Firefox 3.0.7 fixes five security holes, so it is an important update to get. 

• URL spoofing with invisible control characters
• Upgrade PNG library to fix memory safety hazards
• XML data theft via RDFXMLDataSource and cross-domain redirect
• Mozilla Firefox XUL Linked Clones Double Free Vulnerability
• Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.9.0.7)

Along with those, there are a number of different bug fixes too. 

To help better reflect the number of changes coming to Firefox 3.1, Mozilla has decided to rename it Firefox 3.5. However, the next Firefox 3 beta will still be released under the 3.1 name.  That should cover all the important information – but if you want to learn more, check out the status meeting notes via the Mozilla.org wiki.

Firefox developer David Baron wondered how long Firefox 3.1 should be held up by TraceMonkey problems. "Without TraceMonkey, we probably could have shipped 3.1 final by now, or, if not now, within the next month," Baron said. "I think there should be a limit to the amount we’re willing to slip 3.1 to accommodate TraceMonkey, and I think we should decide what that limit is."

Personally, I think, if they need more time – heck, give them more time.  I would rather Firefox 3.1 be a little late and have all it’s ducks in a row rather than go into the, “Oh crap, we have to hurry up and get something out” mode.  Thankfully, Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering said in the same article that, We’re always looking at all of our choices, but I don’t think it’s likely.  TraceMonkey is a big part of Firefox 3.1, and a big part of what we want to have for users."

So should Firefox stay on track, and just work through the delays as they happen, or rush out an in-between release to keep some people happy?

A of noise has been made about the excitement around private browsing.  Personally, this isn’t the feature I have been waiting for years to see, but it is nice to see Firefox keeping up with the competition and adding this feature in.  With this new mode (coming to Firefox 3.1) your browsing, cookies, temporary files, search, forms, and download history will not be saved.

Best thing about it that I have seen is that they will not interrupt the interface with some big bold “Hey you, you are browsing privately now” graphic.  You just get the simple (Private Browsing) in the title bar.

So are you excited to see private surfing added to Firefox or is this one of those “ehh, I guess it is ok” features for you too? Learn more about it at ehsanakhgari.org. 

Mozilla Minefield: Yes, It’s Fast. Really Fast.

There’s been some talk around the blogosphere about Mozilla Minefield, the superfast and super cool-sounding browser by the folks who bring us Firefox. I decided to give it a whirl and see what it was really about.

Drag & DropZones Turns Right-Clicks into Gestures

Drag & DropZones is a clever interface tweak that allows you to perform nearly any action or search by dragging any page element—a link, email address, image, or page itself—onto a transparent grid you set up.

Turning Bookmarklets into Commands for Ubiquity

The main problem with bookmarklets is that they don’t provide a scalable solution for accessing their functionality. You can only have so many buttons on the toolbar before they become an unusable outbreak of pimples that clutter the browser’s interface.  With a new utility function in Ubiquity, it’s now trivial to turn any bookmarklet into a Ubiquity command.

(Firefox Add-on Developers) It’s that time again…

With the release of the first beta of Firefox 3.1 today comes everyone’s favorite release-time festivity: extension compatibility updates!  If you’re an extension developer using a maxVersion of 3.0.* or less, please test your extension before declaring 3.1b1 compatibility. Some of the changes for extension developers are listed here.

Mozilla releases Mobile Firefox Alpha – For Mac, Windows and Linux?

Mozilla has released the first Alpha version of Fennec, the mobile web browser which currently runs on the Nokia N810 internet tablet, and which will soon run on Windows Mobile. Fennec is just a code name. Eventually the browser will probably be called something like Firefox Mobile. And there’s a good reason for that. If you can view web content in Firefox, you can pretty much view it in Fennec.

Here are the benchmarks thus far:

Be sure to check out Brendan’s Roadmap Updates for more.  Also here are a few handy links from John Resig on the testing:

• SunSpider, 1.83x faster (released by the WebKit team)
• SunSpider ubench, 22.5x faster (released by the WebKit team for testing Squirrelfish)
• Image Manipulation Demo, 6.46x faster (Change the contrast and brightness of images dynamically)
• Matrix Manipulation, 6.26x faster (with the Sylvester JavaScript library)

So the big question is, will Firefox be able to make Firefox 3.1 even faster in the area of JavaScript?  If you have the nightly build of Firefox 3.1 installed, you can turn TraceMonkey on by going to about:config and then toggle the javascript.options.jit.content setting from false to true.  For the rest of us out there though, this is just one more surprise to look forward to once Firefox 3.1 gets rolled out to the public.

For more info, be sure to check out Firefox 3.1 to Get More JavaScript Speed Optimizations – as the CyberNet team had done a good in-depth look into this and has done the best job at making it make sense to everybody.

Here are a few of them that are targeted for Alpha 1:

• worker threads (under review)
• offline storage / local storage (under review)
• downloadable fonts (kinda maybe)
• native JSON (under review)
• WHATWG <canvas> text API
• Awesomebar improvements (need review gavin, shepherding)
• border image (under review)
• media queries (under review)
• bulk tagging
• ctrl-tab

Will Firefox 3.1 create as much excitement around the world as Firefox 3 did?

According to Mozilla Links, Firefox 3.1 will be getting the rumored update to tab switching that got a little buzz after Firefox 3 was launched. 

As said, there’s also a new behavior for Ctrl + Tab. Instead of just moving left to the next opened tab, now it switches between the current and the last viewed tab and I have to say I’m already loving it. I usually have to check several other pages while posting and to ease the tab switching I moved the reference tab next to the post edit tab to have it a couple of keystrokes away. There’s no need now: I just took the long way to the reference tab once and then it’s already at reach.

Want this feature now?  Check out the Ctrl-Tab add-on for Firefox.