Mozilla, Gecko Archive

Both Apple and Microsoft are betting on H264 for HTML5 video, while Firefox and Opera focus on WebM and Chrome does both. Microsoft, however, is kind of an oddball; they first stated they would limit HTML5 video support in Internet Explorer 9 to H264, excluding all other codecs, but later made an exception for WebM, as long as the user installs the WebM codec. Now there's a new move by Microsoft: a Firefox plugin that allows the browser to hook into Windows 7's native video framework to provide H264 support.

"With the release of Firefox 4 Beta 7, Mozilla returned to near the top spot in browser performance rankings. According to tests run by Computerworld, the new browser is about three times faster than the current production version of Firefox in rendering JavaScript, and lags behind only Opera among the top five browser makers."

"Mozilla has pushed back the planned release of Firefox to sometime in 'early 2011'. Previously, the open source outfit had said its latest desktop browser would be officially released next month."

For its upcoming Firefox 4.0 release, Mozilla has been concentrating a great deal on what is often cited as the main shortcoming of Firefox ... its speed. For example, Firefox 4.0 will include GPU acceleration for both rendering and compositing on Windows 7/Vista, OSX and Linux, and it will have GPU acceleration for compositing only for Windows XP.

"Mozilla has announced a new alpha release of its Fennec mobile browser for Android and the Nokia N900. Fennec offers support for add-ons and has tight integration with Firefox Sync, a browser synchronization service that was formerly called Weave. The support for Firefox Sync is arguably Fennec's killer feature, especially because Mozilla is planing to include the synchronization features out-of-the-box in Firefox 4. Users will be able to have access to the their bookmarks, browsing history, and tabs across all of their computers and supported mobile devices."

Today, Mozilla released the fourth beta of Firefox 4.0. After a period of what I would call stagnation, the Mozilla team are back on track with delivering interesting UI concepts. They were sensible enough to copy Chrome's excellent tabs-on-top UI, but have now also added something called Panorama, a new and very interesting way of managing your open tabs.

Mozilla has reached an important Milestone as its new JavaScript engine "JaegerMonkey" is now faster than the current "TraceMonkey" in a key benchmark. Mozilla wants JaegerMonkey to be faster than the competition and launch on September 1, which means that JaegerMonkey will make it into Firefox 4.0.

Firefox 4 Beta (version 1) considered to be stable and safe to use for daily web browsing, though the features and content may change before the final product release.

WebM support has been added to Firefox trunk. "Today I landed Firefox's WebM support on mozilla-central, our Firefox development branch. It should appear in nightly builds from tonight onwards. Firefox should build with WebM support without needing any extra changes to your build configuration, unless you're building on Win32, where you'll need to have MASM installed in order to compile libvpx's optimized assembly."

"Mainstream microprocessors have been 64-bit for years. Operating systems have followed suit. Now it's time for a program used by hundreds of millions of people to make the leap: Firefox. Programmer Armen Zambrano Gasparnian announced the first 64-bit Firefox builds for Windows on Friday, offering an FTP site for those who want to download it. But the software isn't for mainstream users yet."

"For many users of Mozilla's open source Firefox Web browser, Firefox is simply a tool for looking at Web content. For others, Firefox is an enabling tool to actually help develop content and code for the Web. This week, Mozilla released the results of a developer survey it conducted in November 2009. The survey received responses from 5054 developers spread across 119 countries and provides some insights into how developers work with Firefox - and what about Firefox makes it so critical as a tool for developing."

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."

"Mozilla's high-performance TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which was first introduced in 2008, has lost a lot of its luster as competing browser vendors have stepped up their game to deliver superior performance. Firefox now lags behind Safari, Chrome, and Opera in common JavaScript benchmarks. In an effort to bring Firefox back to the front of the pack, Mozilla is building a new JavaScript engine called JaegerMonkey."

"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."