Firefox fans looking for a major update to the open-source Web browser probably will get a final version of it next month.
"We're looking for final ship sometime in June," said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, in an interview Wednesday. Mozilla, which was spun out of AOL more than 10 years ago, oversees the Firefox programming project.
Mozilla leads development of the Firefox and Thunderbird projects.
(Credit: Mozilla)One of the Firefox's strengths is the broad collection of hundreds of add-ons, but that also means things move more slowly when programmers must update their projects to be compatible with Firefox 3. And that's part of what Mozilla is watching closely as it seeks feedback from the 1.5 million people who have installed the Firefox 3 release candidate 1, which Mozilla issued a few days ago.
"We're in a phase where we're letting add-ons get a chance to update," Schroepfer said. "We like to have RCs (release candidates) out for a while to gather feedback."
More release candidates are possible, he said. With Firefox 2, there were three. "We're in better shape this time, but there's no reason to rush this," he said.
The release candidate is available for download for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. If you want to try it out, it's best to read the release notes first, in particular the known issues that could trip you up.
After Mozilla's years-long slow start, Firefox has gained significant market share against its top rival, Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Although the latter still dominates the market, Firefox has helped to reignite the browser wars to an extent: Microsoft is investing more resources in IE development, Apple has brought its own Safari to Windows, and Apple and Google are among those devoting attention to the open-source Webkit browser engine project.
Browsers have also become more important as the Internet has begun moving to the more lavish and interactive pages of Web 2.0. For that reason, performance has become a concern: browsers now must execute large amounts of JavaScript code that power-hungry sites such as the office applications of Google Docs and the photo editing of Picnik use.
The Mozilla Foundation has grown significantly over the years. It's set up two subsidiaries, Mozilla Corp. to handle the browser, and the newer Mozilla Messaging group to handle the Thunderbird e-mail software.
Firefox extensions need to catch up before Firefox 3 is released.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Based on market share statistics and the number of Firefox browsers that check Mozilla servers for updates, Schroepfer estimates there are about 175 million Firefox users today.
Firefox crossed the 500 million download mark in February, and now has been downloaded more than 556 million times.
What are Schroepfer's three favorite things about Firefox 3?
• "No 1. is definitely the "awesome bar"--the Smart Location Bar. It changed the way I use the browser. With a couple keyboard presses, it figures out what page I want to go to." The Smart Location Bar starts suggesting Web addresses based on the user's browsing history and can sidestep problems with complicated, hard-to-remember URLs.
• Second is "the performance and memory work. It's 2 to 3 times faster than the previous version and nearly 10 times faster than IE 7," he boasted. "We really tuned the heck out of memory use, so it uses a lot less memory, especially with lots of windows and tabs."
• Third: "The antimalware and security features. We used to tell people not to go to the bad part of the Net. Now we're seeing legitimate sites being taken over," so it's good to have better protection by default.
The CNET review of Firefox 3 RC1 generally concurred with Schroepfer's assessment, though we found the memory improvements were "nothing to write home about," and some performance improvements might be related to the fact that incompatible add-ons weren't running.
Update 4:15 p.m. May 12: The file was actually infected with a remnant part of code from the Xorer Trojan, not with the full Trojan itself, according to a follow-up Mozilla blog post. The remnant "does not infect the user's machine with the virus (and) is a remnant from a virus that most likely infected the language pack developer's machine," Mozilla said. "To minimize the potential of something similar happening in the future, Mozilla is now scanning all add-ons whenever the signatures for the antivirus software are updated."
A Vietnamese language pack infected with parts of a Trojan for the Firefox Web browser was available for download from the open-source Web browser's official add-on site for months.
Mozilla, which oversees the project, announced the problem on its security blog on Wednesday, saying people should disable the add-on pack for now.
"Everyone who downloaded the most recent Vietnamese language pack since February 18, 2008, got an infected copy," Mozilla said. "While we cannot determine the exact number of compromised downloads, there have been 16,667 total downloads of the Vietnamese language pack since November 2007, so we anticipate the impact on users to be limited."
The author of the add-on pack, who acknowledged on Thursday that his machine had been infected, isn't suspected of any intentional harm, according to the discussion of the problem. The author offered a cleaned-up version Thursday that so far appears OK.
