Twenty-Five Percent Of Surfers Use Firefox: Report

Firefox, which just turned five, now claims 25% of end users, according to market research firm Net Applications. Calm down though: it was about a year ago that Net Applications said Firefox hit 20%.

Obviously Firefox isn't gaining market share by leaps and bounds. It's growing slowly, and with Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari, it has more competitors than ever. Still, Mitchell Baker, the former CEO of Mozilla Corp. and the current chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, mentioned the 1-in-4 figure in a post to her personal blog earlier this week when she celebrated Firefox's fifth-year anniversary.

According to Net Applications, for the week of Nov. 1 through Nov. 7, Firefox accounted for 25.1% of all browsers. Internet Explorer led all browsers with 63.3%, while Apple's Safari (4.4%), Google's Chrome (3.9%) and Opera Software's Opera (2.3%) trailed.

Look at that Chrome percentage, though. Chrome advertises itself as the fastest browser, and that makes a difference for many. Last month, for the fourth time in the last year, Chrome's market share increase bettered Firefox's increase. Extrapolating current trends, Chrome could reach a 5% share in March 2010, six months ahead of Google's announced goal of September 2010. After that, Google's next target is to make 10% sometime in 2011.

It's quite possible. Chrome is fast, but what it lacks is an extensions network like Firefox's. Google is working on that hole, however, and it they plug it, you could see a number of users switch ... like me, perhaps.

AT&T Tries To Set The Record Straight On Its Verizon Lawsuit

AT&T continues to blast (and sue) Verizon over its recent ads, which make a point of hammering home the 3G coverage holes in AT&T's network. AT&T has said that the ads are misleading, and on Friday, AT&T said it wanted to set the record straight regarding its lawsuit.

In its press release, titled "AT&T Sets the Record Straight on Verizon Ads," AT&T says the following:

As the U.S. market leader in wireless data service, we typically don't respond to competitors' advertising. However, some recent ads from Verizon are so blatantly false and misleading, that we want to set the record straight about AT&T's wireless data coverage.

First, they're the market leader? really, Verizon has more subscribers, but AT&T is making a point: with the iPhone it certainly has more data exercising its cellular network than Verizon does.

Of course, that's probably the reason AT&T users see so many dropped calls, as well. Its this sort of smartphone overload that "Seth the Blogger Guy" used to defend the AT&T network problems.

The rest of AT&T's press release goes to explain that its network covers the majority of the U.S., which is why it has complained about Verizon's ads; AT&T feels that the map on Verizon's ads implies no AT&T coverage at all in much of the U.S.

AT&T's release notes that 233 million people or 75% of the population are covered by AT&T's 3G network, while 301 million people or more than 96% of the population are covered by EDGE.

It further goes on to note that AT&T customers have access to "more than 100,000 applications, more than with any other wireless company." Of course, the fact that almost all of these are iPhone apps was pretty much ignored. If Verizon gets its hands on the iPhone ... well, you can see what will happen.

Also, AT&T's ad, er, press release points out that on Verizon's network, you can't talk and perform data-centric functions (browse the web, email) at the same time, a limitation of the CDMA technology that Verizon uses. Of course, AT&T leaves out that you on the iPhone you can't listen to Pandora and get a phone call, unless you have a jailbroken phone, but that's besides the point, right?

Additionally, on Thursday, AT&T amended its complaint, seeking a restraining order against the holiday ads that Verizon is beginning to use, such as one that claims the iPhone belongs on the "Island of Misfit Toys."

Microsoft Confirms First Windows 7 Zero-Day Vulnerability

Microsoft on Friday confirmed the first Windows 7 unpatched security (or zero-day) bug. It was first reported by Canadian researcher Laurent Gaffie on Wednesday, when he revealed the bug and posted proof-of-concept attack code to the Full Disclosure security mailing list and his blog.

According to Gaffie, the flaw allows a hacker to crash Windows 7 (and Server Windows 2008 R2) PCs so completely that that the user has to manually power off the PC. Originally, Microsoft only said it was investigating the report.

