Firefox boosts security with add-on whitelist 

Mozilla's popular open-source browser Firefox is about to get another layer of security, this time where it may matter most: add-ons.

 

Add-ons, among Firefox's main advantages over competing browsers, will have to check with a whitelist when connecting to the Internet in Firefox's version 17.

 

PC World quoted Jorge Villalobos, Mozilla's add-ons developer relations lead, as saying add-ons may interact with a mix of "privileged" and "unprivileged" code online.

 

“In Firefox 17, the whitelist will become mandatory and the shared object members will cease to be visible from content,” he said.

 

The whitelist will also specify if the access granted is read-only, write-only, or read and write.

 

In some cases, accidentally exposing privileged objects to Web content "is a major security concern,” he noted.

 

Mozilla said add-on developers may have to make sure their products access data only from sites in a whitelist.

 

Error message

 

This early, PC World said the beta of Firefox 15 will show an error message when a web page not on the whitelist tries to access a privileged object in the add-on.

 

Villalobos said that for now, the code will still work but the error message will alert developers to make the needed adjustments.

 

Firefox 17 is expected to come out late November, PC World said. — TJD, GMA News