The next version of Firefox will identify malware on Web sites and make users stop and think about it.

With the number of malicious Web pages mushrooming over the past several months, the Mozilla Foundation is looking to help users defend themselves. Window Snyder, who is Mozilla's "chief security something-or-other," says the company is taking a two-pronged approach.

Mozilla programmers are rewriting a lot of the Firefox code for the upcoming version release, Snyder says. They're replacing much of the older code to increase performance and make the code base more modular, able to handle new security threats like phishing. In a previous interview, Snyder said some of the browser's components that are written in native code are being rewritten in managed code to reduce memory management flaws, like buffer overflow vulnerabilities. Managed code executes in a virtual machine, so there's less space for memory management problems.