Mozilla Targets Malicious Sites
Mozilla’s Firefox browser has been gaining popularity over the past few years, but its success has not satisfied its developers. For Firefox 3.0, Mozilla hopes to develop two defenses against dangerous Web sites for Firefox users.
One thing Mozilla developers are working on is giving Firefox 3.0 the ability to detect malicious code on sites that Firefox users are attempting to view. This is currently unavailable in Firefox 2.0.
The second thing that developers are working on is an interface that will warn users when they are about to open up a potentially dangerous Web site.
"We don’t want to just pop up an alert that gives them an OK or cancel option. We want to create a warning that users won’t mistake. … It’s going to be a different kind of warning, and it’s not going to be a click-through," said Window Snyder, "chief security something-or-other," at Mozilla.
The mock-up version of this warning currently shows up as a red-letter warning that does not have a click through option, preventing the dangerous site from loading. This could change before Firefox 3.0 is finally released, and technicians are contemplating whether or not to provide an override function for users.
Programmers at Mozilla are also re-writing some of the Firefox code to improve security and performance.
According to recent figures released by Net Applications, 14.55% of the world’s Internet surfers used a version of Mozilla’s Firefox browser in June 2007.
Source:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/cmp/20070812/tc_cmp/201400213;_ylt=
Ahu2T0Xb2HbQ_lAo7bMJP5r6VbIF
