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
How many of the more than 7 million Firefox 4.0 downloads do you account for? Mozilla has a running counter that’s keeping track of how many people, and from where, have downloaded the latest version of its Firefox browser, which was officially released yesterday. The browsers wars are hotting up all over again. → Read More
Mozilla has just released Firefox 4, and in less than a day clocked more than twice the downloads Microsoft boasted about after the release of Internet Explorer 9.
Now website analytics company StatCounter says Mozilla’s new browser has already taken 1.95 percent of the worldwide Internet browser market. In contrast, StatCounter adds, Internet Explorer 9 has taken only 0.87 percent of the worldwide browser market a week after its debut. → Read More
As you’re aware by now, earlier today Mozilla officially unveiled Firefox 4 to the world. At first glance, it’s a great update with massive speed improvements. And that’s good, because that’s exactly what they need to combat the fast-rising Chrome browser from Google. But Google isn’t sitting still either.
This afternoon, Google pushed Chrome 11 into beta. On the surface, users might see this as little more than the version which brings the new Chrome icon. But underneath, there are a couple awesome new things going on as well. → Read More
If you’ve already downloaded the new Firefox 4 today, the first you probably noticed is how much zippier it is. I pretty much had stopped using Firefox altogether because of the creekiness of its previous versions compared to Chrome, Safari, and IE9. But the new Firefox 4, which Mozilla claims is 6 times as fast as before, puts it back in the same pack at least as the rest. It’s been downloaded nearly 2 million times as of this writing (check the counter for more up-to-the-second numbers).
I’m sure there are plenty of benchmark tests that show one browser is faster than the other, and vice versa, but my initial reactions after playing around with Firefox 4 today and comparing it side by side with Chrome is that it is just as fast if not faster. It depends on which website I visit. TechCrunch, for instance, loads a second or two faster by my stopwatch. Without the stopwatch, I can’t tell the difference. And that’s a good thing for Firefox, because speed is my No. 1 requirement for a Web browser. Nothing else is nearly as important. Sluggishness pushes users away. So that’s fixed. → Read More
At great long last, Mozilla has revealed the first developer release of their Web Apps Project, which aims to build the infrastructure for an open web app ecosystem.
Back in May of 2010, Google announced plans for what would become the Chrome Web Store. Mozilla responded immediately with plans for its own web store, now known as the Web Apps Project.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Google was first to the punch; the Chrome Web Store launched in December, and we’ve been waiting for Mozilla’s “more open” rejoinder since. The initial phase of Mozilla’s project is finally here and shows that the company is making a serious attempt to take advantage of what few limitations there are in Chrome’s ecosystem. Of course, whether it can compete toe-to-toe in the long run remains to be seen. → Read More
Why is Mozilla harshing on Internet Explorer 9 ? The company’s tech evangelist, Paul Rouget, said in a recent blog post that Internet Explorer 9 isn’t a “truly modern” browser, specifically calling out its implementation of HTML5. I don’t understand why the average person couldn’t use both (along with Chrome and Opera) to browse the Web as they see fit, but let’s hear Rouget out for a bit. → Read More
In the never-ending Browser battle, speed is king. Browser A might be the prettiest, most secure one around — but if Browser B seems faster or more light weight, good ol’ Browser A is going to lose users in droves. This is especially true in the mobile world, where cellular network latency and the occasional peak-hour bandwidth bottleneck add precious seconds over the near-instant connectivity we’ve grown accustomed to. It makes sense, then, that Mozilla’s latest beta of Firefox 4 for Android is all about the speed. In at least one test, this newest build is clocking in at just over 3X faster than the built-in browser. → Read More
First of all, let me say that I think it’s awesome that Google has finally created a simple solution to allow users to opt-out of advertising tracking. This new Chrome extension already seems like a much better idea than the somewhat convoluted controls or browser plug-ins that they’ve created in the past to placate government agencies and concerned users. It’s also great that Mozilla is taking the same steps — though I’m going to focus on Google here since their entire business revolves around ads. (Though I guess you could argue that Mozilla’s does indirectly as well since they’re business revolves around the revenue they get from Google.) And it’s even better that they’re open-sourcing the whole thing.
But let’s be honest here: this really doesn’t mean much of anything. → Read More
Yesterday evening, Mozilla announced that it would be blocking the Skype toolbar add-on in all versions of its Firefox browser.
While this concerns an impending ‘soft block’, meaning users will be able to re-enable the add-on if they choose to do so, Skype is keen to point out users should always install the most recent version of its desktop client in order to avoid compatibility issues. → Read More
