There’s been some newsworthy activity on the Mozilla front in recent days: The Mozilla Organization recently updated Mozilla, its eponymous application suite, to version 1.7.6 and updated Thunderbird, its e-mail client to v1.0.2. What’s more, a new Web site has been posted for Camino, the Mac OS X browser based on the Mozilla Gecko engine.
Mozilla is a suite of applications that features a Web browser, mail and newsgroup reader and HTML editor. Most importantly, the new release of the Mozilla suite incorporates a fix for the Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) homograph spoofing problem that allowed Web site domains using international characters to appear like conventional roman characters instead — a problem that could potentially be exploited by “phishers” trying to trick unwary users into providing sensitive information like credit cards or personal data by posing as another Web site, such as a bank or Internet service provider. A variety of other security issues have also been address in this release, along with a host of bug fixes and other changes (about 70 all together).
Thunderbird is an e-mail client that features junk mail detection and eradication; support for IMAP and POP protocols, built-in support for RDF Site Summary/Rich Site Summary (RSS) and more. The 1.0.2 release is described as an “essential upgrade” for all 1.0 users (there was no 1.0.1 release). The Mozilla Organization lists a number of security fixes for this release, as well as improved stability.
There’s also a new Web site for Camino, the Mac OS X Web browser built using Apple’s Cocoa development environment, based on the Mozilla Gecko engine. You can find out more about what’s going on with the Camino project and download the latest stable release, multilingual version or nightly build. The developers report that a new version (0.8.3) is on the way.