iOS and Android aren’t leaving much room for Firefox to burrow into mobile. “We knew there was going to be a transition from desktop being primary to mobile and tablet being primary” said Greylock partner / Mozilla’s former CEO and current board member John Lilly today at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC. “What I worry about, the scary part is that for the first time the platforms and distribution are tightly controlled before innovation has really started”
Lilly explained that Internet Explorer once dominated web browsing and people said “How the hell do you break that?” But Firefox and Chrome came along and now the market is almost evenly split. But Lilly says “mobile’s not like that. Mobile is these tied-down vertical stacks that are controlled by Google and Apple, so we have a new impossible problem to become relevant on mobile.” → Read More
Twitter does a lot of things right, but it still hasn’t solved the problem of turning its noise into signal. After joining Twitter, it can take a lot of following and unfollowing scores of accounts before you’ve curated a stream that makes sense for you. With its platform growing fast, Twitter is looking to make the onboarding process a little easier (and more personalized) for new users, which is why it announced today via its blog that it will begin serving users tailored suggestions of who they should follow. → Read More
Mozilla’s Do Not Track feature, which allows users to tell websites that they would like to opt-out of being tracked by third parties, is starting to gain some traction among both users and publishers. According to new data shared by Mozilla today, 8.6% of Firefox desktop users and 19% of mobile users now turn this opt-in feature on. The latest company to announce that it will honor Do Not Track is Twitter. → Read More
A new version of Firefox used to be a big deal, but since Mozilla switched to a rapid release schedule, these updates are becoming pretty routine. Today, Mozilla launched Firefox 12. For most users, this is likely one of the least interesting Firefox updates in recent history, as it only introduces a few minor changes. For developers, however, this update is a bit more interesting. In total, this new version of Firefox includes 85 improvements to the browser’s built-in developer tools. → Read More
Mozilla and Spain-based Telefonica officially announced their intentions to work together on an open web device at this year’s Mobile World Congress, but I’m not sure anyone expected the launch market Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs just announced.
According to the Brazilian blog ZTop (Google Translated here), Kovacs just recently revealed the the world’s first consumer-ready Boot to Gecko devices are expected to launch in Brazil either at the end of the year or in early 2013.
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For a while now, Mozilla has been looking beyond the core browser features to expand Firefox’s capabilities. Last week, the Firefox team showed an interesting new demo at the ITEF 83 meeting in Paris. In this demo, the Firefox team shows a new browser-based video chat feature for Firefox that is completely based on JavaScript and other open standards. The most important of these standards for this demo is WebRTC. With WebRTC – which is part of the developing HTML5 standard – developers can enable real-time services, including file sharing, voice calls and video calls right in the browser. → Read More
Giving free devices away is something of a time-honored tradition when it comes to getting people interested into your platform. We’ve seen Google do it, we’ve seen Microsoft do it, and now at a conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., we’ve seen Mozilla do it. In an apparent effort to drive awareness and developer interest around their web-based mobile platform, Mozilla has been handing out Boot to Gecko-powered GSM Nexus Ss to lucky JSConf attendees. → Read More
BrowserQuest, playable in a browser near you, is a proof of concept so ingenious that you’ll wonder why they didn’t just build a Zelda clone and be done with it. In short, the site is a multi-player RPG based entirely on HTML5 with no Flash to be found.
The source code is free and open source and it uses WebSockets to communicate with a central server in order to render the movement of the other players. Quest states are saved automatically (although the quests are pretty limited in this demo.)
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Calling all developers: if you know your way around HTML5 and JavaSrcipt and have a great idea for an app, Mozilla wants to hear from you. The web-friendly nonprofit has just announced their intention to launch a new cross-platform app market later this year, and the submission process is slated to start next week at Mobile World Congress. → Read More
This morning, Amazon announced that Kindle Cloud Reader, the nifty HTML5-based Web app that lets customers read Kindle books in their browser (online or offline), is now available for Mozilla Firefox 6 and above, in addition to Google Chrome and Safari (on iPad and desktop).
Not much else to report in terms of news, but Chris Blizzard, Director of Platform Product Management for Mozilla’s Web browser, says there are now more than 450 million Firefox users worldwide. → Read More
If you’re on a website that uses accounts, the sign in button can be anywhere. Sure, there are some common best practices, but I can think of dozens of sites that put them all over the place. Mozilla is looking to fix that, by bringing the sign in to the browser level.
A new experimental extension that Mozilla has released for Firefox does exactly this. When it’s installed, you’ll see a new “Sign In” button just to the left of the URL box. Clicking this, pops open a window that prompts you for a username and password for the site you’re on. It then shows you when you’re signed into a site, and gives you one-click ability to sign out. Easy. Simple. Nice. → Read More
Firefox may be getting a very nice facelift soon.
Mozilla designer Stephen Horlander has posted a set of screenshots showing off what may be the the future of Firefox’s interface, and it includes some major changes that give it a more modern look. My first reaction: this looks a whole lot of Chrome. And my second reaction: that isn’t a bad thing at all. You can find the whole set right here.
