Damn... people dying, icons being removed... what next? Anarchy I tell you! 

According to the blog of Mozilla Software Engineer Jared Wein, M.Sc, the Firefox team has just killed off the age-old favicon in yesterday’s nightly build. Wein states that the changes are set to arrive in the release channel in mid-July, and are intended to increase security for users, while reducing overall visual weight.

The problem, apparently, arrises when sites decide to use tricky favicons such as padlocks to give off a false sense of security. According to the blog post, “this behavior can trick users in to thinking that a site is using a secure connection when on an unsecured connection.” Because of these offenders, starting with yesterdays’s nightly, Firefox will no longer include the favicon in the address bar. 

Read the entire article.

As they always do at the beginning of each month, Microsoft updated its official Internet Explorer blog today with its claims about the user base for its web browser. According to Microsoft, Internet Explorer 9 users on Windows 7-based PCs now comprise 48.8 percent of the web browser market share in the US. Google's Chrome is second with 14.6 percent and Mozilla's Firefox is third with 11.6 percent.

Worldwide, Microsoft says IE 9's market share for Windows 7 PCs is set at 34.5 percent, compared to 21.2 percent for Chrome and 13.1 percent for Firefox.

Overall, Net Applications claims that IE 8 is still the most used web browser worldwide with 25.40 percent of the market share, followed by IE 9 with 15.17 percent. Chrome 17 is shown in third with 14.73 percent. However, Google recently updated Chrome to version 18. Firefox 10 is in fourth place with 7.79 percent. As with Chrome, Firefox was recently updated to version 11.

Read the IE Blog HERE!

A fully patched version of Internet Explorer running on the most secure version of Windows yet was the second browser to fall at an annual hacker competition designed to test resistance of internet software to real-world attacks.

The attackers were able to take complete control of the underlying laptop by exploiting two previously unknown vulnerabilities in version 9 of the Microsoft browser running on Windows 7 SP 1. Like Tuesday's hacks on Google's Chrome browser, multiple vulnerabilities had be targeted in tandem to penetrate protections developers have added over the past few years, to harden their wares to sophisticated exploits.

Chief among the protections is what's known as a security sandbox. This funnels web content into a highly restricted perimeter condoned off from operating-system functions that carry out sensitive actions (such as modifying registry settings).

Read the story HERE!

Interesting... 

Microsoft's new version of Internet Explorer has barred browser plugins in the Metro environment. But Microsoft has revealed a method that plugin-dependent websites can use to leap over Metro's walls and reach the green fields of the conventional Windows desktop, where Flash is still allowed to roam free.

The relevance of proprietary browser plugins is declining as standards-based Web technologies mature. Native Web technologies don't yet supply complete functional equivalence with the capabilities of plugins, but the open Web has the advantage of greater ubiquity.

There are a growing number of mobile devices and computing environments where modern Web standards are supported, but plugin-based technologies like Flash are not. The proliferation of platforms and devices, including some that are locked down like appliances, has made it difficult for plugin vendors to keep up and reach every screen. 

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