Four years ago, when MozillaNews.org started the community suffered from a lack of sources for timely news. In that time, MozillaZine has become a powerhouse with news, forums, weblogs, the FeedHouse, and the wiki-based Knowledge Base. Also, we now have the RSS-aggregator Planet Mozilla for world-wide Mozilla related blogs, and even Gemal's Blogupdates. This past year, we here at MozillaNews have found out personal lives a lot busier, and we've had less time to devote to MozNews. We still love MozNews, but for now, we're putting it into hibernation mode. New comments are closed to prevent comment spam, but all the stories are still here, and we'll be back. Thanks for reading, folks.
Now that NVu 1.0 has been officially released, we asked Daniel Glazman to take some time to give us another interview to book-end our first interview with him, early in NVu's development. He was gracious as always, and fast! Click our Read More link for unavoidable laws, plans for the future of NVu and Daniel, and even news about his company's upcoming release.more...
Mozilla.org's very own Asa Dotzler caught everyone's second favorite browser, Opera, in another marketing mishap. He notblogged about Opera misunderstanding that coming in 88th in The 100 Best Products of 2005 as rated by PCWorld, behind the #1 product Firefox, the #12 product Maxthon (an IE-based browser), and without any other browser products in the list is not the equivalent of being "The Best Browser of 2005". They are one of the top 100 products of 2005, but is clearly the third best browser of the year. Screenshot of opera.com
AOL has released Netscape 8 today, to average reviews. It still has the twin-engine design, and a few extra features form the beta such as the Trust Rating system. We'll take it for a spin over the next few days and post a review by Sunday evening July...
The most recent security release to Firefox and Seamonkey have been released. Returning for an encore is our incredibly advanced Download Matrix©®™ for links to the Suite and Firefox. This is merely a security release for both products. TherRelevant security bulletins: MFSA 2005-44 Privilege escalation via non-DOM property overrides MFSA 2005-43 "Wrapped" javascript: urls bypass security checks MFSA 2005-42 Code execution via javascript: IconURL Downloads Firefox Release Notes Suite Release Notes Windows Installer (4.6 MB) Full Installer (11 MB) Stub Installer (221 KB) Zipped Build (11 MB) Mac OS X Disk Image (8.7 MB) Disk Image (14 MB) Linux Installer (8.2 MB) Compressed Build Linux Installer (12 MB) Stub Installer (100 KB) Compressed Build (13 MB)
We're starting to so some spring cleaning around here. One thing you can see right now is the Forums link in the menubar now points to MozillaZine's Forums. When MozillaNews.org started almost four years ago, the Mozilla community was a very different place. MozillaZine was a small site with few news updates, and there was no centralized community center except the newsgroups, which being hosted on the Netscape newsgroup servers weren't easily discoverable. We started up with the idea of forums to come soon after. The best made battle plans never survive contact with the enemy, and our forums were severely delayed. MoZine opened their forums, and it quickly became the place to be, as the kids say. With the recent reorganization over there, they're better than ever. So now we officially close our forums, and direct all forum goers to MozillaZine's Forums, an excellent community resource for chat and support. We'll have some more improvements coming soon, so stay tuned!
In his blog post for today, May 2, 2005, Ben Goodger has given us a brief overview of the new "Changes for Extension Developers". He describes it as "almost a complete restructuring of the Extension system" and goes on to give some details about how it improves the situation for developers and for users. He also thanks Benjamin Smedberg and Darin Fisher for their feedback in a rather hefty patch. Speaking of Ben Smedberg, MozillaNews.org wants to congratulate he and his wife on the birth of their daughter Claire Jane Smedberg, born back on April 27. Yes, Ben's wearing his Firefox polo shirt while holding his newborn. That's the way to do it, indoctrinate them when they're young!
