Mozilla, Gecko Archive

The fifth beta of Firefox has been released. "Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 5 has been released for testing. The fifth beta of the next major Firefox version offers over 750 bug fixes over Beta 4, including improvements in user interface, location bar autocomplete, bookmark backup and restore, full page zoom and other new features based upon user feedback."

"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."

"While Firefox 2 used less memory than it's predecessor, Firefox 1.5, we intentionally restricted the number of changes to the Gecko platform (Gecko 1.8.1 was only slightly different than Gecko 1.8) on which Firefox was built. However, while the majority of people were working on Firefox 2/Gecko 1.8.1, others of us were already ripping into the platform that Firefox 3 was to be built on: Gecko 1.9. We've made more significant changes to the platform than I can count, including many to reduce our memory footprint. The result has been dramatic."

"Mozilla's greatest success to date has come from its online efforts with the Firefox web browser. Since at least October of last year they've been working on the Mozilla Prism effort to bring the online experience to the desktop. That effort is taking a major step forward today. Instead of struggling with Mozilla Prism to create a standalone desktop version of a Web app, there is now a point and click browser plugin to do the magic."

"Firefox 3 b2 is now available for download. This is the tenth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3."

The Mozilla Corporation today released Firefox 3 Beta 1, which is now available for download in a variety of languages. The beta includes updates to the default theme, the new places site management features, improved security architecture, and Gecko 1.9. Release notes with a more complete list of features, are also available.

"What do you get when you cross a Firefox with a chameleon? An open-source Web browser whose user interface is adapted to the look of the operating system it's running on. One change planned for the upcoming Firefox version 3, code-named Gran Paradiso, is this more native appearance."

The developer team behind Firefox has announced plans to bring a mobile version of the technology to the market in 2008. "People ask us all the time about what Mozilla's going to do about the mobile web, and I'm very excited to announce that we plan to rock it," Mike Schroepfer, a Mozilla developer known as 'schrep', wrote on the Mozillazine blog.

"On her weblog, Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker has announced that Mozilla Thunderbird is to move to a "new, separate organizational setting" as the Mozilla Foundation continues to focus ever more closely on Firefox. While the Mozilla Foundation supports a number of projects, its taxable subsidiary the Mozilla Corp. is responsible for only Firefox and Thunderbird. However, it has become increasingly clear that Firefox is the priority. The resources allocated to Firefox dwarf those allocated to Thunderbird and recent projects such as the initiative to improve Mozilla support exclude Thunderbird."

"The fifth public alpha build of Firefox 3 has been officially released. The new alpha build, which is codenamed Gran Paradiso, features early components of the revamped Places system, a cohesive storage framework that will unify bookmark and history storage. An earlier prototype of the Places system was tested in early Firefox 2 alpha (Bon Echo) builds but was removed because it couldn't be completed within the Firefox 2 release timeframe."

"After fifteen months of hard work, the Camino Project is pleased to announce the release of Camino 1.5, a substantial update to the popular Camino 1.0 web browser. Based on Mozilla’s Gecko 1.8.1 rendering engine, Camino 1.5 includes some brand-new, exciting features to make surfing the web even easier." New features include inline spell-checking, feed detection, session saving, and tabbed browsing improvements. Camino is a fantastic OS X native browser that is generally more compatible than Safari. The Camino Project also launched a new website to coincide with their browser milestone.

"When Firefox launched in beta release five years ago, it burst on the open-source browser scene like a young Elvis Presley - slim, sexy and dangerous. Since then it has attracted millions of users, generally set the agenda for browser development and unseated Microsoft's IE as the de facto monopoly in the field. But, with Firefox 3.0 poised for release later this year, the 'IE killer' is in danger of morphing into an early Fat Elvis, if increasing numbers of die-hard fans turned reluctant critics are any guide."

Mozilla has released Bugzilla 3.0, with many new features and code improvements. According to the release announcement, some of the new features in this version include custom fields, support for the Apache mod_perl module, per-product permissions, an XML-RPC interface, and the ability to create and edit bugs via email.

"According to Mozilla's CEO Mitchell Baker, Firefox is just at the beginning of its life cycle. In this one-on-one interview with APCMag.com, she talks about where Firefox came from and where it's going."