Mozilla, Gecko Archive

Mozilla has released the first beta release of Firefox 3.6, which comes with some nice Windows 7 integration features. More specifically, the Firefox 3.6 beta integrates with the new taskbar in Windows 7.

"In the discussion about the best way to manage the Mozilla trademarks, the problem of sites charging people to download Firefox is often mentioned. However, not everyone has come across such a site. For your ediification, I present 'A Tour Of A "Pay to Download Firefox" Site', with detailed analysis and screenshots. You'll be pleased to hear we have recently been having some success using trademark law with preliminary injunctions and domain name disputes against such sites."

We've already talked about the proposed interface changes for Firefox 3.7 (and 4.0) which are coming to the Windows platform. However, those were anything-goes sketches, and now it seems as if the team has more or less settled on what Firefox 3.7 will look like on Windows. I'll reserve final judgement until I have used it, but my first thought was: who littered all these different widgets all over the place?

Last week, Mozilla started placing a warning message on its welcome page, seen by users after they upgrade Firefox to the latest version, informing the user if they have an out of date Flash Player. Now the stats have been crunched, and the result is that 10 million people have clicked the link, doing more than Adobe's own efforts to keep people up to date.

The US State Department is quite clearly fed up with not being able to use Firefox. One of its staffers asked (causing applause) Secretary of State Hillary Clinton why they were not allowed to use Firefox. Clinton did not know the answer right away herself, but under secretary Kennedy explained that while Firefox is free, it still comes with a price. However, the goal is indeed to allow the State Department to use Firefox. More here.

Remember the very detailed proposal Microsoft submitted to the European Commission not too long ago about the browser ballot? This was quite the detailed proposal, covering just about every possible aspect of such a ballot screen. Responses were positive from within the EC, but now it seems that according to the Mozilla Foundation, the proposal is not good enough.

"I'm really excited to announce a new feature in Jetpack 0.4 -- Audio Recording. 'Jetpacks' can now access the microphone with just a few simple lines of Javascript The result is an audio file encoded in Ogg/Vorbis, which you can then playback, or if you choose to upload the file to a remote location". A while ago we discussed Jetpack (and Google's) HTML / JavaScript based browser extensions. Now the ante has been upped, with such creativity as URL-based voice memos!

As was anticipated, the boys and girls at Mozilla have released the final build of Firefox 3.5 today. Firefox 3.5 - originally supposed to be 3.1 - comes with many welcome improvements, chief among which is support for HTML5 audio and video tags.

We're on the verge of a serious evolution on the web. Right now, the common way to include video on the web is by use of Flash, a closed-source technology that is a massive resource hog. The answer is the HTML5 video tag, which allows you to embed video into HTML pages without the use of Flash or any other non-HTML technology; combined with open video codecs, this could provide the perfect opportunity to further open up and standardise the web. Sadly, not even Mozilla itself really seems to understand what it is supposed to do with the video tag, and actually advocates the use of JavaScript to implement it. Kroc Camen, OSNews editor, is very involved in making/keeping the web open, and has written an open letter to Mozilla in which he urges them to not use JavaScript for HTML video. Note that Kroc's website may not work properly in Internet Explorer. (Update The letter has been mirrored in the article, Read More for the full text)

Firefox 3.5RC1 has been released. "Firefox 3.5 (Release Candidate) is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use, and adding new features for users."

Tabbed browsing is pretty much the norm by now, with even someone like me (who disliked it vehemently for a long time) finally giving in and start using tabbed browsing (thanks to Chrome, by the way). Well, apparently, Mozilla thinks its time to move on. They believe tabbed browsing has become obsolete, and are asking users to come up with a better alternative.

The boys and girls of the Mozilla project have taken the wraps off the beta for Prism 1.0. Prism is a technology which blurs the boundaries between the web and the desktop, allowing you to approach web sites as if they were ordinary desktop applications. Prism is cross-platform, and runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

"Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, has gone to beta. Though currently only available for the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet, it appears to be functional and stable. Firefox introduced many innovations into desktop browsing, most of which have since been emulated by the competition. On mobile phones the competition is already fierce, and Fennec will have a hard time proving its value against other browsers which already offer much of what made Firefox so compelling." Ars has more.

We've got two bits of good news, and one bit of bad news about Mozilla's Firefox web browser. Starting with the bad news - in 2008, Fiefox suffered from considerably more security holes than Internet Explorer and Safari. However, the first bit of good news is that Mozilla was much faster at patching zero-day exploits, according to a report by Secunia. The zero-day flaws of Firefox were also less severe than those of IE. The other bit of good news is that Firefox' upcoming Tracemonkey JavaScript engine is so good, the next Firefox release has been bumped from 3.1 to 3.5.