Firefox hit 49,000,000 downloads last night. Today, as we approach 50,000,000, SpreadFirefox is offering prizes for photographic proof of your most amazing spectacles to celebrate. To quote: 'We have a handful of unique prizes that you won't find anywhere else, and we're asking you to do one simple thing to claim one: impress us. As we drive toward 50 million downloads, do something so cool, so unusual and so spectacular to spread Firefox that we can't help but scurry around the Mozilla Foundation to tell every one. Send a photo of your feat to fifty@spreadfirefox.com.' But you don't have long. The Infocraft Firefox Counter shows just over 800,000 downloads left at the time of this submission!
When Opera 8 released on April 21, Opera's CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner announced he'd swim from Norway to America, with only one layover in Iceland for a cup of his mom's hot chocolate. Well, they did it. One million, fifty-thousand downloads later, he jumped into the freezing waters off of Oslo. The more healthy competition there is for Microsoft's Internet Explorer the better for web users everywhere, and we wish Jon the best of luck swimming across the unforgivingly cold North Atlantic. If someone wants to buy me a round trip ticket to Iceland to interview Jon on his rest, I'll be glad to bring back a cup of hot chocolate for you.
The people have spoken, and the Evil Empire has listened! In the IEBlog, the good men and women of the IE crew have heard the collective voices of web developers screaming for PNG alpha transparency support, and it will be included in IE7's first beta release. IE users will finally see the graphics at MozillaNews.org as they're meant to be seen. ;) Also coming is numerous CSS bug fixes "so that web developers have a consistent set of functionality on which they can rely." Actually, web developers have had this for years with Mozilla, Firefox, and Opera. It's that now the (current) majority users will have it, making it easier to deploy and making web developers lives easier. It's a great thing to see IE playing catch-up again. The first beta of IE7 is due out this summer.
Robert O'Callahan has posted what he calls a "Glimpse Of The Future". And from the post, that's exactly what it is. "One of the big initiatives in 1.9 will be an overhaul of our graphics infrastructure. We're planning to rip out a lot of our existing graphics code and base everything on Cairo. This will give us modern 2D graphics capabilities (such as filling, stroking and clipping to paths, general affine transforms, and ubiquitious support for alpha transparency) and also, via Glitz, acceleration using 3D graphics hardware. It will also mean we can use a single rendering pipeline for HTML/CSS, canvas and SVG, so that SVG effects can be applied to HTML content." Read the entire post for details and prototype screenshots. Congratulations to Robert, Vladimir Vukićević and Stuart Parmenter for some incredible groundwork. It's nowhere near done yet, but this is an exciting development.
Former Windows Magazine editor Fred Langa in his weekly "Langa Letter" column for InformationWeek discusses The Pros and Cons of Firefox. The article has what seems to be Fred's stock in trade, good information mixed in with bad information. In the article below, I'll make some observations and responses to Fred's article. Click the "Read More" link for the full article.more...
Incremental updates to Firefox and the Mozilla Suite have gone gold and are released. Below is our spiffy Download Matrix©®™ for links to the Suite and Firefox. Firefox has several security updates and an improved Update process. The Suite has a few security updates as well. Read the Release Notes for full details. Downloads Firefox Release Notes Suite Release Notes Windows Installer (4.6 MB) Full Installer (11 MB) Stub Installer (221 KB) Zipped Build (11 MB) Mac OS X Disk Image (8.7 MB) Disk Image (14 MB) Linux Installer (8.2 MB) Compressed Build Linux Installer (12 MB) Stub Installer (100 KB) Compressed Build (13 MB)
Mike Connor let loose the news in this blog post that he's now working on Firefox full time under a contract with the Mozilla Foundation. On a related note, today I start working full-time on Firefox, working under a contract with the Mozilla Foundation. So all of those “I’ll get to it around mid-April” comments really were accurate. I really did mean “I’ll get to it around mid-April” which is now. Expect the bugspam to start rsn, I need to catch up on bugmail first (the last week sucked). Great news for Mike, and the entire Firefox community. Congratulations!
