Mozilla, Gecko Archive

It has long been known that in addition to the N900 port of Firefox (released just 49 days ago) Mozilla have been targeting Windows Mobile, drawing ever nearer to a release. They have now decided to put the port on hold, following the news of Windows Phone 7 Series at MIX (and what that holds for Windows Mobile 6.5). "While we think Windows Phone 7 looks interesting and has the potential to do well in the market, Microsoft has unfortunately decided to close off development to native applications. Because of this, we won't be able to provide Firefox for Windows Phone 7 at this time. Given that Microsoft is staking their future in mobile on Windows Mobile 7 (not 6.5) and because we don't know if or when Microsoft will release a native development kit, we are putting our Windows Mobile development on hold."

All Mozilla projects (the major ones at least, I didn't check them all up) are licensed under the Mozilla Public License, version 1.1. It's already over a decade old, and the Mozilla Foundation believes it is time to overhaul the license, with a focus on modernising what they believe to be outdated wording.

"Mozilla, faced with new competitive pressures, has begun work on three separate, significant changes to Firefox. First is a new JavaScript engine that - with a transfusion from the project behind Apple's Safari - should run Web-based programs at least 30 percent faster. Second is a new graphics engine for Windows that will take advantage of hardware acceleration for graphics and text. And third is a programming tool to help bring to fruition a new system for Firefox add-ons."

"One of the most interesting Mozilla Labs projects has now stagnated. Is the project dead? Does it have a future? The Mozilla developer who led the project tells all. Back in the summer of 2008, Mozilla began development of an experimental add-on called Ubiquity, providing new command mash-up capabilities for the Firefox browser. After just over a year of development, Mozilla is now pulling back on the effort, but that doesn't mean it hasn't been successful. The current release of Ubiquity is version 0.1.9.1, and was released on January 20th of this year. To date, Ubiquity has garnered more than 420000 downloads, according to the Mozilla add-ons site. So what is happening with Ubiquity now?"

"The notion of a Firefox smartphone browser seemed implausible only a few short years ago, but today it's very much a reality. Firefox Mobile for Maemo demonstrates the flexibility of the Firefox Web browser and its potential to bring a desktop-like browsing experience to constrained computing environments. It is truly an impressive achievement, but it's only the beginning of what Mozilla hopes to accomplish on handheld devices. Stay tuned for our follow-up about Weave, in which we will examine some of the opportunities for innovation created by Firefox Mobile."

"One of the key new features that the Lorentz branch of Firefox 3.6 will aim to include is a technology that rival browser Google Chrome helped to popularize - out of process plugins. With out of process plugins, browser plugins like Flash are sandboxed and isolated by the browser. The official project name at Mozilla for the effort is called Electrolysis."

After a number of delays, Mozilla today released version 3.6 of the successful Firefox web browser. It brings with it numerous improvements and new features, and of course speed improvements are welcomed, too.

"Firefox has just turned five, and it's doubtful anybody outside of Redmond begrudges Mozilla's celebrations. The open-source browser now accounts for 25% of the global market, according to figures from Net Applications, and has brought a radical rethink in what we expect from a browser. However, as Mozilla blows out the birthday cake candles, it might also be reflecting on the curse of getting what you wish for. Its success has forced rivals to raise their game, and the past two years have seen Microsoft, Apple and Opera close the features gap significantly."

"Open source has dramatically reshaped the software development landscape. Yet is it enough to help propel the Web itself forward for the next decade? That's what Mozilla believes. After having been synonymous with open source for over a decade, thanks to its efforts behind the popular Firefox Web browser, Mozilla is now creating a new effort to help shaping the Internet's development using the same sorts of techniques that have made open source a success. The goal of the new Mozilla Drumbeat effort is to go beyond open source code to encourage and nurture projects that help to expand understanding and participation in the open Web. While Drumbeat is today only in its early stages of development, Mozilla is budgeting more than $1 million in funding for the effort - a project that it thinks could help to direct the very future of the Internet."

Mozilla won't make a 2009 deadline for releasing Firefox 3.6 and is giving itself more time to complete a major update, version 4.0. The organization behind the open-source Web browser had predicted a final release of Firefox 3.6 in December 2009, but the Mozilla Web site now includes "ship Firefox 3.6" as a goal for the first quarter of 2010. In addition, Firefox 4.0, which had been due in 2010, now is "aimed at late 2010 or early 2011," with a beta due in the summer of 2010, according to Mozilla.

The ripples caused by Google's Eric Schmidt's words are spreading further and further throughout the internet. Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, wrote on his blog, urging people to switch away from Google to Bing, which he claims has a better privacy policy. Dotzler points users to the Firefox Bing add-on.

Mozilla has released Thunderbird 3. You can read the release notes, or download the darn thing. "If you like Firefox's tabbed browsing, you're going to love tabbed email. Thunderbird 3's tabbed email lets you load emails in separate tabs so you can quickly jump between them. Search results open in a new tab too. New tools like our timeline and filtering tools will help you pinpoint the email you're looking for, whether it’s the one from yesterday, last month, or several years ago."

One of the main reasons why Firefox has become so successful is its extension framework, and the large community of extensions developers that has grown around it. What many users are not aware of, however, is that extensions are a bit of a security nightmare.

"Camino - the Gecko-based browser with native Cocoa interface and more seamless Mac OS X integration - has finally landed an official 2.0 release. The browser uses a much newer version of Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine (the same one used in Firefox) along with updated tabs and improved security features. However, Camino still lags Firefox in support for Web fonts and advanced HTML5 features like the video tag and offline storage."