Fortunately Firefox

I dropped by the Mozilla web site tonight.  I discovered on their Firefox news page, that Firefox 9.0.1 has already been released.

I am pretty excited because this version dramatically speeds up some web pages which use JavaScript.  I read elsewhere this evening that the developers used some clever optimization techniques to get the higher performance.

Apparently, MathML support has been improved too.


On a side note, this is my first post using the draft version of the new version of Google's Blogger service which will be getting an update soon.

It seems nice. This is certainly one of those changes that you notice.  The post-a-blog-entry page is nothing like the old one they have had for years.  Saying it is different is a radical understatement.

Labels: blogging, browsing, firefox, software, update, web

The Nobel Peace Prize web site and others have been infected with malware that in turn infects computers via Firefox if the user is not running the just released update of Firefox - version 3.6.12 (or the 3.5 equivalent).

The vulnerability was in the JavaScript interpreter.  It was of a category named use-after-free.  Memory was dynamically allocated, then freed - and then use continued after that.  It is not terribly uncommon in large, complex programs written in C and C++.  This type of bug cannot be written directly in Java because Java uses garbage collection instead of letting application programmers do alloc/free themselves.

Users running NoScript addon for Firefox were safe all along, unless they expressly gave permission to an infected web site to run JavaScript.

Labels: firefox, javascript, malware, mswin, security, security snafus, web

Supposedly, there is a software conflict between Google Toolbar and Personas 1.6 in Firefox, when an update for one of them came out a few days ago.

After reading some technical support pages for a different addon which was the one exposing symptoms but apparently as an innocent bystander, I decided to switch to my default Theme in Personnas and then disable:  Google Toolbar, Yahoo Toolbar, Personnas - and uninstall that other addon.

Note that since at least one of the addons was malfunctioning very badly and interfering with lots of things, including the ability to display the Addon manager window (!) I had to start up Firefox in "safe" mode.  On the Macintosh, this is easy:  simply hold down the Option key on your keyboard while launching Firefox.  I did not check any buttons on the safe mode dialog that appeared when I did this; just clicked the button to tell it to start up in safe mode.

This procedure cleared up the problem.  I was pretty concerned about this since Firefox is by far the web browser I use the most, most of the time.

I was very much relieved to discover this was simply a problem with some addons.  Firefox itself was not the problem, nor is there apparent permanent damage to my Firefox install!

Problem solved.

Labels: extension, firefox, troubleshooting

My iMac running latest, up-to-date Mac OS X (10.6.3) blue screened while I was typing in Safari and went through a reboot process.  It seemed to take extra long compared to a warm boot; seemed like a cold boot or even a boot that did some kind of update.

At the time it happened, I had Safari in the foreground and I had Firefox sitting idle in the background.

Other applications were not running.  I have 5.6 GB of disk storage free on my boot drive.  My computer was downstairs on the western facing side of the house.  So there were no free disk space or ambient temperature problems.

When the system came back up, I was naturally curious what was in the logs at the point it crashed and just before that so I ran the Console application that comes as part of the Mac OS. What I saw surprised me.

There was a process called "firefox-bin" running and it was running amuck.  The process was logging over a dozen messages per second.  Every message was the same error:


6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)


Well, I am pretty sure I had not launched Firefox yet! It had not been opened, yet firefox-bin, the main Firefox application process, was already running.  Not only that, it was stuck in a loop trying to do something it could not do, over and over really quickly.

I checked and this error message repeatedly being output has been reported by other users back in late 2009, running Mac OS X 10.5 (older than my 10.6) and an older version of Firefox than I have.

Here is the discussion thread on it at support.mozilla.com: System.log shows that Firefox is spamming the following error in large chunks .  The person who posted that message listed the error message absolutely identical to the one on spotted above on my system.  They said they updated Firefox, and the problem went away.

Oh, and someone reported the same problem (same error message) being output by iCal in December 2009:   _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001).  Completely unrelated application gave the same error message.

I killed the process, by the way.  I am not sure why it was running, what it was doing, why it had this error and why it was apparently doing it really fast over and over in a tight loop.  Nothing about it seemed kosher or okay.

Here is me killing the rogue, runaway Firefox process:


John-intel-iMac:~ jcollins$ ps 4299
  PID   TT  STAT      TIME COMMAND
 4299   ??  Ss    19:26.69 /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin
John-intel-iMac:~ jcollins$ ps -elf 4299
  UID   PID  PPID        F CPU PRI NI       SZ    RSS WCHAN     S     ADDR TTY           TIME CMD                  STIME
  501  4299     1     4000   0  57  0   517184 189464 -      Ss    40a5000 ??        19:27.11 /Applications/Fi   4:01.47
John-intel-iMac:~ jcollins$ kill -9 4299

I am running Firefox 3.6.3 which has a reported file size of 55,240,723 bytes on my system.  I am really sure about those two numbers because I copied and pasted them directly from the Get Info pane in the Finder.