Everyone's favorite redundantly redundant tech news site News.com.com22 has a new article up entitled Start-up wants to improve on Firefox. Round Two, formerly Mozsource (formerly E-Flo), is looking to launch a suite of Firefox enhancements sometime in the next month or so. I think it's a sign that you've arrived when businesses spring up to support your OSS project, and this proves that Firefox is definitely a force to contend with. Updated: Removed references to Blake Ross. Blake Ross is not affiliated with Round Two. I apologize for the mix up. We do look forward to what Blake has up his sleeve, though.more...
Robin Monks wrote in to remind us: Mozilla's recently revived weekly Bugday will be expanded this week due to the planned auto-resolve of unconfirmed bugs. Mozilla bugday will be 48hrs this week (from the normal 24hrs) and will start Tuesday, April 5th at 2PM Atlantic. Everyone is welcome! That's right; It's twice the Bugday fun this week with a double helping of triaging! For those of you not in New Brunswick (Canada, not New Jersey), that's 1PM EST, 10AM PST, your time may vary.
Ok ok, we lied. Google is not buying the Mozilla Foundation. It's an April Fools Day joke. Have a great spring, everyone.
Well, looks like all those rumors about GBrowser were true, but in a way no one guessed. Google is aquiring the Mozilla Foundation whole. We've managed to get advanced copies of the press release from Google from an insider. Apparently, Firefox is also going to be rebranded Google Firefox, and our mole has sent us a copy of that new product page. We have no word yet on Thunderbird, Bugzilla, or other projects. We'll keep you informed.
Mozilla Firefox 1.0.2 has been released. This release fixes a security bug with a buffer overflow in GIF images. Important links to downloads, release notes, etc. below. Firefox product page FTP Download Directory Release Notes Also note that there is no zip builds available for win32 builds. This is due to people having auto-update problems.
From the folks behind the Windows XP utility TweakXP, Total Idea, comes a new freeware utility for Firefox called FireTune. It's essentially a collection of various performance tweaks rolled into one little freeware applet, making it easier than digging though about:config. It's freeware, so we're not getting a kickback here, but it looks genuinely interesting. They're even soliciting community created GFX for the tool.
Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 has now been released. No, you didn't miss the 1.0.1 release, it was cancelled close to release due to further issues discovered in the release candidates. Since ther ewas a forthcoming Firefox 1.0.2 release on it's way, the decision was made to scrub TB 1.0.1 and roll all the fixes into a matching 1.0.2 release. Thunderbird 1.0.2 direct download links: Windows Linux Mac
The Mozilla Camino browser project, which is Mozilla.org's Mac OS X native browser, now has it's own domain and website. It's meant to be the new source of official releases and information about the Camino project. We look forward to a newly competitive OS X native browser to go toe to toe with Safari, and to compliment Firefox for OS X.
I swiped this directly from Gervase Markham's blog, it's just so cool it needs a higher profile. "A guy called Eric Edwards, a motion graphics student at the Savannah College of Art and Design, has done a rather cool television-style advertisement promoting the use of Firefox. It's a student project which he's planning to enter in an Adobe design contest." This is Gerv's original entry. Thanks to Gerv for finding it, and thanks to Eric Edwards for making a fantastic little peice of work.
Despite promises earlier this week, Yahoo is backing away from it's pledge to ensure Firefox compatibility with future services. Despite the Gecko core technology being around since 1998, Yahoo has justified backing away from the seven year old rendering engine by stating, "In the grand scheme of things Firefox is still a new technology." With Yahoo recently celebrating it's tenth anniversary, one must wonder when a technology is mature to the Sunnyvale California company. The company representative continued, "I’m not saying we are not going to be developing and exploring other areas -- we are. But there are so many different products on the Yahoo network that there may be some products that are, perhaps, not appropriate for that browser." Yes, Firefox just reached version 1.0 recently, so please don't browse the racier parts of Yahoo without parental supervision.
