firefox

A few months later than had been planned, Mozilla released on Monday night the first beta version of an overhauled Firefox, the widely used open-source Web browser.

Firefox 3 beta 1 includes a number of significant features that Mozilla said should improve security, ease of use, rendering of Web pages, and location of previously visited Web pages. And for the new era of rich Internet applications, the browser can run Web-based applications even when the computer is disconnected from a network.

The software is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux at Mozilla's download site in 20 languages. … Read more

Writing up a list of items for which I'm thankful is such a cliche at this time of year...that I can't pass up the opportunity to add my own contribution to the Thanksgiving fray. I have very little need for 3D turkey screensavers, but luckily, there are a few more valuable applications listed on CNET Download.com upon which I can bestow appropriate tribute.

In honor of Thanksgiving week, I've decided to serve up a heaping helpful of my nine "most useful" Windows utilities on the Download.com site. Now, notice that I didn'… Read more

Whenever I'm writing something here and my subconscious whispers, "You're probably wrong," I should learn to stop and ask. Alas, I'm a blogger with a day job, so I usually hit "Publish" and wait for someone on the other side of the issue to set me straight.

Such is the case today with Mozilla's Firefox 3.0 release, which I (and a wide range of others) reported would be shipping with 80% of its (remaining) blocker bugs/issues still unresolved. The truth is not so simple, as it turns out.

Mike Shaver of Mozilla clarifies "blocker bugs" and puts things in perspective:

At some point, of course, the number of "bugs we'll ship with" will hit 100%, unless we manage to produce the first piece of bug free software I?ve ever worked with, but even with such numerical truisms aside, the picture here isn?t as simple as it seems.… Read more

The Mozilla folks always think of Mac users. I've already extolled the virtues of Mozilla Firefox in the past and I still think it's a great browser even when up against Apple's Safari. Mozilla's other Mac browser, Camino, is like a slimmed-down model built from the ground up using native Mac OS X technologies and toolkits. But I'm not here to talk about browsers. The Mozilla folks have another great product for Mac that just got an update.… Read more

Whatever happened to open-source projects being released according to development readiness, rather than an arbitrary release schedule?

Mozilla seems to have forgotten this, with The New York Times reporting that the upcoming Firefox 3.0 set to ship with only 20 percent of its remaining 700 "blocker" (serious enough to justify postponing a release) bugs resolved before it ships.

Of course, Mozilla has already fixed over 11,000 bugs, according to Mozilla developer Asa Dotzler. Even so, that doesn't answer the apparent fact that the Firefox development community is planning to ship a product before a wide range of known blocker bugs are resolved. (Firefox 3 meeting notes can be perused here.)

For now, the mountain to climb appears quite high, as The New York Times notes:

As Mozilla pushes to post Beta 1 of Firefox 3.0, it has asked developers to prioritize already-identified bugs so that the most important can be fixed. But according to notes of yesterday's Firefox 3.0 status meeting, that will leave about eight in 10 bugs untouched.… Read more

In this interview, Mozilla's technology strategist Mike Shaver responds to and rejects recent claims that Firefox and Google are getting a bit too close for comfort. Mozilla is independent, he says, with or without Google's $56 million.

I received a fair bit of criticism for a blog post that I wrote last week describing what I believe is the extremely close relationship between Google and Mozilla. Mozilla's PR people complained, Firefox developers left critical comments in the blog post itself, and I received a number of e-mails from upset individuals. All had concerns with the claims and … Read more

As much as I love using Gmail, the Greasemonkey script-based Better Gmail plug-in made my favorite e-mail client, well, better. Integration with Google Reader, colored labels, built-in TinyURLing, and other features really made Gmail that much more useful. Since Google's recreated and upgraded most of Gmail's back-end, those scripts and most other Gmail plug-ins have broken.

To confuse matters, Google is slow in rolling out the new features, so not everybody is using the new interface. If you do have the new Gmail, you can access the old interface Better Gmail 2 v0.1 recreates some of the features in its predecessor, and promises to eventually feature most if not all of the old expanded functionality. For now, though, it's slim pickings.

… Read more