Chrome Ads

Website of the most popular newspaper in Italy, this morning.

First reaction: install AdBlock Plus. I’m not really sure if that was the original aim of this unobtrusive and classy ad

Technorati Tags: chrome, corriere.it

1 Billion

Canon EOS 40D, Canon 17-40mm ƒ4, tripod

Not completely satisfied with the final result (too many pins and not enough time), but here we go, celebrating 1 billion download of Firefox

Technorati Tags: firefox, billion

30,000,000 downloads and counting

I’ve just finished reading Asa’s post and I took a look at the real-time stats.

Just curious: why Italy disappeared from this table? It should be somewhere near Spain…

Technorati Tags: firefox, downloads

Firefox 3.5 Party in Milan

Great fun and wonderful people

As usual, the entire set of photos of the Italian Firefox 3.5 Party is on Flickr.

Technorati Tags: firefox 3.5 party, mozilla italia

Funny Microsoft

Since the ie8-only contest wasn’t enough, take a look at this shameless browser comparison (and read the explanations).

Seriously, I think that the author of that page doesn’t even really know what Firefox and Chrome look like…

(thanks to Tiziano for sharing this)

Technorati Tags: microsoft, browser comparison

Another Firefox Wallpaper

Canon EOS 40D, Canon 17-40mm ƒ4, tripod

If you like it, there’s a whole set on Flickr

Technorati Tags: fotografia, firefox wallpaper, mozilla wallpaper

Firefox hangs because of malware

In the last few weeks, starting from the end of March, we noticed a strange spike in requests on the Italian support forum. The symptoms described were always the same:

• Pages stop loading after a few minutes of normal browsing.
• When the user tries to restart the browser he gets the error message “Firefox is already running but is not responding“.
• Other browsers on the same system are not affected and work without problems.

Since Firefox stopped working at the same time of the Firefox 3.0.8 release, a lot of people thought that the problem was caused by the last update, so they were searching the best way to go back to a previous version.

The usual solutions were not effective: safe-mode, disable plug-ins, temporarily disable antivirus and firewall, reinstall the last version in a different folder, create a new profile.

From the beginning we were able to restrict the problem to the Windows platform, so we thought of some sort of malware. By the evidences we’ve collected so far, the problem seems to be caused by a variant of the Navipromo Adware, not identified by most of the antivirus softwares (see this virus total’s analysis).

Users found suspect files in the local %Appdata% folder (C:\Documents and Settings\%User%\Local Settings\Application Data on Windows XP, C:\Users\%user%\AppData on Windows Vista):

• [random_name].exe
• [name_of_exe].dat
• [name_of_exe]_nav.dat
• [name_of_exe]_navps.dat

After killing the .exe process in Task Manager, Firefox returns to its normal behavior.

There are still two unanswered questions:

• Why does only Firefox (and not other browsers) hang?
• Why now and so hard in Italy? This adaware seems to be quite old.

If you’re interested, there’s a bug and an ongoing discussion on the SUMO Contributors’ forum.

Thanks to all the guys of the Italian project and SUMO for the support and the great team work of the last days

Technorati Tags: firefox, Firefox is already running but is not responding, navipromo

Plugin manager for Firefox 3 (pre alpha 8)

In the current nightly versions of Firefox 3 (pre alpha8) there’s an interesting new feature: a plug-in manager, accessible as a panel in the Add-ons window.

In this way users can manage their plug-ins, uninstall and disable them on the fly

Technorati Tags: Firefox 3, plug-ins manager, pre alpha 8