Mozilla, Gecko Archive

Mozilla To release Firefox 4 March 22

According to a post on the mozilla.dev.planning Google Group by Mozilla Senior Director of Engineering, Damon Sicore, the ship date for the stable version of Firefox 4, Tuesday 22 March, has been approved by Mozilla's IT and Marketing teams. Sicore notes that, should the developers discover any last-second blocker bugs that would prevent the final release, a second release candidate would be issued "as soon as possible" and the ship date would be reset. So far, the first RC has "received a very warm welcome", said Sicore.

Mozilla, RSS and Feedback

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.

No Hardware Acceleration Firefox for Linux Due to Buggy X Drivers

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).

Microsoft Brings H264 to Firefox on Windows 7

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.

Fennec Alpha for Android Too Slow, But Add-ons, Sync Impress

"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."

WebM Lands on Firefox Nightlies

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."

Firefox for Windows Starts 64bit Transition

"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."

Mozilla Developers Talk Up Firefox as a Key Development Tool

"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."