News: Mozilla Drumbeat Aims to Expand Web Participation

Open source has dramatically reshaped the software development landscape. Yet is it enough to help propel the Web itself forward for the next decade? That’s what Mozilla believes. After having been synonymous with open source for over a decade, thanks to its efforts behind the popular Firefox Web browser, Mozilla is now creating a new effort to help shaping the Internet’s development using the same sorts of techniques that have made open source a success.

The goal of the new Mozilla Drumbeat effort is to go beyond open source code to encourage and nurture projects that help to expand understanding and participation in the open Web. While Drumbeat is today only in its early stages of development, Mozilla is budgeting more than $1 million in funding for the effort – a project that it thinks could help to direct the very future of the Internet.

More details available at itmanagement.earthweb.com

Release: Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 Has Been Released!

Mozilla has started spreading a new beta release of Firefox 3.6 to worldwide ftp mirror sites only a day after releasing updates for their Firefox 3.1 and 3.5 web browser series. The new version of the web browser is as usually available for all supported operating systems and languages. The release notes lead to a non existing page at the moment which makes it difficulty to find information on the changes that have been introduced in the new beta version.

The missing release notes are an indication that it will take anywhere from 24-48 hours before the new version of Firefox 3.6 will get officially announced by Mozilla. This will also be the time frame for the discovery of the new version by the automatic update check in the web browser. Continue Reading »

News: Mozilla exec said "Bing is not popular enough for Firefox"

Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s director of community development, explains why an add-on is required to add Bing as a search option from within Firefox.

If you download a fresh copy of Firefox, you’ll note that the default search engine is not whatever you already have picked in all your other browsers. Instead, Mozilla chooses Firefox’s default search engine, and the list of search providers in the accompanying drop down menu, based on their popularity. Thus, Bing isn’t one of the choices. Continue Reading »

News: Mozilla Community Managers Suggests Move to Bing from Google

Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s director of community development, has published a brief blog post in which he recommends that Firefox users move from using Google as their main search engine to Bing, citing privacy issues. Disregarding the existence of alternative search engines such as Ask and Yahoo, Dotzler asserts that Bing’s privacy policy is better than Google’s.

Dotzler explains the recommendation with a quote from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google: ‘If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time…’

More details available at slashdot.org

Release: Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0 RC Released!

Mozilla has completed Thunderbird 3.0 Release Candidate (RC) to the public, explained the developer, the browser is capable of running on three operating systems as well as the Windows, Mac and Linux.

“Thunderbird 3.0 is intended as a public release is intended to get feedback from the public during the test and the developer community,” wrote Mozilla in his statement, quoted by PC World, Saturday (28/11/2009). Continue Reading »

Release: Firefox 3.6 Beta 2 Is Now Avaible For Download!

Windows/Mac/Linux: Less than two weeks after they released the first beta, Mozilla is back with Firefox 3.6 beta 2. This release includes over 190 bug fixes from beta 1, in addition to the already existing performance boosts and support for one-click themes.

You can grab the latest straight from the Firefox beta page; if you’re already using 3.6 beta 1, those 190+ bug fixes seem like they’d be well worth the update.

Again, this is a beta release, so only upgrade if you’re an early adopter willing to deal with some potential bugs. That said, if you’ve been using 3.6 over the last week or so, let’s hear how you’ve liked it so far in the comments.

You can download it Here | Need the Portable Here

News: Birthday Firefox, Mozilla More Aggressive

Welcomed five years of age Firefox, Mozilla has a lot of planning is more aggressive and hope to compete with other browsers.

Firefox is not the only Mozilla project. In addition to Firefox, there are also projects an email client Thunderbird, Bugzilla bug tracking system, and combining ons Firefox and Thunderbird with the web development tool and chat features. Continue Reading »

Firefox: Expand shortened web addresses in Firefox with LongURL Mobile Expander Addon

Thanks to twitter and its 140 character limit, we now suddenly have to care about web addresses (URLs) length. Yeah, whatever. Except that you never really know where that shortened URL will take you and it could easily be just bait to increase someone’s page hits count.

Fear no more thanks to Long URL Mobile Expander, a Firefox extension created by Sean Murphy, that reveals the true destination of obfuscated URLs using the LongURL web service that covers more than 200 URL shortening services.

You can get Long URL Mobile expander from Mozilla Add-ons.

(source: mozillalinks.org)

News: Quick Firefox 3.5.5 update addresses stability bugs

Mozilla has relased a quick Firefox update to address several stability bugs that may lead to crashing in very specific cases like sites that use a GIF image as their favicon.

Users are encouraged to update as soon as possible by selecting Check for Updates… in the Help menu. Otherwise, you should be prompted for the update in the next few hours.

You can check the release notes for more details. (Source: mozillalinks.org)

News: Web Open Font Format Backed by Mozilla, Type Foundries

Type designers and Web designers have reached a consensus on a format specification for embedding fonts on the Web. Mozilla is already including support for the font format in Firefox 3.6, and wide adoption could come sooner than many expected.