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• New Opera Browser Version 1,110 Percent Faster Than Last (appscout.com)

Google has filed at least four patent applications for technology it is building into its Chrome browser to try to make the web a more powerful foundation for applications.

Three patent applications concern Google’s Native Client, a technology for letting downloaded software modules run directly on a processor rather than more slowly through on-the-fly decoding as with the commonly used JavaScript. The fourth patent application involves O3D, a technology to let browser applications take advantage of 3D acceleration of graphics hardware.

Ultimately, Google hopes to standardize the technology so all browsers can use it, though it is not waiting for a standard. “Native Client so far is outside any standards process. We’re in discussions with other browser vendors on how to move that forward. We’d like to see all these things standardized,” said Linus Upson, engineering director for the Chrome browser and Chrome OS, in an interview in December.

Firefox users should receive an offer to update their browsers Friday afternoon with Firefox 3.6 Beta 5, which offers some new improvements, including the HTML 5 API. As you might recall, the Firefox 3.6 update is oriented around the new HTML 5 improvements, which automate some taks which previously required a plug-in, such as video. (We’ve run a speed test here.)

• Support for the HTML5 File API.
• A change to how third-party software integrates with Firefox to increase stability.
• The ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page load times.
• Users can now change their browser’s appearance with a single click, with built in support for Personas.
• Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
• Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
• Support for the WOFF font format.
• Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
• Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.

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• Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 Officially Available for Download [Downloads] (lifehacker.com)

Opera has shipped a new version of its browser to fix three security vulnerabilities, one rated “extremely severe.”

The most serious flaw could allow a malicious attacker to take complete control of a system, Opera said in an advisory.

Passing very long strings through the string to number conversion using JavaScript in Opera may result in heap buffer overflows. This also affects the dtoa routine, and was reported in CVE-2009-0689. In most cases Opera will just freeze or terminate, but in some cases this could lead to a crash which could be used to execute code. To inject code, additional techniques will have to be employed.

A second flaw, rated “highly severe,” could allow error messages to leak onto unrelated sites

Scripting error messages are normally available only to the page that caused the error. In some cases, the error messages could be passed to other sites as the contents of unrelated variables, and may contain sensitive information. If those sites write the content into the page markup, this could allow cross-site scripting, using code provided by the attacking site. This issue only affects installations that have enabled stacktraces for exceptions, these are disabled by default.

Opera also patched a third “moderately severe” flaw but details on this issue were not released.

Opera users should immediately upgrade to version 10.10 which includes the patches for these issues.

Microsoft has released an out-of-schedule fix for problems introduced by its last patch for Internet Explorer.

The fix, described in Microsoft support article ID 976749, was initially made available on October 28 and revised on Wednesday. It aims to rectify issues in the MS09-054 cumulative security update for Internet Explorer, which was included in the Patch Tuesday batch of security updates sent out on 13 October.

People will encounter problems with the original MS09-054 patch depending on various criteria, Microsoft said. If Internet Explorer 8 is running in standards mode, it will miscalculate the top position of an object in the browser window. In addition, Internet Explorer will encounter scripting errors when visiting web pages that use VBScript or a combination of VBScript and Javascript.

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• IE bug fix still not right, so Microsoft tries again (infoworld.com)