Firefox 48, Mint 18 Xfce Released
Clement Lefebvre today announced the release of Linux Mint 18 Xfce for users of that desktop environment. The other big story of the day was the release of Firefox 48 and its new multi-process operation. Elsewhere, Matt Hartley compared and contrasted Korora vs GeckoLinux and Mint MATE vs Ubuntu MATE. Also, Linux is becoming the more popular platform for botnet DDoS attacks.
Linux Mint 18 Xfce is finally here for fans of the lightweight but full-featured desktop environment. This release is based on Ubuntu 16.04 and it features Xfce 4.12 on Linux 4.4, plus all the goodies included in previous Mint 18 versions. This includes new X-Apps replacing GNOME apps, Update Manager improvements, new Mint-Y theme, and lots more. Download and errata information is available on the announcement page.
Seems folks were more excited over the release of Firefox 48 with many distributions already sporting the new update. Today's release is probably being celebrated because this is the one that finally brings multi-process functionality to the popular browser. Dubbed Electrolysis, or e10s for short, its purpose is to split the browser's different tasks into their own processes. This will help increase stability primarily by protecting processes from others that may be misbehaving. Specifically, it separates the web content rendering from the interface operations. So, if a web page is throwing too many javascript ads and flash videos the menus, other tabs, and navigation buttons continue to function normally. See Nick Nguyen's post for all the new features and download yours at mozilla.org.
Kaspersky Lab released their Intelligence Report for Q2 2016 and there's a disturbing little nugget right smack in the middle of it. It seems SYN DDoS type attacks are way up this quarter and Kaspersky says that's cause "70.2% of all detected attacks came from Linux botnets." They state Linux is well suited for those types of attacks. This is the first time Linux machines outnumbered Windows and by so much. Their full report has other interesting tidbits as well.
In other news: