVI can be converted to Theora using VLC, an open-source streaming media server, video player and converter from the VideoLAN Project. Another open-source converter is ffmpeg2theora.

Firefox's work will streamline the delivery of video to users, wrote a user by the name of J5 on his blog. "That to me is freedom - to allow for those who prefer open formats the ability to deliver their content without any barriers between them and theirend users," J5 wrote.

Opera Software, which makes a browser by the same name, has also implemented the video HTML tag. The company said last month that it has released versions of its latest browser that support Ogg Theora for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X operating systems.

"It's such an obvious improvement over the previous state of affairs of dealing with online video that it really makes you wonder why it took so long," wrote Ben McIlwain, an IT consultant, on his blog. "We're several years into the online video revolution now (led by such giants as YouTube), so it's only fair that we finally get native browser support for videos."

The moves by Mozilla and Opera can be seen as a strike against Microsoft, which dominates the browser market. Figures from Net Applications from last month show Internet Explorer with a 73 per cent market share, compared to Firefox at 19 per cent and Opera at 0.69 per cent.

Ogg Theora isn't supported in Internet Explorer 7. It is an older compression specification compared to Adobe's Flash 9, which uses the latest H.264 technology and is used on prominent websites such as Google's YouTube.

News from http://www.pcworld.in/india/news/Software/New_Firefox_to_Boost_Open-source_Video_Software/5341197/9

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