I am really disturbed by this highly unusual and unexpected behavior on my system. Nothing like this has ever happened before on this computer. In all the 2 or 3 years I have had it, it has never spontaneously rebooted.

I am going to look into this further because clearly something is wrong with my system at that point on the basis of the reboot.  Why Firefox was running and why it had this error message being logged at an absurdly rapid rate over and over is an issue too. Whether they are related or not, I cannot say at this point but I hope to find out soon.

I verified my Mac was up to date immediately after the reboot.  It was except for printer software which must have been updated in the past week.

Labels: crash, firefox, macintosh, macosx, reliability, security, snafus, software, web

Firefox 3.6.2 was released yesterday to fix a remote code execution vulnerability and some other bugs. A cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in SVG content handling was also fixed.

Labels: firefox, security snafus

The famous Html Validator add-on for Firefox has been updated to be compatible with the current version of Firefox 3.6.  If you have the old version, tell it to go to its home page, uninstall the old version, then install the new version from its home page.

Labels: extension, firefox, html, opensource, software

A new 3D graphics library for World Wide Web browser programmers is emerging: WebGL.

WebGL is an open, industry-wide JavaScript API that looks like it will be appearing in the major web browsers soon.  Perhaps as early as this year.  So far, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome have all endorsed it and already have it in their nightly builds.

Based on that, I think it would be very surprising if you did not see WebGL rolled out by all three leaders before the end of this year.

Internet Explorer, hardly a leader when it comes to web standards, still has not implemented the 2D graphics web standard approved back in the 1990's.  However, nobody looks to Microsoft when they want open, interoperable standards.

Sure, in areas like SQL where everything is fragmented, basic standards are difficult because the standard seems to embrace incompatible dialects.  Some say Microsoft had a hand in this a decade and a half ago.  Could be.

Nowadays, the leading web browser makers are working together in two ways:  defining open/interoperable standards and making products that follow those standards.  That is the reason the web has been advancing so quickly lately.

The idea of cloud based computing depends on having very advanced, standards-based, web browsers that do not get hacked a lot.  Since business, government sites, political, and scientific web sites are going to have a lot of statistics on them visualization is going to be a key ingredient for them to be effective at getting their message across.  That is where WebGL will really let those sites shine.

If you are interested in doing fast 3D graphics on the web, take a look at the WebGL Tutorial.

Labels: 3d, firefox, graphics, safari

At last, Mozilla Firefox 3.6 has arrived. It got here a few weeks, well, exactly 3, after the end of 20009. Not bad though. The speed improvements from the newly improved JavaScript interpreter might make up for it.

Labels: browsing, firefox, update, web

An article in IT online newspaper The Register says that Firefox 3.6 might go final next week.

I will not hold my breath, but with 3.6 RC1 having already come out earlier this month we really could see Firefox 3.6 go final soon.

Labels: firefox

The ultra-popular Mozilla Firefox 3.5, the latest released version of Firefox is the most popular of any particular version of any web browser for any brand.

The first popular web browser, Mosaic, was created by programmers at NCSA, located at UIUC - a university in the US. That was back around 1993.

They were subsequently lured away to create a new web browser, Netscape, at a new start-up company by that name in California. Netscape was wildly successful, and then in the late 1990's, suddenly lost marketshare to the Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser. Ironically, Microsoft did not write IE, they bought Mosaic from the University, which had spun it off and renamed it Spyglass.

Netscape responded by founding a non-profit organization, Mozilla, and set about creating the Mozilla web browser under its auspices. The Mozilla browser was very popular but never came close to recapturing all of Netscape's former market share.

However, a sleeker, faster, more powerful web browser was created from Mozilla. This new one was called Firefox.

Now, Firefox is one of the most advanced, standards-compliant web browsers around. Internet Explorer, in classic tortoise-hare fashion, is one of the least.

And correspondingly, it is now Firefox that has the most popular web browser version around.

Labels: firefox, statistics

There are issues fixed by updating to Firefox 3.5.6. It is very important at this time to keep Firefox up to date.

That goes for the Firefox application program itself, the extensions you have installed, and the plugins.

Unfortunately, Firefox lacks a built-in, automated way to check for out-of-date plugins and offer to update them for you.

However, there is at least a web page at the Mozilla web site that will do that for you. Using Firefox web browser, click the shiny bit of blog bling in the lower left corner of my weblog page here, so you can get that done.

That simply takes you to their web page. Their page does all the work. Just read it carefully. Make sure you bookmark their page, by the way. You will want to visit that web page regularly. I recommend doing it about once a week.

