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Jun
22

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Firefox 5 Beta Released For Desktop And Android

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Mozilla Firefox word mark. Guestimated clear s...

Image via Wikipedia

Though Mozilla‘s increasingly popular web browser just got a refresh in March with the release of Firefox 4, Mozilla developers have been hard at work and have already cranked out another beta release.

Firefox 5, announced on Tuesday, is now available for desktop devices running Windows, Mac, Linux, as well as for Android handsets.

A post on the Mozilla Blog claims that the new version introduces over “1,000 improvements and performance enhancements,” including new add-ons for users and developer resources such as CSS animation support.

Jun
16

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Google Desktop Search Reloaded

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Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

In a media event in San Francisco, Google announced new features including Voice Search, Search by Image, and Instant Pages. Interestingly, these features will only be available through the Chrome or Firefox browsers by using the appropriate plugin.

Voice Search
This feature, quite popular on mobile phones, has finally hit the desktop version. Currently, it is only supported by Google Chrome 11 or higher for obvious reason. Initially, it will only support the English language. Oh yes, it does require a mic.

Apart from the endless fun of throwing any weird question at your computer, this feature can actually be useful. Not just useful, but very useful – if you are not comfortable with hard-to-spell words (like me). It will also come handy when you can’t type a query because your hands are full, say while having lunch. All this hinges on the assumption that it will actually understand what you’re trying to say.

Search by Image
Google has been providing image results on text queries, but now it also supports the converse. If you are curious about an image you happen to have on the computer, just drag it into the search box on (http://images.google.com Alt text: Search by Image) images.google.com. Google’s computer vision techniques will then match your image to other images in the index and provide a “best guess” text description of the query, as well as similar images. This can also be done by pasting the image URL in the search box.

Instant Pages
This feature will help users get to their desired search results faster. According to Google, when you perform a search, it will pre-render certain web pages in the search result that are most likely to be visited by you. The company is currently building this feature into Chrome. Instant Pages is expected to go beta later this week.

These added features are promising and look likely to be embraced by users in short order. However, Google has turned a blind eye to other popular browsers. Is it possible that these features have more to do with Chrome’s market share than to providing more convenience to users?

Source :- http://www.techtree.com

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Jun
2

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Government officials, activists targeted in Gmail attack

Category: Social, Technology Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Image representing Gmail as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

Google has posted to their blog information about a targeted attack against the personal Gmail accounts of US government officials, political activists, military personnel and journalists.

Mila from contagioblog provides much more detailed information about the attacks. The messages appear to be handcrafted and spoofed to seem to be from governmental colleagues of many of the victims.

Gmail view/download linksNormally attachments in Gmail appear with a paper clip and links to view or download the item. The attackers created HTML that used fake attachment links that actually lead to a phishing page designed to look identical to the Gmail login page.

Mila wrote about these attacks in February, but the big news is Google sharing this information publicly. Most organizations prefer to keep security problems to themselves and maintain the illusion that their services are perfectly secure.

While this attack is not specifically a problem with Gmail, it is a widespread security weakness in many cloud services. Google sharing information with the public about how these attacks are executed helps all of us learn from these situations and build better systems.

Google gives some good advice in their post, although it seems strange that they feel the need to push Google Chrome as a solution to all security problems…

Gmail sign inHow should we respond to this news? We should take a moment to remind our users about best practices when using web-enabled technologies.

If you are ever presented with a login screen in your browser and you didn’t type in the address of the site you are trying to visit, close the window. Only enter your password into pages where you entered in the URL.

Source :- http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/

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Apr
17

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Google Chrome Warns Against Malicious Downloads

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The browser now alerts users if the file being downloaded is malicious

Google boasts about several security features in its Chrome web browser. Now, Google has added one more feature in Chrome web browser which will alert users against malicious file downloads. Now that’s something every browser should ideally have so that users don’t have to be dependent on anti-malware programs. This experimental feature is currently made available to Chrome Development Channel for testing and initially, it will alert against malicious Windows executables.

The Google Safe Browsing API comes into picture when the browser checks if the Windows executable being downloaded originates from a malicious code bearing site or not. Also, it has the same privacy policy as in the Safe Browsing feature which means Google will never know what URL you’ve visited to download that particular file.

This new alert against malicious file download could be too small to be noticed. At times, users are in such a hurry that they click on the ‘x’ (Close) on any pop-up message. So instead of showing an alert just above the status bar, something more attention drawing is required to make this feature actually useful.

Google Chrome has been offering features such as alerts the users against faulty websites that intend to inject malicious code in the user system. Google accumulates data about such websites and makes it available via Safe Browsing API. Several web browsers – Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari make use of Google’s Safe Browsing API to warn users if they happen to visit webpages that have been coded smartly to inject malware code in the system.
Google didn’t promise any date when the feature would be implemented and made available via a stable build of the Chrome browser.
Source -: http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Google_Chrome_Warns_Against_Malicious_Downloads/551-115023-643.html

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Apr
9

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Chrome’s new “Speak to Search” option

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Google chrome earlier had developed a software that allowed the users to talk to the browser via HTML5 code. Now, a team has come up with an extension of this software that allows this software to be used in search boxes across the web.

The extension, called “Speechify”, was developed by the Dugley Labs. Now many of the search engines display a small microphone icon right next to their search boxes. This icon when clicked allows users to “speak” what u wanted to search. Google, Bing, Youtube, Hulu are some of the sites that support this.

It is working pretty well as of now and returns exact searches for songs or sites or videos. Though there are minor hitches and glitches, like in some sites the microphone feature doesn’t work although it shows and in others it is shown at weird places like the title bar but it still works. But it works the best with Google and the Instant as it allows the users to search without using the keyboard.

This kind of feature has been used in mobiles before but to see it work on the web is interesting. As of now Chrome 11 beta supports it bu tit is expected to soon move to other builds too.

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Feb
19

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Internet Explorer 9 Final May Release on March 16

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Beauty of the Web event hinting at something major related to IE9

Last week, Microsoft rolled out the first Release Candidate of Internet Explorer 9 web browser. Apparently, the software giant is gearing up for the web browser war that seems to be heating up slowly. Neowin reported about a media invite being sent out about Microsoft holding Beauty of the Web event, again. Microsoft’s IE9 team would be hosting the event so we certainly anticipate IE9 final announcement. Microsoft held IE9 Beta announcement event with the same name – Beauty of the Web in September 2010.

Co-incidentally, Mozilla is also expected to release the Firefox 4.0 final version in March. Today, Google Chrome 10 matured to Beta stage and version 11.10 developer build was released. Yes, there’s no end to new versions of desktop web browsers.

We shall wait till March 14 to see if Microsoft will announce IE9 final or some eye-candy feature related to the same.

IE 9

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