About a month ago, Firefox Creative Lead Aza Raskin revealed "Tab Candy", a Firefox feature designed to make managing tabs easier. It shows an overview of all tabs so they can be quickly located. It also includes other organizational features…

Grooveshark has reportedly now become available in Apple’s App store after a long struggle to get it there. This is an app that lets you search for songs, and stream them on demand . Unsurprisingly, it faces legal battles, but it has already settled s…

Bribes can represent an easy way of securing a person’s loyalty; throw enough cash at someone, and they’re almost sure to be appreciative.  Mozilla might have an advantage in the browser wars, however, as it appears that many Mozilla bug finders a…

Bribes can represent an easy way of securing a person’s loyalty; throw enough cash at someone, and they’re almost sure to be appreciative.  Mozilla might have an advantage in the browser wars, however, as it appears that many Mozilla bug finders a…

Chitika has provided some very interesting search market-related findings. According to the firm, Firefox is responsible for a significant amount of Google’s share. In fact, based on the sample looked at, there were more Firefox-based Google searches t…

Mozilla is working on a new Firefox feature called "Tab Candy", which might make you more productive, or at least less irritated by the number of tabs you have open.

"The power of the browser has grown substantially in the last ten yea…

Mozilla has launched Firefox Home for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This is a free application that works with Firefox Sync.

"Firefox Home provides access to your Firefox desktop history, bookmarks and open tabs on your iPhone," explains Mozil…

Recently Mozilla unleashed Firefox 4 Beta upon the world, and most of us couldn’t be happier. The latest edition, of the world’s second most popular browser, has been in discussion for well over a year now… but the wait is finally ov…

Mozilla has served its 2 billionth Firefox Add-on download. The download rate has been increasing each year, but Firefox also faces increasing competition in the open source browser market.

This week Google actually took efforts to make Chrome more ac…

Mozilla is working on a new iPhone app for Firefox users, called Firefox Home. It’s based on Firefox Sync (formerly Weave Sync), and allows users to access their Firefox browsing history, bookmarks, and tabs from the most recent browser session on the desktop.

"Firefox Home for iPhone is part of a broader Mozilla effort to provide a more personal Web experience with more user control," says Mozilla says. "For devices or platforms where we’re unable to provide the "full" Firefox browser (either technically or due to policy), we aim to provide users with “on the go” instant access to their personal Firefox history, bookmarks and open tabs on their iPhones, giving them another reason to keep loving Firefox on their desktops."

Mozilla has offered this "sneak peek" at the app, which is still under development:

Firefox has been losing some ground in the web browser market share space, to Google Chrome, which just released a new stable version for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Creating a useful mobile experience across multiple platforms could go along way to help the Firefox cause. Firefox home would be a step in the right direction. A solid Android offering would also be helpful.

Mozilla says Firefox Home will be ready to submit to Apple’s App Store soon.

Mozilla CEO John Lilly dropped a bomb late yesterday in announcing that he would be stepping down from his position. The news came just after Mozilla revealed its early product plan for Firefox 4, in which it placed great emphasis on speed and HTML5 support – two of the big selling points for competing browser Google Chrome.

In fact, the news also comes as Chrome continues to steadily gain market share in the browser space. Lilly wrote a note about his pending resignation, however, that expresses his continued dedication to Mozilla and Firefox, even as he gives up the lead position. He wrote:

I’m in no rush, and the most important thing to me is to build the strongest Mozilla we can, with the best leadership possible. So my plan is to stay through that transition — we’re starting a CEO search now, and plan to do it in as transparent a way as possible — which means I’ll continue in my CEO role as normal for several more months, at least.

I’ll have more to say on the transition as we figure things out more clearly, but for now, business as usual. We’ve got Firefox 4 to ship, and Firefox on multiple mobile platforms. We’ve got our web services like Weave to stand up and make available to millions of users.

Firefox 4: fast, powerful and empowering View more presentations from Mike Beltzner.

Lilly’s heart is in funding startups, and this is the main reason he has chosen to step down from his post, according to his letter. He says he’s "always been a startup guy at heart" and that the Mozilla gig was originally supposed to be a "quick volunteer effort". He intends to join Greylock Partners as a Venture Partner, and will work on investing in startups from there.

