Mozilla, Gecko Archive

VirtualBSD 9.0 is a desktop-ready FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE built around the XFCE Desktop Environment for good aesthetics and usability, and is distributed as a VMware appliance (that can also be made to work with VirtualBox) so even non techies can be up and running in minutes. The most common applications, plugins and multimedia codecs are ready since the first boot.

After much speculation over whether Mozilla, the non-profit foundation, and Google, the search and advertising company, would renew their default search provision deal, Mozilla has announced that a new multi-year deal has been made. The deal will see Google continue to be the default search provider in the Firefox browser for "at least three additional years".

"In a move that will raise eyebrows, Mozilla is now distributing a version of Firefox that uses Bing as the default search provider instead of Google. Rest assured that this is a joint project, though: the creatively-named Firefox with Bing website is run by Microsoft, and both Mozilla and MS are clear that this is a joint venture. Now, don't get too excited - the default version of Firefox available from Mozilla.com is still backed by Google, and there's no mention of an alternative, Bingy download anywhere on the site - but it's worth noting that Mozilla has been testing Bing's capabilities using Test Pilot over the last couple of months, and the release of Firefox with Bing indicates that Mozilla is now confident in Bing's ability to provide a top-notch service to Firefox users." Test pilot or not, I'm stockpiling more baked beans.

Mozilla has released Firefox 7. Unlike releases of Firefox 5 and Firefox 6 which were relatively minor upgrades to the browser, Firefox 7 includes a number of significant improvements, most important of which is probably the drastically reduced memory usage.

Mozilla Firefox has been listening to recent memory complains, and as a side effect tested the browser's scalability to the extreme with memshrink's improvements. The results are shocking: For 150 tabs open using the test script, Firefox nightly takes 6 min 14 on the test system, uses 2GB and stays responsive. For the same test, Chrome takes 28 min 55 and is unusable during loading. An optimized version of the script has been made for Chrome as an attempt to work-around Chrome's limitations and got an improved loading time of 27 min 58, while using 5GB of memory.

Mozilla has already done a lot to clean up the user interface of its successful web browser, but it would seem they're not yet done. As someone who finds the current interface a little... Chaotic and distracting, I'm quite happy with the changes they're currently proposing. They basically pointed at Chrome and said "pretty much that".

"Over the last couple of weeks, Mozilla has finally stepped up its 64-bit testing process. There are now five slaves dedicated to building Firefox for Windows x64, which means that from Firefox 8 and onwards, you'll be able to pick up 64-bit builds that are functionally identical to its 32-bit cousins but operating in native 64-bit CPU and memory space." Th 64bit version is about 10% faster, benchmarks show.

A remarkably well reasoned editorial by Peter Bright at Ars discusses the implications of the new Firefox release schedule. The Crux of the argument is that by complaining about the "new" Firefox release, corporate customers are fundamentally misunderstanding the web and their place in it. He also reflects on historical reasons for their attitude and what they should do in the future to maintain parity with the evolution of the web.

Mozilla Labs has introduced its concept of a desktop replacement called Webian Shell. The Webian Shell basically consists of a browser which will replace the traditional desktop, and where the web applications are given more importance than the native applications.

Hooray for Mozilla. That about sums this story up. Remember all those domain names ICE keeps seizing? There are countless ways to get around these silly seizures,like using your operating system's hosts file. To make this a less cumbersome process, several Firefox extensions dot he work for you. Well, since copyright infringement is naturally a threat to the security of the United States, the Department of Homeland Security contacted Mozilla, asking them to take down one of these extensions. Mozilla declined.

Mozilla announced on Monday that it will reabsorb Mozilla Messaging and integrate it into Mozilla Labs, a team within Mozilla that incubates experimental projects.

After a very long development phase, Mozilla has finally officially relased Firefox 4.0. The binaries were already up on the FTP sites yesterday, but today the release became official. Firefox 4.0 packs a heck of a lot of new features, including an entirely new user interface.

A mini-tempest has been raging across the web with anger at Mozilla for removing the RSS icon from the Firefox 4 toolbar by default (and moving it to the bookmarks menu). This has been going on for a couple of weeks now, and I had avoided writing about it on OSNews since the recent furore is often cited to have begun around a personal blog post I wrote, but now things have come to an impasse: "No matter how loudly you shout, what you see in the beta with regard to the feed auto-discovery button is what will ship in Firefox 4". When Mozilla can say they are open to input, but refuse to change in the face of near universal disagreement, we all lose, not just me.

Yesterday, the ninth Firefox 4.0 beta was released. One of the major new features in Firefox 4.0 is hardware acceleration for anything from canvas drawing to video rendering. Sadly, this feature won't make its way to the Linux version of Firefox 4.0. The reason? X' drivers are "disastrously buggy". Update: Benoit Jacob informed my via email that there's some important nuance: hardware acceleration (OpenGL only) on Linux has been implemented, but due to bugs and issues, only one driver so far has been whitelisted (the proprietary NVIDIA driver).