mozilla

Adapting Firefox for tablets is on Mozilla's mobile-browser priority list, and now the first version has appeared in "nightly" builds for developers to try out.

"It has now reached a functional state that is good enough for getting some early feedback," said developer Lucas Rocha on a blog post today. "Keep in mind that this is very early stage work. There are lots of rough edges and design is continuously evolving."

The design keeps elements of the smaller-screen smartphone version--tab switching that can pull out from the left side and other options that … Read more

Google thinks it's time to look beyond JavaScript, the programming language that gives Web applications their brains. The company's project to do so behind closed doors with a new language called Dart, though, has spurred something of a backlash.

The company piqued Web programmers' interest last weekend with the news that it would offer details about Dart, which it calls "a new programming language for structured Web programming," at a conference in October. But immediately after, a leaked 2010 memo about Dart--at the time called Dash--raised hackles by spotlighting how Google often develops Web technologies … Read more

Firefox browser distributor Mozilla today gave companies that sell digital certificates a week to take actions to improve their security after a certificate authority (CA) was hacked and Gmail users in Iran were targeted in a recent attack.

When a Web surfer visits a site over a protected SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) connection, the browser provides a visual indication that the site is trusted--a green URL bar or padlock, usually--based on the digital certificate for the site. If the digital certificate, which is used to authenticate a site as legitimate, is revoked or has some other problem, the browser will … Read more

Web spies are getting stealthier and stealthier. Recently they've been caught peering into our browser histories to determine the sites we've visited, even in so-called privacy mode with cookies disabled, as Dan Goodin described earlier this month on The Register.

Many of the companies whose sites were discovered using the technique claimed to have had no idea and immediately decried the spying. Julia Angwin reported on many of these surprise responses on the Wall Street Journal's Technology site.

If the owners of the spying sites aren't even aware of the activity, what are unsuspecting visitors to … Read more

While the desktop version of Firefox seems to have settled into an interface design, going largely unchanged since version 4 debuted in March, Firefox for Android (download) apparently has some alterations coming its way as part of a heightened focus on mobile development. A blog post by Ian Barlow, a visual designer for Firefox Mobile's User Experience team, revealed three coming changes for Firefox on tablets. The upshot of these changes is that the browser will feel like more of a native fit for Honeycomb.

The first will revise how tabs are implemented in the browser. Currently, tabs appear … Read more

As social networking has gone mainstream, so have the flock of buttons embedded in Web pages to get you to promote a story on the multitude of social-networking services you use. One Web developer has written a quick-and-dirty add-on that hides two of those gnat-like buttons from view. Dietrich Ayala, a developer for Mozilla based in Portland, Ore., wrote a new add-on called Wallflower to cut down on the memory use of buttons that he found superfluous.

Wallflower is a restartless add-on for Firefox, which means you won't have to restart your browser after installing it, and it performs … Read more

A reader named Eddy contacted me the other day to ask how to block mail from specific people in Mozilla Thunderbird. Eddy also wants to be notified when mail comes from certain addresses.

While I am familiar with how to create rules in Microsoft Outlook to block senders and receive notifications when mail arrives from a particular person or address, I had never tried to do the same in Thunderbird. It turns out Thunderbird's filters make it easy to automatically block mail from a person or address, but there's no equivalent in Thunderbird to Outlook's ability to … Read more

While Firefox might be your chosen browser for its speed, useful add-ons, and open-source culture, it's also packed with many useful built-in features.

We dug through Firefox's endless list of features to find you the best, little-known secrets you can start using right now.

1. Customize search with Smart Keywords A little-known Firefox feature lets you run searches within any given Web site from the browser's address bar. For example, to search for "TouchPad" within Amazon.com, all you'd have to do is type "amazon touchpad" in the Firefox bar.

To create … Read more

Mozilla upgraded its developer's edition of Firefox today to version 8, including changing how forced third-party add-ons are handled and debuting a series of under-the-hood tweaks that continue a renewed assault on performance gains made in Firefox 7 Beta. Firefox 8 Aurora can be downloaded for Windows, Mac and Linux, and it marks the first release of Aurora for Android.

Two add-on changes were revealed last week that represent, for the first time in possibly years, that Mozilla has forced changes on how third-party programs and Firefox interact. Basically, Mozilla is disabling the ability of a third-party program, like … Read more