We have a flood of Firefox newsbits today. First up, Yahoo has caught on to Firefox's popularity, and extensibility as a platform (as noted by their Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox release last month), and thus confirmed plans to open their APIs to Firefox development, and would ensure all new services were compatible with both IE and Firefox from the start. Ask Jeeves is following suit with their own Firefox native toolbar extension. Apparently, they're big Firefox fans, and want to share the joy of better browsing. You are bound by Ask.com Terms of Service, but the actual license the toolbar's code uses is unclear. It would be nice if Ask.com could clear this up so developers know if they're able to reuse the code, or enhance features of this toolbar. Recently some nasty spyware has come to light that exploits Firefox and Sun's JavaVM to infect a user's PC. Ironically, once the spyware infects the computer, the most visible change is a new toolbar in Internet Explorer. Currently, it's unclear exactly where the breach of security lies, in the Java Runtime Environment, or in Firefox itself. Mozilla security group members are investigating this issue. And lastly, Syracuse New York's Al Fasoldt prefers Firefox over Safari for Mac OS X. "I'm a big Safari fan, but as soon as I tried the Windows version of Firefox, I knew I had to see if the OS X version is just as good. If anything, it's even better." Great article, and I'm not even a Mac user.
Like "Law & Order" we're ripped from the headlines. Mozillazine ran an article about the first meeting held on the Mozilla IRC server, complete with complete logs of the meeting. Basically, what was handled was general direction of the project. Finding out what module/component owners wanted to remain involved, discussing statistical analysis of remaining bugs in Seamonkey, and finding and designating volunteers and leaders (very important, since one problem Seamonkey had was design by committee (not necessarily Mozilla.org's fault)). The project seems of to a healthy start, with excellent involvement with the Mozilla.org staff, such as Asa Dotzler, Simon Montagu, and others. The next meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, March 22nd March at 17:00GMT (Noon EST, 9am PST, your time may vary).
A bunch of Mozilla.org happenings culled from the Mozilla sector of the blogosphere this morning. Mozilla.org has hired Josh Aas to help flesh out and polish the Mac OS X offering of Firefox. Also on the Firefox front, Mike Connor (mconnor), when not healing his stomach or working to support his family, is finding the time he can dedicate to reviewing patches is diminishing. The problem stems from a lack of people with the same level of authoritative knowledge of the product, a lack of time, and a growing list of patches to review in that shrinking time frame. My own comments on the issue can be found here. The site formerly known as Netscape DevEdge has returned! Mitchell Baker has all the details about DevEdge being handed over to the Mozilla Foundation, and will be hosted as DevMo in the hopefully near future.
We've been on hiatus for a while it seems. That's what happens when the heavy lifter get sidetracked with real life. But, to celebrate our return, Technology and Business Magazine went and compared nine of the most popular email agents including the 800 pound gorilla that is Microsoft Outlook, and declared Mozilla Thunderbird as Editor's Choice. While they admit there's no silver bullet client for everyone, Mozilla Thunderbird was their top choice in the end. Excellent work Thunderbird team!
Asa notes in his blog that Firefox has gained one million downloads less than four days after the two-page advertisement on New York Times. Firefox downloads now totals 12 millions. (See spreadfirefox.com for important update.) In addition, NY Times published an article on Firefox yesterday (December 19). The author Randall Stross writes: With Firefox, open-source software moves from back-office obscurity to your home, and to your parents', too. (Your children in college are already using it.) Refuting claims made by Microsoft's Gary Schare, Stross criticizes IE's free ride and Microsoft's blaming security problems on users. On a related news, Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 has garnered one million downloads in 10 days after its release.
