Ars Technica recently posted an interesting summary of usage stats for operating systems and web browsers on desktop, laptop, and mobile computing platforms.
Here are a few highlights:
Most of the world considers a version increase from 23.x to 24 to represent a major release, with many new and changed features. Not so with Firefox. In the interest of marketing, Mozilla has tossed out anything resembling industry standards for naming Firefox’s version numbers.
Version 24 of Firefox fixes a few minor bugs and adds some very minor enhancements: nothing worthy of a major version increase. Version 24 does include several security fixes, which can be seen on the Security Advisories page.
I suppose it almost goes without saying by now, but the release notes and related announcements for Firefox still leave a lot to be desired (see my post about Firefox 23 for details).
A new version of Firefox was released yesterday. Version 23.0.1 apparently fixes three minor bugs, none related to security.
There was no official release announcement for this new version. The release notes are exactly the same as for version 23, with the three fixed bugs just added the top of the list of changes. The ‘complete list of changes’ link still points to an enormous list of bugs that appear to all be related to version 23.
I won’t bother rehashing everything that’s wrong with the way new Firefox versions are being documented by Mozilla. For that, see my post about Firefox 23.
Another new version of Firefox was made available yesterday. Along with the usual crop of security bug fixes, version 23 sports a few changes worthy of mention:
Update 2016Jan06: The release notes page for Firefox 23.0 no longer exists. It was moved to an archive site by Mozilla, but must have been lost in the process. There’s a broken link to the missing page on the Releases/Old/2013 page.
As always, there was no proper announcement for this release. I discovered the new version when I was reading Hacker News. I’ve outlined the problems with Firefox’s online resources in several previous posts, so I’ll just provide a brief list here. Suffice to say that nothing has improved since Firefox 22.
Web browsers want to make your life easier, which is why they all offer to store web site userids and passwords. But if you thought this was a safe way to store passwords, you’d be wrong. Still, some browsers handle this better than others.
First of all, regardless of which web browser you use, if a person has access to your computer while you are logged in, and you allow your browser to store passwords, you should assume that the person now knows all your web site passwords. Simple techniques can be used to trick any web browser into displaying otherwise obfuscated (e.g. ‘*****’) passwords as plain text. This is yet another reason – as if you needed one – to always lock your computer when you walk away from it. Most operating systems have a setting that locks your computer for you after a period of inactivity. This is the only way to be at all secure; access to your logged-in computer potentially gives intruders access not only to your passwords, but also to all of your documents.
Given the above, does it even make sense to worry about how your web browser handles saved passwords? There are arguments for both points of view. From my perspective, security should be layered: getting past one security hurdle shouldn’t open up everything. So if you allow your browser to save passwords, you should consider using the browser’s settings to secure those passwords. The four browsers I use handle passwords with varying degrees of security:
Google Chrome stands out in this list, since it both shows your passwords, and has no master password feature. Elliot Kember recently wrote about this, describing Chrome’s password handling as ‘insane’. I’m not sure I would go that far, but Chrome clearly needs a master password feature.
I’d like to see all web browsers show a prominent warning to any user who uses a password saving feature: “WARNING: saved passwords can be retrieved extremely/relatively easily. Always lock your computer when you leave it unattended.”
Update 2013Aug11: Here’s Google’s response.
Update 2013Aug25: Tim Berners-Lee (the person who invented the World Wide Web) weighs in. tl;dr – he agrees that Chrome should at least have a master password.
Version 22 of Mozilla’s web browser was released yesterday, with the usual utter lack of anything approaching a proper announcement. The closest we got was a post on the Mozilla blog entitled “Firefox Delivers 3D Gaming, Video Calls and File Sharing to the Web“. That post discusses some of the new features of Firefox 22, but never actually mentions the new version number. I understand that Mozilla is trying to place less importance on version numbers, but in my opinion this is going too far.
Making things even more confusing, the main download page for Firefox never mentions the current version, although all the download links point to version 22 URLs, which you can see by hovering your mouse over them.
The release notes page is still a confusing mess. The first text you read on that page is “Firefox Notes (First offered to release channel users on June 25, 2013)”. It sounds like they’re saying that Firefox was released on June 25, 2013. What they really mean is that Firefox version 22 was released on June 25, 2013, but the version isn’t mentioned in the title. In fact, the only reference to the version is in a contributor “thank you” note below the title. Below that, the “What’s New” section lists changes made to Firefox, which we can only assume are specific to version 22 because the page’s URL includes the text “22.0”.
A link on the release notes page for version 22 titled “complete list of changes” now points to a list of bugs in Mozilla’s bug tracking system, Bugzilla. The list of bugs shown is huge, and although each of the 510 entries supposedly represents a bug fixed in version 22, the information is highly technical and not really intended for regular users. A proper change list is nowhere to be found.
Somewhat more useful are the confusingly-named and well hidden “known vulnerabilities” and “security advisories” pages for Firefox. The first of those pages lists security vulnerabilities and the versions of Firefox in which they were fixed, including version 22. The second page lists Firefox security vulnerabilities by the date on which they were first reported by Mozilla, with no indication of which vulnerabilities have been fixed, or when they were fixed.
I’ve been pointing out the lack of proper version announcement resources for Firefox here and in other online forums for a while now, but have yet to see any significant progress.
Another new version of Firefox was released today. Version 21.0 fixes several security vulnerabilities and other bugs.
As usual, the release notes for version 21 don’t mention the version except in a note about contributors, but the list of fixes seems to be relevant to the new version.
Clicking the ‘complete list of changes‘ link on the release notes page now goes to the Firefox bug tracking site, but the list of bugs shown includes issues that were resolved long before version 21 appeared, which is still very confusing.
On a brighter note, the release notes page now includes this entry:
21.0: Security fixes can be found here
Clicking the associated link shows a page titled “Known Vulnerabilities”, which clearly shows the version in which particular security vulnerabilities were fixed.
On Tuesday, Mozilla released another new version of Firefox, version 20.
The new version includes several security fixes, as well as private browsing, changes to the download system, performance improvements, and several other bug fixes and enhancements.
As usual, the release notes and complete list of changes for this release are a jumbled mess of old and new information, making the job of figuring out what has actually changed needlessly difficult. Will they ever fix this?
Mozilla released a new version of Firefox today. Version 19.0.2 fixes one security vulnerability.
As usual, the release notes and complete list of changes for this release are a mixture of old and new information, making the job of figuring out what has actually changed needlessly difficult.
Firefox 19 was released today, with the usual lack of a proper announcement, and a confusing jumble of change information from Mozilla.
Instead of a proper announcement for the new version, all we get is this post announcing a new, built-in PDF viewer.
As usual, the release notes for version 19 are confusing, but at least the new version is mentioned, albeit in an unusual congratulatory note to ‘new Mozillians’ – whatever they are. And, as always, the complete list of changes for version 19 actually includes every bugfix in recent history. When are they going to clean this stuff up, one wonders.
Still, a built-in PDF viewer will allow users to steer clear of at least one buggy piece of Adobe software in the form of a Reader plugin. It remains to be seen whether the new viewer has as many security issues as what it’s replacing.
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