Updating Ad-ons in Firefox is easy. Just go to the Tools menu in Firefox, Choose Add-ons menu item, and click the Find Updates button at the bottom of the dialog box that appears. It will let you know if there are any updates that need to be applied and then display a Restart button if there are.

To update Firefox itself, you should go to its Help menu and choose the Check for Updates menu item.

If software developers at Mozilla update Firefox, but you never get those updates from them - then your computer just gets more and more at risk. Plus, you are not going to get improvements. The same goes for updating its third-party plugins and add-ons.

Labels: browsing, firefox, software, update, web

The Noscript addon for Firefox makes Firefox even safer. It blocks executable content like Flash and other things that have caused browsers to be compromised before.

It is a pretty powerful defense against drive by web attacks. If you are not displaying/executing the content that is trying to attack you, it cannot do any harm.

Noscript will not stop image exploits so you still have to be concerned about where you go. Firefox just fixed some image-handling vulnerabilities this week. Image exploits for various file types like WMF, JPG, and GIF have cropped up on Windows. While I do not recall reading in the news about any attacks on Macs using them, I do recall some vulnerabilities involving them getting fixed on Macs.

Image file vulnerabilities make me uncomfortable because we never seem to get to a place on any computer where they are solved. And since browsers might use the operating system to display an image, that poses a problem for everyone who browses the web, reads newsfeeds, or reads email.

Flash is something different though. Flash is not a part of any web standards. Flash is a plugin that runs on IE and on Firefox. It follows their standards for plugins so it can run in the browsers.

Some sites need it to run but most do not. Some ads need it. Some ads actually exploit flaws in Flash to hack your computer. This keeps happening in recent years.

Even when running Firefox on a Macintosh, Flash vulnerabilities could hurt. The ones that were in the news last month used IE-specific technology. But someday the authors of Flash malware might embrace Firefox or even the Macintosh as well.

With Noscript, all they will get back is the cold shoulder!

For sites you really trust a lot and figure you can trust their ads, you can enable their content. If a site does not use Flash for ads, it poses less hazard. The safest ads I have noticed so far are the Google Adsense ads. I have managed to get them turned on yet myself but I have seen them enough times to notice I never see any images in them. I think more advertisers need to consider text-only ads as something worth looking into.

To get some protection against Flash for Safari web browser on the Macintosh computer, get the ClickToFlash webkit plugin.

Reducing malware risks just takes making safer choices.

Labels: firefox, flash

I finally upgraded from Firefox 3.0 to 3.5 today.

Firefox 3.5 has been out for a number of months. My reasons for not upgrading right away is that I wanted stability issues to be addressed and I wanted to wait for upgrades the addons I use to be upgraded.

Another thing that pushed me to make the upgrade is that I do not want to get left behind.

Old versions eventually get less attention from maintainers, for one thing. So there can be new vulnerabilities arising. That is not good for a program whose job it is to display files from the Internet all the time

There is more support for new standards in Firefox 3.5. HTML 5 is gonig to be a good deal and I wanted to be able to start authoring some pages that take advantage the increased support for it in Firefox. CSS 3 is another area where things are getting better and better.

Last week, Firefox 3.5 was patched to fix some possibly exploitable flaws in the graphic media libraries that arose during a retooling of them as part of the 3.0 to 3.5 evolution. I feel as confident about 3.5 as I did about 3.0 now. The paint is not wet anymore.

Flash has become a real risk though much less for me than a lot of people. The folks that are getting harmed by it are running Microsoft Windows and IE.

Unless I am testing web pages I am developing, running Windows Update to install security updates and bug fixes from Microsoft, or accessing a work-specific portal I give IE a wide berth.

I have been using the web since back in the old days when there was no IE or Netscape, just Mosaic. I have learned a thing or two. One of them is avoid the highest risk places, software, and media.

I also found out recently that the addons I use were as ready as they were going to get for 3.5.

Unfortunately, I had to say goodbye to Google "Bookmarks" as Google announced last month they are no longer going to support it. I have not used it in a good while so as brilliant a tool as it is, I probably will not miss it anytime soon. So addons, one of the things that usually holds me up a while when a new version of Firefox comes out are no longer an issue.

One of my relatives recently upgraded to 3.5 too and I wanted to stay in sync with them to make it easier to give tech support when they had questions or problems.

Firefox 3.5 seems really fast. I hope it stays this fast. I have noticed for years that when I do a browser upgrade as opposed to a minor patch, it really speeds up. Then it gradually slows down. Not sure if this has to do with some disk caching of pages or RSS feeds or what. If Firefox 3.5 keeps operating at the speed it is right now I am going to be extremely happy.