Mozilla scans its files for viruses, Trojans, and other problems. But the file had been uploaded nearly two months before the antivirus software could detect the Trojan in question, called Xorer.
(Via SecurityFocus.)
Sometime last night, Firefox downloads crossed the 500 million threshold.
Mozilla congratulated itself on attaining 500 million downloads of the Firefox Web browser.
(Credit: Mozilla)It's an arbitrary but interesting milestone for the open-source Web browser, whose development is overseen by Mozilla but that's also developed and extended by a large number of outside programmers. In September 2007, Firefox crossed the 400 million download mark, indicating an average rate a bit shy of 20 million per month at present.
According to the Spread Firefox site, there had been 500,168,448 downloads as of 6:15 a.m. PST. About 12 hours earlier, there had been more than 499,900,000.
Firefox has spread widely in the years since its release. The project originally was named Phoenix to symbolize a rising from the ashes of the Netscape open-source browser project that began in 1998 but languished for many years as Microsoft's Internet Explorer solidified its lead.
Now Firefox programmers are working on version 3, which brings performance improvements and interface changes, and Mozilla also is working on a mobile version of the browser for handheld devices.
A sister subsidiary of Mozilla, Mozilla Messaging, is working to reproduce the successes of Firefox with the open-source Thunderbird e-mail software.
A new Mozilla Foundation effort to improve its Thunderbird open-source e-mail software now has an official name--and its first public goals.
Thunderbird 3.0 is due to ship by the end of the year with a more comprehensive search feature and official integration of the Lightning calendar add-on, said David Ascher, chief executive of the newly named Mozilla Messaging subsidiary. The first alpha release will come sooner, though, for those who want to test the software.
"I'm expecting we'll have some public releases probably within three months," Ascher said.
Mozilla is best known for its success with the Firefox browser, which has dented Microsoft Internet Explorer's dominance and sparked programmers to build a rich selection of extensions. Now the group is trying to apply the formula to e-mail software. Even though many rely on Web-based services for the chore, e-mail software is still widely used, and Thunderbird could open another major beachhead for open-source software in mainstream computing.
Although Mozilla Messaging's priority is to produce good software, not specifically to dethrone Microsoft's dominant Outlook software, the new calendar ability makes Thunderbird a more viable competitor, particularly in corporate environments.
Adding a third Mozilla group can be confusing, so let me spell out the distinctions for those of you who haven't scrutinized every development in the last 10 years since Netscape and its acquirer, AOL, spun off the Mozilla project in 1998. The Mozilla Foundation, a not-for-profit group, is in charge overall; for-profit subsidiaries Mozilla Corp. and Mozilla Messaging run the Web browser and e-mail projects, respectively.
Mozilla Messaging also has named a three-person board of directors: Ascher; Chris Beard, general manager of Mozilla Labs; and Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL, the open-source database company Sun Microsystems has just agreed to acquire for about $1 billion. More are likely to be added later as the organization grows, Ascher said.
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Mozilla has released a third beta version of Firefox 3, bringing about 1,300 changes to the widely used open-source Web browser.
Firefox 3 Beta 3 should be more stable, perform faster, use memory more efficiently, and fit in better on various operating systems than its predecessors, Mozilla said.
Beta 3 of Firefox 3, shown here running on Windows XP, uses new interface elements made of vector graphics. It helps improve performance, Mozilla said.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)Having tried the new version out for a while this morning, my top impression hasn't changed since beta 2: the best thing about the new version is faster performance. Pages load faster.
Other improvements, according to the Firefox 3 release notes, include a better tool for seeing who owns a Web site; better protection against sites known to install viruses, spyware, or other malicious software; the plugging of 350 memory leaks that previously could waste more and more computer memory; the ability to locate downloaded files; a better tool to find and install plug-ins; and , now enabled by default.
The new Firefox beta can be downloaded from the Mozilla Web site, including versions for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux localized for several languages.
The new Firefox beta also adopts more of the native style of Mac OS X, Windows Vista, and Linux--the latter having been a point of some contention earlier given some technical difficulties. Also interesting from an interface standpoint and giving the beta a new look is the use of vector graphics for elements such as the back arrow and reload button.
