Mozilla has reached the latest development milestone for its next-generation Firefox 2.0 "Bon Echo" browser with a little anti-phishing help from Google.
Anti-phishing capability, which Mozilla has branded "Safe Browsing," is one of the marquee features in Firefox 2.0 and one of the reasons a third alpha is necessary. Now baked into Firefox 2.0 alpha 3, Google Safe Browsing is triple-licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) 1.1, the GPL 2.0 and the LGLP.
Safe Browsing inspects a visited site against a regularly updated list of known phishing sites. The list of phishing sites may be downloaded automatically within the browser or can optionally be checked against Google"s online list of known miscreants. IE Internet Explorer 7 will also have a form of anti-phishing capability.
The most recent report from the Anti Phishing Working Group (APWG) found that there were 11,121 unique phishing attacks in April 2006, which is the highest-ever number for that metric from the APWG.
In related news, Mozilla is expected to update its current stable 1.5.x branch as early as tomorrow with a 1.5.0.4 security and stability update.