Labels: firefox

A few minutes ago, my Firefox started locking up every time I run it.

The only pages I have visited since booting this morning are: www.yahoo.com, news.google.com, several news web pages linked to those 2 portal pages, delicious.com and one or two pages I found on the delicious.com Popular page.

I have not added any new addons to Firefox in a couple of weeks. I have the latest version of Firefox 3.0.1.

Not sure what the cause of the problem is but I am really irritated by it.

Labels: firefox

Firefox 3 is the biggest leap forward for web browsers since Firefox 1.0 was released several years ago. In fact, I think it might be the biggest improvement to the state of the art for web browsing since the beginning - back in the early 1990s.

Tagging in Firefox 3 is great. The only feature that is missing is bulk editing of tags. This is an essential feature but did ont make the Firefox 3.0 release. It had to be pushed back until Firefox 3.1. I guess that means I will not be getting that before the end of this year.

I might write my own. I studied the Places system in Firefox and read the API docs for the different services Places provides. It looks very powerful and, at the same time - very easy to use in Javascript programs.

I reckon I will probably have to create an extension in order to provide an execution environment. However, that would probably be necessary in any case. I would probably want to have a sidebar that I could use to browse and edit my tags, kind of like the one that comes with Firefox 3, but slanted just towards bulk editing bookmarks' tags.

Once you start tagging a lot you will really notice how cool the new location bar (AKA, The Awesome Bar) is.

Type words in it and they become search terms applied to all the tags, page titles, and URLs in your bookmarks. Maybe your browsing history too. Anyway, I like this feature. Some people complain it could be an embarrassment at work but c'mon, what kind of sites are you visiting then?

There is another great feature in Firefox that is somewhat related to bookmarks. They use URNs to define search criteria for dynamic bookmark lists. Think of these as "smart folders" in iTunes or in the Mac OS X Finder (desktop) if you have iTunes or a Macintosh.

I will not go into the details of that feature. If you already know what a URN is, you do not need any explanation. If you do not, then you can find explanations of it better than I could give over on the Mozilla/Firefox web site or in Wikipedia.

Firefox 3 is fast - very fast. Firefox 2 ran slower on the Mac than it did on MS-Windows. It was almost if not quite a dot compared to Safari 3. Well, now the canine costume is on the other foot. Safari 3 needs to be sped up slightly on the Mac to hold its record, I think.

That is just my subjective opinion. I saw some benchmarks this week that indicate that Safari 3 generally faster than Firefox.

Some of my favorite Firefox addons like these have not been updated to work with Firefox 3 yet:

1. Firebug
2. HTML Validator
   
3. View Source Chart
4. XForms
   

But most are already working with Firefox 3. These include:

• Adblock
• EditCSS
• ForecastFox
• Google Toolbar
• Google Notebook
• Selenium IDE
  
• Web Developer
  
• Yahoo! Toolbar
  
• Greasemonkey
  

The new features that let you see how much confidence you can have in a web site are nice. Very easy. And this sort of "transparency" for web sties to the user is long overdue! Hopefully, every browser will make it as easy as Firefox 3 to see if a site as kosher as it appears to be.

So, if you have been hanging back, waiting for other people to "check out" Firefox 3 before you upgrade - hey, it's checked out now!

If you use a Macintosh running Mac OS X, you will be really impressed with how much faster Firefox runs and how much cleaner it looks. Regardless of which operating system you run it on, you will be really happy with the new features. I cannot think of anything that got harder to do, more complicated, or slower. Things just improved across the board.

Another nice thing is that Firefox 3 uses less memory than earlier versions. It is a rare day when a program runs faster and uses less memory. But tht is the case with Firefox 3.

Come on in, the water is fine! Fast, fun, and feature-packed!

Labels: firefox

The long awaited Firefox web browser version 3 came out this afternoon (morning, if you live on west coast of US).



More details after I have had a chance to install it and check it out. In the meantime, grab your own copy.

The Mozilla guys are pushing to see how many people they can get to download and try it out in the first 24 hours. The clock started ticking today a little before or after noon today - depending on where in the US you live. If you live elsewhere, it probably came out around 10 AM PDT (GMT-7, considering daylight savings time is on now).

Labels: browsing, firefox, Firefox 3, web

Firefox 3 RC 2 is out now.  Here are the release notes.

Labels: firefox, http, web

The new design of the addons.mozilla.org web site has a really clean, polished, professional look to it now.

It has looked nice for a long time. Now, it looks better than nice. It looks really solid, powerful, and up to date. In a word: "modern".

Labels: firefox

A new version of Firefox (2.0.0.2) has been released to fix some problems and to help it work better with Microsoft Vista.

Labels: firefox, software, update, vista