Perfume Factory

Firefox 3 Beta 1 was released on 19th November, 2007 for developers and testers. As it is a beta version, it has been strictly mentioned that, Firefox 3 Beta 1 should be used only by developers and testers only.

I am using Firefox 3 Beta 1 for last two weeks. I have been using Firefox for many years. The main eye-candy of Firefox is its tabbed browsing. Tabbed browsing attracted me so much that, it made me to switch to Firefox from IE permanently. Now I rarely use IE even though IE7 featured tabbed browsing. MS communities have now started talking about IE8 in much more enthused way. Let me wait for that.

Back to Firefox 3… when I installed it, the first thing I encountered is incompatibility of many extensions, like google photos screensaver, which I use in Firefox 2. This definitely made me very disappointed. Since its beta, this can be accepted.

Having a first look, it didn’t seem there is a much change but UI looked somewhat brighter and clearer compared to Firefox 2. However for Vista users, it displays menus with vista native theme.

Although I didn’t see much change initially, as I went on using it, I saw drastic improvements over Firefox 2 .

Firefox 3 beta 1 has taken care of memory issue very well. Firefox 3 doesn’t consume huge memory. Although release notes says that over 300 memory leaks ha been fixed but I am still not sure whether memory leakage issue has been completely taken care of.

Second thing, I noticed is the speed of firefox loading, page loading and tab opening. Speed has been increased considerably. Now tabs open faster. Firefox doesn’t hangs if I open many tabs simultaneously.

As a security point of view, more stress has been given to it. Now, firefox blocks known malware, web forgery, phishing sites to make you to browse more securely. Now , only secure add-ons are allowed. Anti-virus integration is embedded to check for downloaded executables automatically. Also, by clicking on favicon of site you are browsing you can view the details of that site.

One more major change you will notice is inclusion of ‘Firefox Places’. Now all bookmarks, history and preferences are stored on SQLite database instead of flat files. This prevents accidental data loss due to crashes.

Bookmarking has been made simpler and better. The star button beside address bar lets you bookmark the site with a single click without any interruption. You can add text tags to bookmarks. Searching for bookmarks and history is also made simpler. By just typing keywords or tags in address bar, you can get corresponding matching site urls.

Regarding password management, now popup doesn’t appears for asking to save password instead an info bar appears on the top from which you can save password. The advantage here is it lets you save passwords after successful login. This avoids you saving incorrect password for that site.

Save Tabs feature has been added. Now if you try to close firefox while multiple tabs are open, it will ask you whether you want to save tabs before quitting.

One more new feature added is Page Zoom. Now, Firefox, like Opera, can zoom page wise instead of zooming only text. It also enables you to save zoom settings per site.

A search feature has been added to download manager so that we can track downloads easily. Now downloads can be paused and resumed across sessions.

Initially I thought to use this new beta version only for a while. But now I have addicted to it although I find some minor bugs during usage

You can download beta from here.

Whenever you try to open firefox, a new msgbox will popup onto your screen displaying a msg like “I DNT HATE MOZILLA BUT USE IE OR ELSE…” with the title “USE INTERNET EXPLORER YOU DOPE”. After it terminates the firefox automatically.

The following screenshot describes it best:

Along with firefox, it also prevents you from opening Orkut and Youtube. It gives the alert “Orkut is banned you fool`, The administrators didn’t write this program guess who did?? MUHAHAHA!!” and “youtube is banned you fool`, The administrators didn’t write this program guess who did?? MUHAHAHA!!” and closes the window immediately.

Description

• The name of worm is W32.USBWorm.
• It spreads through USB drives.
• It mainly affects firefox, orkut and youtube. But it doesn’t harm any of your data that is in your computer. Everthing works fine except for firefox, orkut and youtube.
• It also plays a .wav file (which sounds as “muhahaha!!) whenever the pop-up appear

How it works?

• It creates a folder with name heap41a in C drive that will be disguised as system folder with hidden attributes enabled and copies all its contents in that heap41a folder.
• The running process that is responsible for this is svchost.exe and it will be spawned under user name.
• It will make an entry into registry so that it will be started automatically every time the system gets rebooted.

Contents of “heap41a” folder

• Svchost.exe – This is the main executing program.
• Script1.txt – It contains the script for displaying messages and playing sound file depending upon application invoked.
• Std.txt – It is responsible for making registry entries and running svchost.exe.
• Reproduce.txt – It is responsible for reproducing the directory structure and registry entries every time the system reboots or if any files or entries missing.
• Along with these, there will be one audio file and one drive list text which contains by default all alphabets from A…Z

How to remove this worm?

• Terminate svchost process. Remember there will be more than one svchost processes. You have to delete the one which was spawned under user name.
• Delete the heap41a folder from your system. It will be hidden. Use advanced search options to find it. Or directly type “C:heap41a” without qoutes in run ( Ctrl +R ) to open the hidden folder. The other option is to modifying registry entry to show hidden files, goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Microsoft > Windows > CurrentVersion > Explorer > Advanced > Folder > Hidden > SHOWALL, checkedvalue and set this back to 1 which will be 0.
• Remove the following registry entries so that it can not recur. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Microsoft > Windows > CurrentVersion > policies > Explorer > Run” and remove the “winlogon” key . This registry entry will be responsible for starting up “C:heap41asvchost.exe” file everytime you start your windows.
• Also remove any of autorun.inf file in your pen drive and a folder with .exe extension. It will be usually with name “New folder”.

It can also be removed using freeware tool “hijackthis” which can be downloaded from here :http://filehippo.com/download_hijackthis/

Note: sometimes, this worm also disables your “taskmanager” and “regedit” to prevent you to from removing it! In such case you can again enable your taskmanager and registry editor by following the instructions that are provided by microsoft. Follow this link for more information, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555480

Apple has released Safari for Windows. After getting setup file from Veetrag, I tried it yesterday on my work pc. Apple says it is world’s best browser even on windows. It says safari loads pages 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and 1.6 times faster than Firefox ( firefox is still my fav browser inspite of so many unresolved bugs in it ).

But Safari 3 public beta did not turn up to my expectations.

The most serious potential con of it is: no proxy support. I am unable to change my proxy settings as that option is disabled. I am only able to open local intranet and no internet at all. Some say it captures proxy settings from IE but still its not working even after setting proxy correctly in IE.

Only two features I found interesting in safari are snapback and private browsing.

Snapback lets you to go back where u started. Like if u searched for particular in google and you go on clicking search result nestedly jumping from parent website to further another website; using snapback you can come back directly to main original search result page.

Private browsing enables you to browse anonymously. All your browsing activities and traces will not be captured under private browsing mode.

Safari for windows is still in beta version so we can’t expect much from it. Hope it soon provides support for changing proxy settings. Well lets wait and see…