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Mozilla is scrambling to craft a code-signed version of Firefox forthe Mac in case Apple launches OS X 10.8, or Mountain Lion, early. In February, Apple announced that Mountain Lion will include a newfeature, dubbed "Gatekeeper," that will restrict which applicationsusers can install on their machines. By default, Gatekeeper will let users install only programs downloaded from the Mac App Store or those digitally signed by aregistered developer. Last week, Mozilla said it was laboring on meeting the secondrequirement, and hoped to wrap up the work for Firefox 13 by theend of this week. Firefox 13 is now slated to ship June 5. "We must have a signed and released Firefox out there before thegeneral public starts upgrading [to Mountain Lion] and we've beenworking hard to make that happen as soon as possible," wrote BenHearsum, a release engineer at Mozilla, in a blog posted last Thursday . According to Hearsum, the only thing left on the to-do list is tountangle the access restrictions to Mozilla's Apple developeraccount. Because Firefox is not distributed via the Mac App Store, downloadsmust be code-signed before Mountain Lion appears. While Apple hassaid that it will ship OX S 10.8 in "late summer," hints haveappeared on Mac-centric blogs and in the shipping cadence of thethree developer previews that point to a June delivery of the operating system. "We don't know exactly when 10.8 will be released to the public butsome have speculated that it could be as early as the week of June11th at WWDC 2012," Hearsum said, referring to Apple's WorldwideDevelopers Conference, which runs June 11-15 in San Francisco. Apple has categorized Gatekeeper as a new security precaution thatinsures it can track down developers of rogue software submitted to-- and accepted by -- the Mac App Store. Some, however, have criticized the feature because even if Applerevokes an application's certificate, the software remains on Macsand can continue to run. Others have noted that it will not stymiemalware like Flashback, which relied on exploiting a known Javavulnerability to plant itself on hundreds of thousands of machines. Other Apple-mandated deadlines are also fast approaching. Last week, Apple emailed registered Mac developers with a reminderof the impending June 1 deadline for "sandboxing" applications soldor distributed through the Mac App Store. Apple had postponed thesandboxing deadline several times, most recently in March when itextended it to June 1. Only new applications submitted to the Mac App Store starting June1 must be sandboxed; programs already in the e-mart are not held tothe requirement, although upgrades will be. For Mac apps, sandboxing places tighter controls on what they canaccess from OS X and other apps. Theoretically, that makes thoseapplications more secure, since malware exploiting a vulnerabilityin that program will have a more difficult time -- or find itimpossible -- to access the operating system to plant attack codeon the Mac. Some developers have already sandboxed their software -- AgileBits,for example, has sandboxed the version of its popular 1Password password manager that's sold through the Mac App Store -- butothers have announced they'll opt out of Apple's distributionchannel. Atlassian, for instance, which creates the developer toolSourceTree, has said that it is "not currently planning onsubmitting any more updates to the Mac App Store" because of the sandboxing restrictions . Mountain Lion will display a warning when users try to run programsthat haven't been downloaded from the Mac App Store, or digitallysigned by a registered developer. Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsersand general technology breaking news for Computerworld. FollowGregg on Twitter at @gkeizer , on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed . His email address is . See more by Gregg Keizer on Computerworld.com . Read more about mac os in Computerworld's Mac OS Topic Center. We are high quality suppliers, our products such as China Automatic Carton Machine , Carton Packing for oversee buyer. To know more, please visits Carton Packing .
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