Firefox 3 Debuts with Web Domination in Its Sights Security Gets a Boost in Firefox 3 Sean Michael Kerner
Enhanced Security in Firefox 3
Security also gets a boost in Firefox 3 in a number of ways. Among the most visible is the new site identity button, which is embedded with a site's favicon (the 16x16 icon that sits to the left of a site address on the address bar of any browser).
When a user clicks the favicon, they now activate the Mozilla passport officer, which provides a form of verified site information about ownership of a given site.
The feature — which developers have named "Larry" — provides a form of verified information about ownership of a given site. When a user clicks the favicon for a supported site, Larry lets users know that they're on the real site and whether or not the traffic is encrypted.
Currently, however, Larry might not be as useful as other enhancements, owing to a lack of supporting information from sites.
"Most Web sites don't supply identity information," Beltzner said. "That's totally fine, but some Web sites do."
Sites that provide identity information include Facebook and PayPal.
The feature does offer additional benefits, however.
For one thing, "Larry also protects users from malware," Beltzner said.
By leveraging the Google Safe Browsing technology that Mozilla developers have been using since Firefox 2, Firefox 3's Larry identifies malware sites a user might visit. Unlike Firefox 2, the new version of the browser now fully blocks loading of the site.
Among the other features baked into Firefox 3 is a pause-and-resume download capability. It also offers searching through downloads using keywords to more easily find items.
The add-on feature is also easier to use in Firefox 3 than it was for Firefox 2, with a list of recommended add-ons from Mozilla as well as an easy mechanism for discovering new ones.
Mozilla has also secured the update mechanism itself with SSL-encrypted updates, which are aimed at preventing man-in-the-middle-type attacks.
With today's release, Mozilla isn't just aiming to change its browser. It's
also aiming to enter the record books — the Guinness Book of Records, to be precise.
The group's goal is to set the record for the most downloads of a piece of software in one day. Although Mozilla is aiming for 5 million downloads on release day, any number it posts will still be a record, since Guinness has never tracked this category before.
While Firefox 3.0 marks the end of the long road to release, a new version is already in the works. Firefox 3.1 had its first alpha release yesterday — and so the process begins again.