Mozilla 1.7.5 has been released. This release marks the Gecko sync between Firefox 1.0 and Mozilla 1.7.x. There is very little else new in this release except NPRuntime support, and undetectable document.all support have been added. Check out the release notes to see any other minor changes. FTP Download Directory
The Mozilla Foundation has just announced in a press release that it has put a two-page Firefox advertisement on the December 16th edition of New York Times. The newspaper announcement celebrates 10 million downloads of Firefox 1.0, reached in a little over one month after the release. The advertisement features a full-page, black and white Firefox logo made out of a long list of 10,000 names. The page asks Are you fed up with your web browser?. The second page features three quotes from users and an introduction of Firefox. The advertisement is downloadable in PNG image and PDF format. (Note: the PDF document is complex and can take a long time to render). You may also purchase a NY Times Firefox poster from the Mozilla Store. The advertisement is the result of a donation campaign started about two months ago in spreadfirefox.com. It raised $250,000 in ten days.
Secunia has discovered frame injection vulnerabilities affecting Mozilla/Firefox, Konqueror, Opera, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Netscape. The vulnerabilities allow a site to cause a phishing (spoofing) attack by replacing the content of another site's pop-up (if the name of the pop-up is known). They appear to be variations of the multiple-browser frame injection problems (patched) reported this July. More information and workaround in the full article.more...
Today, Copernic released Copernic Desktop Search (CDS) 1.2 (see press release), a search tool that supports Mozilla Firefox history and bookmarks indexing. This makes CDS the first desktop search tool to fully support Firefox. Chris Hofmann is quoted saying "We are happy to see that Copernic is providing support for Firefox. We are close to 10 million downloads in almost a month since the release in November, and developers are taking notice."
Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 has been released. This mail and newsgroups client has many features that make using e-mail safe and easy, such as adaptive junk mail filter, plain-text mail view, message grouping, saved search folders (a.k.a. virtual folders), and customizable views. This article guides you through the process of migrating from Netscape, Mozilla, Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, Eudora, or another mail client. What’s New for Mozilla and Netscape Users New in Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 include global folder, message grouping, saved search folders (these three will be in Mozilla 1.8), new three-column layout view, RSS support, and customizable toolbar.more...
Thunderbird 1.0 has been released yesterday. Unfortunately, it doesn't come with built-in Help (unlike Firefox 1.0 and even Nvu 0.6), and Thunderbird Help is one of very few online Thunderbird resources available. This is because not enough volunteers are helping with Thunderbird documentation. If you have time, please help Jeff Walden (Help Viewer project lead) out with filing and fixing documentation bugs. As a side news, Camino 0.8.2 was also released yesterday (see the release notes).
After being offline for about fifty days, Netscape DevEdge is back online (as of today at noon, Mozilla time). Mitchell Baker, thanks!
Tristan Nitot wrote in his blog that the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" daily (one of largest German newspaper) today published a full-page advertisement on Firefox. The ad campaign is the German version of the Mozilla Foundation's New York Times ad campaign. The ad reads (English translation by Axel): FIRE! Hundreds of programmers jointly developed a revolutionary internet browser. They volunteer their time and donate it to the whole world. Therefore, 2403 individuals and companies financed this ad to tell you: Firefox 1.0 is here. Free download at http://www.mozilla-europe.org/de/ Read Tristan Nitot's blog for more details. On a related note, last Friday ABC World News Tonight did an interview with Blake Ross on Firefox. In case you missed it, you can see the story online (Zach's blog). Also, ITWorld has published two tip-and-tricks articles on Firefox.
Nvu, the standalone composer, has released to version 0.60 on November 26, 2004. This release is still based on Mozilla 1.7.1, however the rulers and the site manager have been rewritten due to bugs in the previous versions. The site manager now displays the default icon in Windows and Linux (KDE only for now), and it can now be used to edit multiple sites simultaneously. Image dragging into the Nvu window now displays the image in Linux. It also includes R.J.Keller and KSS's online Help. There are also many other bugfixes in this release.
