Mozilla, Gecko Archive

Developers have proposed an out-of-the-world browsing experience for Mozilla Firefox 4. Here is a user who peeks into those features and gives us insight. Taragana.com looks at Mozilla initiatives that might make it into Firefox 4.

With the recent surge in WebKit adoption, many have stated to question the usefulness of Mozilla's Gecko browsing engine, claiming that WebKit is far superior. Some even go as far as saying that Firefox should ditch Gecko in favour of WebKit. Ars Technica's Ryan Paul explains why that is utter, utter bogus. "From a technical perspective, Gecko is now very solid and no longer lags behind WebKit. A testament to the rate at which Gecko has been improving is its newfound viability in the mobile space, where it was practically considered a nonstarter not too long ago. Mozilla clearly has the resources, developer expertise, and community support to take Gecko anywhere that WebKit can go."

The Mozilla and Nokia teams have been working hard to port Firefox 3 and the Mozilla Platform to Qt and there are now some solid results available from their efforts. An experimental build of Firefox Qt is available and you can download the sources from Mozilla's mercurial repository. The plan is to merge the Qt branch into the central Mozilla branch to make the port official.

"Mozilla released its latest browser, Firefox 3.0, last week. SecurityFocus contributor Federico Biancuzzi tracked down two key members of Mozilla's security team, Window Snyder and Johnathan Nightingale, to learn more about the security features included in this major release. They discussed the protection against phishing and the new malware protection, the new update mechanism for add-ons, Mozilla's security policies and processes, and the hardening of their Javascript implementation."

Any minute now, the Mozilla Foundation will officially release the third incarnation of their successful Firefox web browser - the browser that cracked Internet Explorer's monopoly and forced Microsoft to improve IE. Mozilla aims to set a world record in most software downloaded in 24 hours with Firefox 3. Update: It's out there, boys and girls. Update II: And the Firefox 3 page is up too.

"Asa Dotzler has been there from the beginning. As Mozilla's director of community development, he's had a hand in birthing some of the web's most successful open-source software projects, most notably the Mozilla and Firefox web browsers. Now, with Mozilla getting ready to celebrate its tenth anniversary on Monday and with the June release of Firefox 3 fast approaching, Dotzler agreed to sit down with Wired.com and share how his outsider's eye has helped shape Mozilla's path. He tells us not only why Netscape failed, but why Mozilla's first crack at a browser didn't do much better. He also offers insight into how the Firefox team makes decisions ('We've never been a democracy', he insists) and why he thinks Firefox 3 will improve the health of the web."