browser

Mozilla has designed a site that will open 100 tabs at once, quite likely crashing a web browser. It's meant as a creative way to show how web tracking works. The stunt is based around cookies: small text files put onto a computer via the browser to ... customize an online session to a website. Third-party tracking cookies are then generated, which keep a record of the sites a user visits. This information is then used by ad servers to deliver targeted ads based on website history. "Track THIS" works by opening 100 tabs selected to represent a particular type of web user. The idea is that there ... (view more)

Mozilla has issued an emergency patch for the Firefox browser that is a must-install. It fixes a security gap that hackers are actively exploiting on compromised websites that serve up malicious code. How to Patch Firefox For most users, restarting ... Firefox should be enough to trigger the update. Users can also click the menu icon near the top right of the browser (the three vertical bars), then scroll all the way down near the bottom and click the "(?) Help" sub menu, then click the "About Firefox" option, which will trigger the update. Once the update has been downloaded, Firefox ... (view more)

Mozilla has confirmed a premium (paid) version of the Firefox browser is on the way. It says it won't charge for any features that are currently free. The details are still quite hazy and Mozilla is still considering exactly what will be in the paid ... version of the "enhanced" browser. It plans to launch it in October, 2019 and will most likely be an on-going subscription service rather than a one-off payment. (Source: techradar.com ) One feature that looks very likely to be included is a Virtual Private Network or VPN . This uses a combination of s ecure s ocket l ayer encryption ( ... (view more)

Microsoft has ditched Windows 10 "Sets," a feature planned as a major rethink of how Windows 10 works. In simple terms, it would have replaced traditional windows (such as File Explorer or a MS Word) with browser-like tabs. The feature was first ... revealed by Microsoft in late 2017 and later went out to some users in the Windows 10 test panel. The concept was simple: to offer an alternative to the current methods of switching between open applications such as using Alt-Tab to cycle between them, or clicking on icons in the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. Browser-Like Experience ... (view more)

Google is to fight back against websites that make it deliberately hard for users to leave their pages. It's tweaking the way the Chrome browser responds to the back button. The back button sounds like something simple that would intuitive take the ... user to the page they were on before navigating to the current page. However, the way it works has proven open to abuse. In reality the back button doesn't reverse the most recent "move" between pages. Instead it tells the browser to visit the most recent page in its history list. To the user it makes no difference, but to the browser it's ... (view more)

Microsoft has confirmed Edge will now use the same code as Chrome . It's also said it plans to support Chrome extensions on Edge. The news bears out previous reports, though notably it appears Microsoft will stick with the Edge name for the revamped ... browser. That may be because it put so much effort into branding Edge as the replacement of Internet Explorer. It's all to do with rendering engines, the part of a web browser that actually turns the code of a web page into what the users sees on screen. Microsoft is ditching its own EdgeHTML and adopting "Chromium," an open source ... (view more)

Sources close to Microsoft suggest that the company may ditch its Edge browser as the default option in Windows 10. Its replacement would run on the same underlying code as Google's Chrome. While Edge has failed to win the hearts of most users, it ... appears the main reason behind the move is that site developers are tired of having to do extra work to make their sites work on the browser. The most recent statistics show Chrome dominating the browser market, being used on more than 70 per cent of computers, compared with just four percent running Edge. Given that Edge is the default option on ... (view more)

Security researchers have warned that nearly half of all phishing sites falsely display the browser padlock symbol commonly associated with secure websites. It's a reminder that the browser padlock symbol only covers one aspect of security. Most ... major browsers display the padlock symbol when a website uses a technology, most commonly Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), to encrypt data as it passes between the user's computer and the website, or vice versa. Such sites have an address starting "https://" rather than "http://". The purpose of the padlock symbol is to indicate to the user that the ... (view more)

Google is taking several more steps to make browser extensions safer. It's giving users more control and cracking down on some common rogue practices. The changes are to Chrome's extensions. Also known as add-ons with some browsers, extensions are ... third-party tools designed to improve the online experience using a web browser. For example, an Amazon extension lets users send text on a web page (such as a lengthy article) straight to their Kindle e-reader as a document with one click. By nature, extensions need some degree of access to and control over Chrome itself, which sometimes means the ... (view more)

A security researcher has found a way to crash the Firefox browser and even Windows itself. Sabri Haddouche has demonstrated the technique to highlight the risk that it could be misused. The bug is shown off at Haddouche's site Browser Reaper, which ... he created to chart his interest in denial of service attacks. Normally such attacks involve flooding a website with bogus visits until it is overloaded and becomes unavailable to ordinary users. However, Haddouche has been exploring the technique from the other perspective: forcing a browser to deal with so much traffic that it crashes. Epic Name ... (view more)