The Mozilla Firefox browser is constantly gaining in popularity. A recent market share survey by Net Applications awards Firefox with 24% of users worldwide. One of the key philosophies of Firefox is that its functionality can easily be extended using plug-ins or extensions. According to the Mozilla foundation there are more than 12,000 extensions available and they have recorded more than 1 billion extension downloads so far. Quite an irresistible target for a malware author, don’t you think?
You can read the rest of this Blog here: The Invisible Firefox Extensions.
Floating_Red wrote:
The Mozilla Firefox browser is constantly gaining in popularity. A recent market share survey by Net Applications awards Firefox with 24% of users worldwide. One of the key philosophies of Firefox is that its functionality can easily be extended using plug-ins or extensions. According to the Mozilla foundation there are more than 12,000 extensions available and they have recorded more than 1 billion extension downloads so far. Quite an irresistible target for a malware author, don’t you think?
I prefer Firefox to Explorer and use quite a few of the Firefox addons. No problems with malware but I only download from the Mozilla site.
Hi Red,
That's a terrific article with some very solid information. Although none of it should come as breaking news for knowledgeable FireFox users, it's nonetheless good to see a compact description of the issue.
The takeaway comes in the last paragraph: "To solve this issue, the Mozilla developers have now decided to remove this capability and only load their own core components in Firefox 3.6 and beyond."
FireFox is a terrific browser, as evidenced by its ever-growing user base. Unfortunately, that same growing user base has made it a more attractive target for malware.