Lilly plans to remain on Mozilla’s Board of Directors.

Google’s Chrome browser has received a lot of buzz lately as it has showcased its efforts in speed testing using potato guns, paint, a pirate ship, lightning, etc. Meanwhile, Chrome has been creeping up steadily in web browser market share.

Perhaps in an effort to keep users from switching to Chrome, Mozilla wants it to be known that it is working on speed as well, and is enabling new open, standard web technologies ("HTML5 and beyond" it says).

Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s Director of Firefox is sharing a slideshow highlighting an early product plan for Firefox 4. The goals for which, are to make Firefox "super-duper fast", enable said web technologies, and put users in "full control of their browser, data, and web experience."

Firefox 4: fast, powerful and empowering View more presentations from Mike Beltzner.

"Usually software producers don’t present these sorts of plans in public until they’re finalized, but Mozilla is a little different," says Beltzner. "We work in the open, socializing our plans early and often to gather feedback and build excitement in our worldwide community. Not everyone could attend the presentation today, though, so I’m sharing the slides and video here as well."

"That said: please understand that these plans are fluid and are likely to change," he adds. "As with past releases, we use dates to set targets for milestones, and then we work together to track to those targets. We always judge each milestone release against our basic criteria of quality, performance, and usability, and we only ship when it’s ready."

Last month, Chrome increased its market share by 0.60% according to stats from Net Applications, though Firefox gained as well.

Here is a quick productivity tip if you find yourself logging in and out of Facebook – did you know that there is a tool bar for Windows Explorer and Firefox for Facebook?

The Facebook Toolbar allows you to log into Facebook direct from your browser.

You can quickly navigate to friend requests, new messages, event invitations, group invitations, upload photographs and even share pages you are currently browsing to your Facebook profile.

I personally like the ‘quick links’ facility where I can navigate to my friends lists to quickly review what my friends have been posting or keep up to date with Facebook Pages I am a fan of.

Be warned that if you activate the Facebook Friends sidebar that it could distract you as you will see all the updates from your friends in real time.

And I would also recommend that you review the ‘settings’ so that you customise what if any pop-up notifications you want to receive from Facebook.

You can download the Facebook Toolbar for Firefox of Internet Explorer here.

What is your favourite way of connecting with your Facebook Friends and your community on your Facebook Page?

Comments

March was yet another good month for Google’s browser in terms of market share.  According to Net Applications, Chrome converted more than a few additional people, shrinking the gaps between it and the field’s two leaders, Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Net Applications put Chrome’s March market share at 6.13 percent, up 0.52 percent from its February standing of 5.61 percent.  That’s a pretty impressive gain to pull off in so short a time, especially given the smallish size of Chrome’s user base.

That gain makes the forecasting math simple, too, since it’s easy to judge that Chrome will gain about 1.0 percent of market share every couple of months if it can keep up the pace.

As for how Internet Explorer did, ground was lost.  This browser’s share decreased from 61.58 percent to 60.65 percent between February and March, making for a reduction of 0.93 percent.  Which must be worrisome to folks in Redmond, since that’s a dramatic dip.

Firefox’s makers, meanwhile, can remain relatively pleased.  Firefox’s share increased by 0.29 percent heading from February into March, landing it at 24.52 percent.  So it’s still accumulating gains, bit by bit.

A new way for Android users to get around the Web should debut this year.  Jay Sullivan, Vice President of Mobile at Mozilla, has indicated that Firefox Mobile for Android will land sometime in 2010.

The nonexistence of this product might have troubled some fans of Mozilla and Google.  It’s no secret that the two companies have been growing apart as Chrome came out and Mozilla’s director of community development endorsed Bing over Google.  Also, the search deal between them is set to expire in 2011.

Sullivan, who’s worked at Mozilla for about two and a half years, told Gareth Beavers that the main obstacle to developing Firefox Mobile for Android was the rift between C and C++ code and Java, however.

Indeed, he sounded quite upbeat about Android and about what Mozilla has in the works.  "It’s a modern OS, and it’s a great fit with us," Sullivan said.  "It’s the type of platform that has a high affinity with the early adopter, and it’s seen a lot of uptake."

So we can expect to see Firefox Mobile for Android "late this year."