Mozilla, Gecko Archive

Firefox 4.0 Released

Submitted by gogothebee 2011-03-22 Mozilla, Gecko 135 Comments

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.

Guest post by lemur2 2011-03-17 Mozilla, Gecko 26 Comments

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

Kroc 2011-01-16 Mozilla, Gecko 76 Comments

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

Thom Holwerda 2011-01-15 Mozilla, Gecko 140 Comments

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).

Submitted by poundsmack 2010-12-15 Mozilla, Gecko 35 Comments

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.

Firefox 4 Regains Speed Mojo

Submitted by snk 2010-11-11 Mozilla, Gecko 44 Comments

"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."

Submitted by lemur2 2010-11-09 Mozilla, Gecko 11 Comments

Following a number of delays, the Mozilla Project has confirmed that it plans to ship the seventh beta for version 4 of its open source Firefox web browser on Wednesday, the 10th of November. This seventh beta for version 4 of Firefox 4 is the first beta to include the new Jaegermonkey javascript engine for Firefox.

Mozilla Delays Firefox 4 Until ‘Early 2011’

Thom Holwerda 2010-10-27 Mozilla, Gecko 15 Comments

"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."

Guest post by lemur2 2010-10-15 Mozilla, Gecko 151 Comments

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.

Submitted by lemur2 2010-09-10 Mozilla, Gecko 64 Comments

"Mozilla has published the first Firefox build that integrates a new JavaScript engine that aims to match the performance in IE9 and reduces the gap to Safari, Opera and Chrome. The JavaScript performance is pretty dramatic and, at least on our test system, Firefox 4 is now faster than IE9 PP4."

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

Thom Holwerda 2010-08-30 Mozilla, Gecko 16 Comments

"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."

Firefox 4.0 Beta 4 Introduces Panorama

Thom Holwerda 2010-08-25 Mozilla, Gecko 70 Comments

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.

‘Firefox 4: One Generation Ahead of Everyone Else Speedwise’

Submitted by suka 2010-08-18 Mozilla, Gecko 52 Comments

In a recent interview with derStandard.at Mozilla's Chris Blizzard talks about the rising competition by Google Chrome, the evolution of the web platform and the prospects for WebM. He also promises that Firefox 4 will be "one generation ahead" of other browsers in relation to Javascript speed.

Submitted by lemur2 2010-07-15 Mozilla, Gecko 5 Comments

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.

First Beta of Firefox 4

Submitted by fran 2010-07-07 Mozilla, Gecko 66 Comments

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.

Firefox User Interface Elements Studied

David Adams 2010-07-05 Mozilla, Gecko No Comments

The Firefox team invited users to install a test addon, which measured which UI elements they use, and recorded their frequency. In no big surprise, the back and reload buttons were used most frequently. Learning about the popularity of the lesser-used buttons should help the Firefox team set their product development priorities.

WebM Lands on Firefox Nightlies

Thom Holwerda 2010-06-09 Mozilla, Gecko 50 Comments

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

Thom Holwerda 2010-05-31 Mozilla, Gecko 23 Comments

"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."

Firefox Home Coming to the iPhone

Thom Holwerda 2010-05-27 Mozilla, Gecko 11 Comments

As most of you probably know, Apple does not allow competing browsers into the App Store. As such, browser makers are forced to come up with inventive solutions to still get their name out there among iPhone users, and after Opera's successful attempt, Mozilla is going to take a stab at it too. Their solution is different, but no less interesting - especially if you're already a Firefox user.

Mozilla Developers Talk Up Firefox as a Key Development Tool

Thom Holwerda 2010-03-27 Mozilla, Gecko 8 Comments

"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."