firefox

The Internet Engineering Task Force has standardized the Opus audio compression technology as RFC 6716.

The move paves the way for much broader use of Opus for anything from playing music to online voice chats. Opus is what's called a codec because it defines how to encode and decode a stream of data for more efficient storage or transmission.

"Opus is the first state-of-the-art, free audio codec to be standardized. We think this will help us achieve wider adoption than prior royalty-free codecs," Jean-Marc Valin, a Mozilla employee and author of Opus, said in a blog post today. … Read more

If you're not a fan of relying on browser add-ons and plug-ins, you'll probably want to enable a feature that can help you ditch at least one of them. Firefox now has a built-in PDF reader, and while it doesn't offer all of the same features that Adobe's version does, it's more than sufficient for most uses.

Before you get started enabling the PDF viewer, make sure you have the latest version of Firefox and you've disabled the Adobe PDF viewer.

To check the version: click the menu at the top left-hand corner and … Read more

Browser maker Mozilla has patched a bug in the latest major version of Firefox that could have exposed the websites of those using the "Private Browsing" mode.

"Private Browsing," a feature implemented in most modern browsers, allows users to browse the Web without leaving any trace of the websites visited on the user's computer.

But shortly after the latest Firefox release was dished out to end-users, a bug report was filed to claim that any site visited while in the privacy-conscious mode "could be found through manual browser cache inspection," according to Mozilla's bug-reporting site Bugzilla.… Read more

New images have hit the Internet and purport to show what could be the design for Mozilla's upcoming Firefox OS Marketplace.

Engadget published photos yesterday of what it claims is the app store for Firefox's mobile operating system. The images show a small listing of apps, including Solitaire and Word Wars. Several app categories are listed, including business, games, and books and reference.

According to Engadget, once users click on an application to get details, they'll find a rating and the option to submit a review to the community.

Mozilla gave Firefox OS its name back in July. … Read more

Please note that the First Look video below is still applicable to Firefox 15, as is this Firefox How To collection, even though it features Firefox 4. A new video will be posted soon.

Review: Mozilla Firefox has undergone an enormous rebirth over the past two years. Since Firefox 4 debuted in March 2011, the browser has been hell-bent on improvements. These have come in large part on the rapid-release cycle, which sees a new version of Firefox every six weeks. Many people like them, but a vocal minority has pooh-poohed the increase in version numbers. That's hardly a … Read more

If you frequently access Web content in a language other than your mother tongue, you know how important it is to have a good translator handy. Firefox users should try ImTranslator for Firefox, a browser extension that makes it easy to access translations between numerous different languages. With a comprehensive set of translation tools, ImTranslator for Firefox is a great choice for both new-language learns and experienced polyglots who need a hand now and then.

Like most Firefox extensions, ImTranslator required a browser restart to complete installation. Once the extension was installed, we were able to access it both from … Read more

As with many tech code-names, MemShrink doesn't sound particularly exciting. And yet, the memory leak-managing project at Mozilla finally sees some of its biggest changes reach the vast majority of people using Firefox with today's major update.

Mozilla expects that the new Firefox 15 for PCs (download for Windows | Mac | Linux) finally will put an end to the multitude of memory-managing issues that have plagued Firefox for years. As we noted in July when Firefox 15 went beta, the MemShrink project has spent much of its time fixing how the browser handles add-ons that contribute to memory problems. … Read more

Remember when you could read a Facebook message and ignore it, without thinking twice about replying? Then Facebook rolled out read receipts for Facebook Messages, thus forcing your hand to reply. Luckily, there's now a browser extension to disable the "Seen" notification on messages you've read, as reported by The Next Web.

The browser extension is called Chat Undetected, and was developed by Crossrider. It's compatible with Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. I was unable to install the extension in Safari, even though The Next Web report lists it as a compatible browser.

To install … Read more

Although speed is a major factor in browser choice, many people don't want to know why their favorite browser is fast -- they just care that it is. But the standards and tests used to determine how we measure a browser's speed can be varied, so Google has set out to further define the playing field.

This doesn't appear to be a case of the tech giant stomping all over open standards, though. Octane v1 is a revamp of Google's V8 benchmark and adds five tests to the eight current ones, the company said today in … Read more