To be clear, these are what Mozilla is calling “really early mockups”. They were presented internally at a company meeting last week, and the team hasn’t committed to when (or even if) they’ll be implementing the new UI.
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Straight from the heart of the Mozilla’s developer newsgroup comes news of an ambitious new project: a standalone, web-based operating system. If that concept sounds familiar, I’ve also just described the core of Google’s Chrome OS which we’re beginning to see pop up on netbooks. The big twist?
It’s currently being developed for mobile devices. And it’s partially Android-based. → Read More
Mozilla wants your help in keeping the web innovative and open.
Today, the organization is launching a new program designed to help spur projects that focus on open web technologies. The initiative is called Web FWD (pronounced Web Forward), and invites teams to spend four weeks working in Mozilla offices, where they’ll learn from top experts in web technologies and have access to Mozilla resources. Applications are now being accepted, and the first group of teams will begin working from Mozilla offices in August.
Pascal Finette, who heads Mozilla Labs, says that the project was inspired by the success of programs like Y Combinator — though there are plenty of differences. Unlike YC, which takes a modest equity stake in participating companies, Mozilla’s not out to make money. In fact, all code written during the four-week program must be open sourced (teams can later fork their code and continue to build their project into a business if they’d like — Mozilla will even make the VC introductions). Mozilla will also consider giving promising products that stick with the open-source model additional funding and resources. → Read More
I think we all know that add-ons have grown integral to the Firefox experience — and popular, to say the least — but we didn’t know just how popular until now. Today, Mozilla said through its blog that 85 percent of Firefox 4 users have installed add-ons. The company then added that, though it had expected the percentage of add-ons downloaded on Firefox 4 (which was released on March 22nd) to drop as time went on, the figure “has stayed between 89% and 85% since launch”. (I’m surprised that this little self-congratulatory admission didn’t come with 5 exclamation points.)
Mozilla has also found that, on average, users download 5 add-ons — not to mention that Firefox has racked up 2.5 billion total downloads and that 580 million add-ons are in use every day on Firefox 4. (Which does seem to be slightly higher than Mozilla’s add-on data available here.) Oh, and you know what? Firefox 5 is here now, too. And apparently it’s so good that the IE Team decided to send Mozilla a celebratory cupcake. More like a sarcastic cupcake, methinks. → Read More
Twitter has just announced on their blog two new key bits of functionality: improved search and photos. The latter, we’ve obviously been all over in recent days, as we first broke the news a couple days ago. The former, we mentioned was likely coming as well. But there are a few details we didn’t know.
First of all, today brings a completely new version of Twitter Search that promises “more relevant” tweets, but also shows you related pictures and videos in the right-side pane. Even more interesting is that Twitter has partnered with Mozilla for a new version of the Firefox browser with Twitter built into the search bar. (There is also an add-on for current Firefox users.) → Read More
When it comes to Chrome, Google has long been addicted to speed. And for many tasks on the web today, that speed is related to how fast your JavaScript engine is. Google has long held that their’s is the fastest. But it’s hard to know for sure because there are a few different benchmark suites to test such speeds — and the most popular ones are made by companies with stakes in the game: Apple, Mozilla, and yes, Google.
In a post yesterday on their Chromium, it’s pretty clear that Google feels their V8 benchmark suite is the best. In fact, they directly call our their rivals’ suites, noting bugs and saying that they must evolve. And then they go one step further: providing links to versions of the rivals’ suites supposedly perfected by Google! → Read More
While Google Chrome may still only have about 10 percent market share in the web browser world, it’s effect on the space has been much greater. For example, remember when Google said that Chrome would begin releasing new versions every six weeks? Well now we’re seeing both Mozilla and Microsoft move towards that type of rapid iteration. In fact, Mozilla has moved so much in that direction that they’ve decided to alter their standard release model.
In a post today on their blog, Mozilla has formally introduced the new channel structure for Firefox builds. And this means the creation of a new type of Firefox build that neither a nightly (read: highly unstable) or beta (read: fairly polished) — they’re calling it Aurora. In Chrome parlance, it’s essentially their “Dev” build. → Read More
Long ago, before Chrome existed for OS X (so, 2009) my browser of choice was Camino. You’ll be forgiven if you’ve never heard of it, it’s an open-source project that zero people work on full-time. And it’s only available on the Mac. In fact, if you have heard of it, it may be as the other browser Mozilla makes. And its future is now at a crossroads.
As the team lays out in a post on their blog, a major change is needed to keep Camino going. Why? Because throughout its existence, the browser has been built using Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine — the one built for Firefox. But now that engine will no longer be embeddable in other browsers — even other Mozilla browsers, like Camino. → Read More
Brendan Eich, creator of the JavaScript scripting language and chief technology officer at Mozilla, has joined the advisory board of Amsterdam, The Netherlands-based Ajax.org.
We recently wrote about Ajax.org’s introduction of Cloud9 IDE, a commercial, cloud-based development platform for JavaScript that incorporates HTML5, and supporting Python, Ruby and PHP.
Eich is known for his work on Netscape, where he started work in April 1995 and invented JavaScript. He then helped found Mozilla.org in early 1998, serving as chief architect, and later helped spin out the Mozilla Foundation. → Read More
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