By using Opera browser, users can comfortly surf the internet from their mobile phone. Opera 8 itself comes with some popular features, such as tabbed browsing, password manager, and URL auto-completion. Also, with its Small-Screen Rendering (SSR) technology, Opera is the perfect solution for browsing the internet from mobile device.

[ Via Slashphone ]

What’s new in Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 2:

• Improvements to automated update system.
• Improvements to Web site rendering and performance.
• Several security fixes.
• Several bug fixes

You can download it from here.

[ Via MozillaZine ]

I’m going to install it after this and check the different, if any. I’ll post here if I found something “unusual’

Anyway, you can download Firefox Beta 2 Release Candidate here: Windows , Linux , Mac OS X

Note that several bugs have been found in this release candidate edition. Head over to MozillaZine for more information. Also check out both this and this post.

You can download Firefox v1.0.7 here (Windows) or browse their FTP for other operating system.

What’s new in Mozilla Firefox v1.0.7:

• Fix for a potential buffer overflow vulnerability when loading a hostname with all soft-hyphens
• Fix to prevent URLs passed from external programs from being parsed by the shell (Linux only)
• Fix to prevent a crash when loading a Proxy Auto-Config (PAC) script that uses an “eval” statement
• Fix to restore InstallTrigger.getVersion() for Extension authors

Opera is an Internet web browser with a pop-up blocker, multiple-window navigation, mouse gestures, keyboard shortcuts, an e-mail client with a spam filter, and integrated search for user security and speed. The cross-platform browser includes a multitude of other functions, such as IRC-compatible chat, support for RSS newsfeeds, a password manager, and one-click customization and privacy-protection settings. Mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts allow for accelerated Web navigation while the Fast Forward and Rewind buttons ease browsing. Users can run multiple windows as well as personalize the user interface with one-click skins.

The browser also contains special elements for users with disabilities, drag-and-drop support, a notes function, user profiles, and a host of other features. Opera supports the latest in security and provides password and cookie managers.

[ Download Opera ] [ Via Start.Com.My ]

Disable JavaScript in Firefox

1. Select Options from the Tools menus.
2. Select Content (Deer Park or Firefox 1.5 Beta 1) or Web Features tab.
3. Uncheck Enable JavaScript option. Click OK.

Disable JavaScript in Internet Explorer

1. Select Internet Options from the Tools menu.
2. Activate Security tab.
3. Select the zone that you want to disable JavaScript for (usually: Internet) and click Custom Level.
4. Scroll down the list until you find Scripting.
5. Set Active Scripting to Disable. Click OK.
6. Restart Internet Explorer.

Disable JavaScript in Opera

1. Select Quick Preferences from the Tools menu.
2. On the sub-menu, uncheck Enable JavaScript options.

No screenshot for Opera yet.

Couple hours after Mozilla released Firefox Beta 1, the first bug found. Tim Ferris, a security researcher, posted information about the security flaw on this browser, accompanied with proof-of-concept code, on his own website and Full Disclosure security mailing list.

Ferris said, “A buffer overflow vulnerability exists within Firefox version 1.0.6 and all other prior versions which allows for an attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code on an affected host.“.

Secunia, a Danish security vulnerability tracker, marked this bug as “Highly Critical”. They noted that the flaw also affects Mozilla 1.7x and Netscape 7.x and 8.x browsers.

The vulnerability is caused due to an error in the handling of an URL that contains the 0xAD character in its domain name. This can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow.

Successful exploitation crashes Firefox and may potentially allow code execution but requires that the user is tricked into visiting a malicious web site or open a specially crafted HTML file.

Mozilla has been notified about the flaw and currently working on it. On Friday afternoon, they released a small patch that disables support for international domain names, or IDNs (the buffer overflow at issue occurs in the code that normalizes IDNs). The detail about the patch is available here.

What’s new in Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 1:

• Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Firefox may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved.
• Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance.
• Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs.
• Improvements to popup blocking.
• Clear Private Data feature provides an easy way to quickly remove personal data through a menu item or keyboard shortcut.
• Answers.com is added to the search engine list.
• Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery, and “Safe Mode” experience.
• Better accessibility support including DHTML accessibility.
• Report a broken Web site wizard to report Web sites that are not working in Firefox.
• Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 and greater) including profile migration from Safari and Mac Internet Explorer.
• New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6.
• Many security enhancements.
• List of notable bug fixes since Deer Park Alpha 2

[ Download Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 (Direct) ]

At first, I though it’s already fixed since the memory usage is stable on the first hour I use the Release Candidat. But after more than 6 hours using this open source browser, with many pages browsed, tabs opened and closed, the problem came again. The memory usage increased a lot and eat almost all of the computer’s (virtual) memory. I still have to work with FreeRAM XP application to keep enough memory and avoid crash.

I know this is just the Release Candidat, not the real Beta 1 version. But I doubt they’d be able to fix it before the scheduled time of the Beta 1 release, unless they decide to postpone the release.

Should I move to Opera?

As stated in MozillaZine, this Release Candidat version is available for those who want to test this open source browser, before Mozilla finalized and released the Beta 1 version sometime tomorrow. If the feedback doesn’t turn up anything horrible in the next half day or so, they’ll released this Release Candidat as the Beta 1 version.

I’ve downloaded and tried this Release Candidat version, and looks like everything works fine. Not much different than Deer Park Alpha 2, except the bottom panel problem is now fix. It seems to fix the memory-leak problem too, but I can’t 100% confirm yet, since I just use it for an hour.

Most of the extensions are not yet compatible (in my extensions list only ChatZilla, FlashGot, DOM Inspector, and Google PageRank Status that already support this new Firefox version), but I guess soon the extension’s developers will update their extensions so no need to worry about that. I just hope that the TabBrowser Preferences extension will be updated soon, I can’t live with that extension.

You can download Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 Release Candidat here: windows, macintosh, and linux.