In a recent interview with BetaNews (Nov 15), Microsoft's product director Gary Schare discussed Internet Explorer and Firefox 1.0. Schare notes the need to market Internet Explorer aggressively (without any material development on IE) while echoing Microsoft's denial on Firefox's threat to Internet Explorer. Yesterday (Nov 29), BetaNews published another interview with Firefox developer, Blake Ross. In the interview, Ross fires back at Schare's claims on security and feature innovation and also discusses future plans on Firefox. more...
Today, AOL releases the prototype of its Netscape Browser, a standalone browser based on Firefox 0.9.3. According to an article by BetaNews, the software is outsourced to the Canadian software firm Mercurial Communications. This Windows-only release includes some features not found in Firefox. A notable addition is the ability to switch to the Internet Explorer (IE) engine. The browser uses Gecko, the same layout engine in Firefox and Mozilla, but the user can easily switch to IE mode through the Site Control menu. The menu also provides access to other Site Controls settings. Site Control allows the user to set, on a per-site basis, settings like JavaScript, ActiveX, cookies, and security levels (high, medium, low). These settings appear to work in both Gecko and IE modes. Another privacy feature addition is the Clear History button, which allows the user to clear histories (browsing, download, etc.) and cookies, or surf in the anonymous mode (automatically clear histories on exit). There are several tabbed browsing enhancements. Unlike Firefox, the New Tab button is on the tab bar, and each tab has a Close Tab button. The Close Tab button has a small arrow which opens menu for various close tab actions (e.g. close all to the left, close blank). To the right of the tab bar is a button which opens a tab selection menu, a handy tool when there are many tabs opened. The Options dialog has a (new) Tab Browsing page, giving access to settings like "open popups in a new tab", "show Close Tab button on tab", and how links in Bookmarks and History are opened. Like Netscape 7, the browser has many Netscape-brand features, including two RSS-based news tickers and a Weather ticker by default, with many more that can be added; it doesn't come with software like AOL Instant Messenger, though. The Netscape branding nevertheless creates a cluttered interface. With some customizing effort, though, the user can get a clean interface. Netscape Browser should support extensions and themes, though a trip to Mozilla Update turns up nothing that supports the prototype. You can find many screenshots on Henrik Gemal's site.
The fire is spreading. As of today, Firefox 1.0 has about 6.5 million downloads. It took 11 days for the number to reach 5 million after the release, according to Asa Dotzler; In comparison, the Preview Release took over one month to reach that number. Interestingly, the majority of [the] Windows downloads... have come from IE users, indicating that browser conversion is continuing steadily. Two recently released web statistics support this trend. OneStat reports that Mozilla browsers have reached 7.35% market share. Among them, Firefox Preview Release (version 0.10, which is mistakenly reported as 0.1) and Firefox 1.0 each has 2.79% and 1.79%, respectively. Internet Explorer 6's market share has also increased, perhaps at the cost of other IE versions. Internet Explorer now has 89% market share. French company XiTi reports similar numbers. According to the study, Internet Explorer's market share has dropped just below 90%, while Firefox has 7.21%. In addition, a rather unscientfic study I did in October indicates that Gecko's percentage share has increased from almost neglegible numbers in the beginning of the year to single or even double digits.
Ben Goodger has uploaded a draft version of the Firefox 2.0 Roadmap yesterday (2004-11-23). According to the draft, three major milestones are planned: 1.1 (March 2005), 1.5 and 2.0. [Update: a Firefox 2.0 PRD is at work at the developer wiki.] Asa Dotzler today (2004-11-24) posted in the seamonkey newsgroup on the 1.7 branch. The next update, 1.7.5, will come in mid-December; it will include a Firefox 1.0-equivalent Gecko and security udpates. Interestingly, there are 1.7.1, 1.7.2, and 1.7.3, but no 1.7.4. These updates could mean that the mozilla.org will be stepping away from incrementing version number. [Update: thanks to our readers who pointed out that 1.7.4 was reserved for any neccessary security update before the bigger 1.7.5 update.]more...