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By George Norman - Software News Editor

Added on 07 Oct 2009(3996 Views)

Anyone who has a little knowledge of how things stand in the browser world is aware that Microsoft and Internet Explorer holds the lions share of the browser market and that Mozilla and Firefox is second in line. In Antarctica and Europe at least, Firefox managed to best Internet Explorer – but overall, IE is still top dog. The good news is that Firefox’s market share continues to grow.

It is not a spectacular growth, but it is growth nonetheless. According to Manager of Analytics, Ken Kovash, the market share of Firefox grew close to 1% during the month of September. Over the last year, Firefox grew 4 percentage points according to Net Applications and 6 percentage points according to StatCounter.


“September’s market share numbers are out and Firefox enjoyed a positive month. While we’re still collecting numbers from a couple valuable sources, reports are readily available from both StatCounter and Net Applications. Emerging from the summer months, reports show Firefox gaining about 1% (over the past couple months). And looking at September specifically, Net Applications shows Firefox gaining more than 0.75%,” commented Ken Kovash.

As you can see in the graph below, Firefox is slowly going up while IE is slowly going down.



Moving on, the level of security the Firefox browser wants to provide is on the up and up as well. The Mozilla Foundation would like Firefox to be able to prevent XSS (cross-site scripting) attacks and with this goal in mind it decided to turn CSP (Content Security Policy) into working Firefox code. Work on CSP is not only underway, it is close to being done.

“We’ve been working for the past few months on turning the Content Security Policy specification into working Firefox code. CSP is a framework to protect websites from XSS and related attacks. We are happy to report that the work is nearly finished, and we have some preview builds available for you to try out. We would like to encourage any server administrators or web app security researchers who are interested in this project to grab a preview Firefox build and help us test the new features,” commented Security Program Manager with Mozilla, Brandon Sterne.

The preview build Sterne mentioned above is available for download here.
A demo page where you can see the basic features of CSP in action has been posted here.
Details on the Content Security Policy specification available here.





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Tags: Mozilla, Firefox, Market share, Content Security Policy, CSP, XSS, Cross-site scripting

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