However, on Friday, Microsoft issued a security advisory. Dave Forstrom, a spokesman for Microsoft security group, said in an e-mail:

"Microsoft is aware of public, detailed exploit code that would cause a system to stop functioning or become unreliable. The company is not aware of attacks to exploit the reported vulnerability at this time."

The bug is in Microsoft's Service Message Block (SMB) code, a network file- and print-sharing protocol. Both SMBv1 and SMBv2 are affected.

Microsoft indicated that zero-day attacks at the bug could be executed using any browser. By tricking users into visiting a malicious site or a previously-compromised domain, hackers could feed them malformed URIs, and then crash their PCs with malformed SMB packets.

Of course, this type of vulnerability is far less dangerous than one thatn can allow an attacker to take over a PC and turn it into a bot. Thus, Microsoft did not commit to a timetable for a fix. This was the first zero-day vulnerability reported and confirmed by Microsoft in Windows 7 since the new operating system went on sale Oct. 22.

For those who continue to feel that Mac OS is invulnerable, one need only look to the recent launches of Mac antivirus software as well as Apple's recent Mac OS 10.6.2 release, which patched 58 security flaws, some critical, to know that no software is invulnerable. As Macs become more popular, they will also be targeted more consistently.

Microsoft Admits Windows 7 Upgrade Tool Uses GPL Source Code

In October, Microsoft announced a tool to allow netbooks lacking DVDs to install Windows 7; it was a key point of the new OS that it run on underpowered netbooks. Unfortunately, it improperly used GPL source code, which Microsoft admitted on Friday the 13th, a few days after pulling the tool.

Bad luck, Microsoft? Well, not really bad luck. GPL, or General Public License (open source) source code was included in the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool, which isn't off-limits, but putting an non-open-source license on a tool with such is.

The Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool was designed to modify a DVD or ISO image into a bootable image that could be put on a flash drive, to be used to install Windows 7 on DVD-less netbbooks, of which there are many. The faux pas was first noted by “Within Windows” blogger Rafael Rivera.

In a November 13th statement, Microsoft said:

After looking at the code in question, we are now able to confirm this was indeed the case, although it was not intentional on our part. While we had contracted with a third party to create the tool, we share responsibility as we did not catch it as part of our code review process. We have furthermore conducted a review of other code provided through the Microsoft Store and this was the only incident of this sort we could find.

Aha, it was outsourced. One has to wonder which of the two outsourcing capitals committed the "error," India or China.

Microsoft apologized for the "inconvenience" and said that it intends to make the source code and binaries for the tool available the week of November 16th under the terms of the GPL v2. They added that they “and are also taking measures to apply what we have learned from this experience for future code reviews we perform.”

Google's Chrome OS To Launch Next Week?

Google's Chrome OS was first announced in July. While the company indicated it would not release the OS until 2H10, it promised an update in the fall. It looks like, according to reports, that update will be an early release version of the OS, coming next week.

Now remember how long Google tends to keep things in beta form. Remember also how buggy their early stuff generally is (but then so are early releases of just about everything). Don't expect it to be something ready for general consumption.

That said, the report theorizes that the release will be targeted to a few limited devices. Most likely, it says, the OS will be ready to go on devices such as the Asus Eee PC netbook and possibly some of Google's Chrome OS partners, perhaps Acer, Toshiba, or HP.

Now, the most problematic issue with a new OS is bound to be driver support. Remember how much trouble Microsoft had with Windows Vista drivers? The reason they didn't have a similar issue with Windows 7 is that the two OSes share "driver models," so end users could generally use Windows Vista drivers if the OS didn't provide the correct drivers.

In terms of Chrome OS, which as you may recall, leverages their Chrome browser, you won't be able to head over to your favorite HW manufacturer's website to get a driver, so this release is probably going to be something for developers, not end users. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to see a release consisting of a bunch of source code that needs compiling to be used. On the other hand, I also wouldn't be surprised to see it complete with binaries.

Either way, it's not going to be something John or Jane Q. Public is going to be able to use, or even necessarily care about, right away. The second half of next year, who knows?