Ben Goodger, lead Firefox developer, announced in his blog that he's leaving the Mozilla Foundation's pay roll, for Google. He'll continue leading the Firefox project and releases, but will increasingly leave the Mozilla Foundation for Google business. Exactly what he'll be doing at Google is unknown.

Asa Dotzler and Ben Goodger updated their blogs with more information regarding the future Firefox 1.1 release. In this versions users are not to be expecting any new features, but rather overall increased stability, rendering and better Mac-platform browser migration.

Update: Ben Goodger blogged some more about the upcoming Prefwindow V, including a new sanitize function (read: a simple version of Opera's Delete private data) and a page full of screenshots.

This popular Mozilla Firefox extension to view the weather has been updated to version 0.5.9 and offers a large list of fixes.

The Mozilla Foundation announced that Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird will support the new U3 standard proposed by Sandisk and M-Systems. This new standard is already backed by a growing list of companies and is specifically specified for managing applications and data on USB flash drives.

Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird to Support New Open Standard Platform for USB Drives

Award-winning Open Source Software to Extend Reach with U3â„¢ Platform

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – January 7th, 2005 – The Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving choice and promoting innovation on the Internet, today announced that its Mozilla Firefox web browser and Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client will support the new U3 standard for managing applications and data on USB flash drives, allowing people to easily carry, store and launch Mozilla software from any PC. As an industry consortium founded by SanDisk (NASDAQ: SNDK) and M-Systems (NASDAQ: FLSH) along with other industry leading software vendors and content providers, U3 looks to expand the USB Flash Drive technology market beyond storage by creating an open standard platform to attract a community of independent developers to build applications for U3 devices. Through Mozilla’s vibrant open source development community, an existing project to provide portable versions of Firefox and Thunderbird for USB flash drives, led by volunteer developers, will be extended to embrace this new standard.

Neowin.net informs us that Secunia has issued a less critical deemed advisory for Mozilla 1.7.5 (and lower) and Firefox 1.0.

Description:
Secunia Research has discovered a vulnerability in Mozilla / Mozilla Firefox, which can be exploited by malicious people to spoof the source displayed in the Download Dialog box.

The problem is that long sub-domains and paths aren't displayed correctly, which therefore can be exploited to obfuscate what is being displayed in the source field of the Download Dialog box.

The vulnerability has been confirmed in Mozilla 1.7.3 for Linux, Mozilla 1.7.5 for Windows, and Mozilla Firefox 1.0. Other versions may also be affected.

Solution:
Do not follow download links from untrusted sources

Ben Goodger, leading the Firefox development, has updated his Inside Firefox blog with more information concerning the 1.1 release which will not be a hugely ambitious release.

Firefox 1.1

OK, the realization that March is approaching rapidly is dawning on us. This week or next we're going to get our acts together and draw together a rough list of things we need for Firefox 1.1. This is not a hugely ambitious release, but what it will see is:

• a resync with the Mozilla development trunk, and all the performance, stability and feature work that goes along with that,
• various other Firefox bugfixes (Firefox1.1 milestone)

Asa Dotzler, of the Mozilla Foundation, reports that Mozilla Firefox has gained over 15 million downloads since its original launch of version 1.0. He also reports that W3Schools has updated the stats for 2005, seperating the Mozilla Suite from Firefox, and still showing growth, bringing the total to 23% in favor of Gecko usage. The website Robin Good reports that their website statistics show 30% fall in share of IE usage. With Mozilla and Firefox taking the largest portion.

Ben Goodger, the mind behind several UI components in Firefox, has updated his blog with interesting news regarding the upcoming version V of the preferences window, which will be more fitting with the Mac and Gnome.

The Maf project has released MAF 0.4.3 for Linux and Windows, giving Firefox users the ability to save complete websites in a single archive. This is a feature I often hear users ask for, so try it out, it really works good.

Changes from 0.4.2 to 0.4.3

• Added save selected tabs functionality.
• Fixed bug that reset save archive type index when save dialog box was cancelled.
• Fixed bug that stopped tab saving if an event handler couldn't be removed.
• Fixed bug that resolved relative links to the wrong base url if the page had a base url tag.
• Added Russian locale contributed by the ArtLonger: Mozilla.ru team.
• Added Polish locale contributed by Bartosz Piec: Mozillapl.org team.
• Updated Post Install code to work with FF RC1.
• Added preference to disable the window alert when a single page has been saved.
• Updated Post Install code to update new vbs scripts for windows filetype associations.
• Fixed bug that stopped URL rewriting if there was an error accessing a DOM Attribute Node value.
• Fixed bug that caused MHT decoding to fail if the root part was of type multipart/alternative.
• Added functionality to execute filetype VBS when preferences are saved.