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…
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.
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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.
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"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.
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."
Thanks to Google, PayPal, and Mozilla, the anti-malware organization borne out of Harvard’s Berkman center has become an independent entity. StopBadware.org is now a non-profit known simply as StopBadware.
This change should be viewed as more evolutionary than revolutionary; like before, StopBadware will work to minimize the threat of malware, and at the moment, nothing more significant than some colors, logos, and site content has been changed.
Urs Gasser, executive director of the Berkman Center, also explained in a statement that StopBadware is just following a path taken by previous Berkman Center ventures like Creative Commons and Global Voices.
And as mentioned earlier, it’s doing so with the support of a lot of important companies. Google, PayPal, and Mozilla all provided funding for StopBadware’s launch, and one person from each group will now sit on its board of directors. Notably, "father of the Internet" Vint Cerf is Google’s representative.
Anyway, a hat tip goes to Elinor Mills, and we’ll see what happens. In a blog post, Maxim Weinstein, StopBadware’s executive director, did encourage onlookers to "watch for more changes, both aesthetic and substantive, as we embark on this new adventure."
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According to data released by the AT Internet Institute, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has fallen to under 60% of visits in Europe. The firm suggests that with widely publicized news of a major security flaw and moves being made by competing browsers, IE’s fall may not be reversed in the very near future.
"Out of the 23 countries that were studied, Internet Explorer experienced the largest decline in visit shares for websites in Ireland, United Kingdom, Greece and Czech Republic," the firm notes.
Additional findings from the AT Internet Institute include:
- Google Chrome exceeded 4% of visit shares with a gain of 2 points in 6 months
- attained 29.4% of traffic to a website in a European country in December 2009
- gained almost 1 point and exceeded 5% of visit shares
- On average 2.3% of visits to a European website through Opera in December 2009 compared to 2.2% in June 2009.
"It is interesting to note that the growth of Safari coincided with the growth of Google Chrome," says the firm. "Based on the same engine Webkit, would Google Chrome indirectly encourage the use of Safari?"
Last week, Mozilla launched the latest version of Firefox, and Google has just released the latest version of Chrome for Windows, complete with extensions and Bookmark Sync.
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Mozilla has launched the latest version of its popular Firefox web browser – version 3.6. They say this version is a whopping 20% faster than version 3.5. New features in Firefox 3.6 include:
- Personas: Personalize the look of your Firefox by selecting new themes called Personas in a single click and without a restart
- Plugin Updater: To keep you safe from potential security vulnerabilities, Firefox will now detect out of date plugins
- Stability improvements: Firefox 3.6 significantly decreased crashes caused by third party software – all without sacrificing our extensibility in any way
- Form Complete: When filling out an online form, Firefox suggests information for fields based on your common answers in similar field
- Performance: Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness, and startup time
- Open Video and Audio: With the world’s best implementation of HTML 5 audio and video support, now video can be displayed full screen and supports poster frames
Here’s a video from Mike Beltzner, Director of Firefox Development, who gives an overview of the new features.
For developers, Firefox 3.6 supports the latest HTML5 specification, including the file API for local file handling, font support (in addition to OpenType and TrueType fonts, it supports the new Web Open Font Format), CSS gradients (linear and radical), and device orientation – it exposes the orientation of the laptop or device to web pages.
The browser is available for download for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in over 70 languages, which Mozilla claims is more platforms and languages than any other browser. It can be found here.
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> Firefox Nears 1 Billion Downloads