mozilla

Featured Freeware: MozBackup

As great as it is to have tools such as Firefox and Thunderbird, backing user profiles and all their moving parts can be a tedious process. MozBackup is a tiny program that makes saving and restoring all your bookmarks, extensions, and other personal settings a streamlined and stress-free experience. It's dead simple to use because it walks you through both the backup and restore features. So, for example, even if you've backed up everything but you only want to restore your bookmarks, you can do that easily.

The program works with Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, and Netscape on Windows … Read more

Thunderbird's advanced search helps you find mail fast

Compared with Outlook and other commercial e-mail programs (are there any other commercial e-mail programs left?) Mozilla's free Thunderbird e-mail client has a lot going for it. Not the least of Thunderbird's time-saving features are its search capabilities.

If you don't see the search toolbar directly above the main Thunderbird window, click View > Toolbars > Search Bar. By default, you can view all your mail, all your unread mail, all mail with one of Thunderbird's five built-in labels attached (Important, Work, Personal, To Do, Later), mail from people in your address book, messages received recently, … Read more

Early Mozilla leader leaves Matrix Partners to rejoin the entrepreneurial ranks

Bob Lisbonne has long been one of my favorite venture capitalists and, indeed, people. He's a warm, intelligent person. I've passed more than one bad venture idea his way and had him very kindly tell me it was a pile of potty.

So it was with mixed feelings that I read his email today that he's leaving Matrix Partners to possibly rejoin the ranks of the entrepreneurs. Here's the guy who, while senior vice president and general manager of Browser Products at Netscape, helped to give us Firefox. Here's the guy who invested in promising open source-related companies like PostPath and LucidEra. And now he's leaving. Or coming back.

Or both:

Over the years, I've tried to make time for my own little software projects during nights and weekends, but, as you can imagine, that's whetted my appetite more than satiated it.… Read more

Quick fixes for browser glitches

As new Web applications debut, and older ones are enhanced, we spend more of our work time in a browser. Unfortunately, we also seem to be spending more time trying to figure out why our browsers aren't displaying the sites we visit correctly, or at all.

These days it's tough being a Web designer. Even if you create sites that comply with the latest HTML and other Web standards, you can't be sure that the pages will open or function as intended for all of the site's visitors. The fact is, Internet Explorer plays by its … Read more

Firefox 3 Beta 5 is out: Better than IE, but still work to do

Mozilla just released Firefox 3 Beta 5, the last beta release before Firefox 3 goes to "release candidate" status. It feels even faster than before, and includes over 750 fixes over Firefox 3 Beta 4. It's getting rave reviews. Progress, right?

As can be seen in the screenshot at right, however, Beta 5 introduced some problems, at least for me (Mac OS X 10.5.2). I like the back button. It's a great tool. Even so, I don't need three of them. I've been trying to find ways to flush this out of … Read more

Firefox 3 beta 5 released

Mozilla released its fifth beta version of Firefox 3 for Windows and the Mac on Wednesday, bringing a handful of improvements in ease of use to the open-source Web browser. A portable version is also available.

Overall, Firefox 3 beta 5 includes 750 changes from the previous beta, focusing on enhanced stability, Web site compatibility, and platform and user-interface improvements.

In the ease-of-use arena, Beta 5 is designed to offer improvements in integration with Windows, Mac, and Linux. The beta aims to show improvements to Windows icons, as well as native user interface widgets in Web forms and the browser. … Read more

Firefox reaches 18 percent of corporate desktops

Mozilla Firefox's share of the enterprise desktop market has reached 18 percent, according to a new Forrester report noted by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley.

This number will seem low to those who have seen higher numbers elsewhere (for example, as high as 30 percent in Europe). This simply reflects the bias of the report toward formal enterprise adoption, a route that Mozilla has explicitly not taken. Basically, Firefox is not an alternate universe into which you will be banished.

Forrester's report states:

Mozilla's share of the browser market rose steadily throughout 2007, only slowing for the quarter directly following the release of Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7) in late 2006. Adoption in the enterprise nearly doubled to 18 percent by the end of 2007, but large-scale, companywide deployments are not yet typical. Mozilla continues to expend little energy on wooing IT managers to formally adopt Firefox....

And yet it's getting them, all the same.

Why?… Read more

Mozilla celebrates 10th anniversary

Ten years ago Monday, Mozilla was launched and its source code was first made available to the public.

Out of Mozilla came such projects as Firefox, Thunderbird, and Bugzilla (close to the heart of many a CNET News.com editor, er, or maybe just a few).

Mozilla is summed up this way in a post by Mitchell Baker, "chief lizard wrangler":

At its inception, Mozilla was:

An open source codebase for the software we call the browser

A group of people to build and lead an open source development effort--the Mozilla Organization (also known as "… Read more

eWeek names its top 15 open-source business influencers

eWeek has put together a solid list of the top-15 open-source business influencers in the industry today. It's much the same that I would have devised had I come up with such a list. Names like Linus Torvalds (Linux), Mitchell Baker (Mozilla), Mike Milinkovich (Eclipse), and Larry Augustin (most startups known to humankind) make the list. Also John Roberts of SugarCRM, who was really the one who made commercial open source as big a topic as it is today, at least beyond Linux and middleware.

But the list is also notable for its inclusion of some people that might … Read more

Firefox 4 will push out the edges of the browser

This post has been corrected from the original: Mozilla has no plan to ship Firefox 4 this year; references to that effect have been removed.

After the product road map roundtable I live-blogged Wednesday, I had a talk with Chris Beard, VP of Labs for Mozilla. Beard is working on the things you won't see in Firefox 3, but will, if he has his way, surface in Firefox 4.

Beard's philosophy is this: The browser needs to evolve. Beard believes the browser concept hasn't fundamentally changed in 10 years. It's still an isolated piece of software, … Read more