I like Firefox 3's new location bar drop-down feature, in which Firefox presents various sites I've visited or bookmarked. For example, typing "can" retrieves a list that includes various Canon Web sites I've visited as well as Icanhascheezburger.com. (Alas, though, everyone's favorite LOLcats site seems to have a rendering problem with the new browser in the form of 10 "favorite" buttons.)
Beta 3 apparently improves the "frecency" formula that selects what to display in the drop-down list based on how frequently and recently you visited the sites. My only beef with the location bar drop-down so far is that it's a visually chaotic jumble of URLs, favicons, and titles in different fonts and colors.
Coincidentally, I was able to give the new Firefox 3 beta a short stress test, and it fared much better than its predecessor.
I found a misbehaving Flash ad Tuesday that made Firefox 2 chew up about 98 percent of my CPU power and thereby caused my system--especially Firefox--to slow to a crawl. Today, I found that same ad on another Web site while trying the Firefox 3 beta, and although it, too, maxed out my CPU, Firefox now was usable, though sluggish.
Firefox 3 sports a new add-on manager to find, add, disable, and uninstall plug-ins.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)There are some reasons I won't be moving full time to the new beta, though.
Unsurprisingly, given warnings in the release notes, several plug-ins I use still aren't compatible: Foxmarks, del.icio.us, Fotofox, and FireFTP. And Yahoo Mail only can be used in its older classic mode for me.
For the Yahoo Mail problem, there's some hope: Mozilla is waiting on Yahoo for a bug fix for the mail site, and the Firefox release notes now offer a less pessimistic warning that the newer Yahoo Mail interface "may not work for all users right away."
The release notes also warn that Windows Live Mail doesn't work; a plug-in must be installed to play Windows Media Player content on Windows; Firefox often will stop responding to keystrokes when using Google Documents on Mac OS X; and printing is broken on many versions of Linux.
Mozilla's new CEO, John Lilly
(Credit: Mozilla)Mozilla Corp., the for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, has promoted Chief Operating Officer John Lilly to chief executive, the organization behind the Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird e-mail software said Monday.
Former CEO Mitchell Baker will remain chairman, the organization said, where she'll focus on high-level issues such as standards, interoperability, and issues around people's data.
"John Lilly is the right person to guide the product and organizational maturity of MoCo. John has been doing more and more of this since he took on the COO role in August of 2006. John understands Mozilla, is astonishingly good at operations, and has an innate facility for our products and technologies and the directions in which they should develop," Baker said on her blog on Monday. "Once I allowed myself to think about this, I realized that John will be a better CEO for the MoCo going forward than I would be."
Before Lilly joined Mozilla in 2005, he had been founder and CEO of Reactivity, a software company Cisco Systems acquired in 2007. On his blog, Lilly said his priorities will include shipping Firefox 3.0, currently in its second beta version; helping out with the new Mozilla mail company launch; and improving communications about Mozilla's economic situation and its hybrid for-profit/not-for-profit state.
'Netstripe' graphic elements to give Firefox a Netscape skin
(Credit: AOL)The Netscape Web browser has long since been eclipsed by its Firefox offshoot, but it's still somewhat noteworthy that AOL is formally pulling the plug on its historic software.
"AOL's focus on transitioning to an ad-supported Web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be. Given AOL's current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically-acclaimed products, we feel it's the right time to end development of Netscape-branded browsers, hand the reigns fully to Mozilla, and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox," said Netscape's Tom Drapeau in a blog posting Friday.
Support for the Netscape Navigator browser will continue through February 1, 2008, he said, but AOL is recommending people move to Firefox. The Netscape.com portal will still be available, though, and nostalgia buffs can reskin Firefox with a Netscape look.
Netscape has a long history by Internet standards. The browser's precursor was a separate project, Mosaic, written by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at the National Center of Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, but Andreessen left to found the Netscape start-up with Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark.
Netscape was key to making the World Wide Web useful and the company's initial public offering is considered the beginning of the dot-com boom. The software also struck fear into the heart of Microsoft, raising the prospect of a computing environment that could rival Windows.
But Microsoft fought back with Internet Explorer, winning away Netscape's dominant market share. Netscape fought back in 1998 with a plan to make its browser open-source software, but that didn't immediately improve the company's prospects, and Netscape ended up an AOL subsidiary even as the Internet service provider continued to ship Microsoft's browser. Sun Microsystems, in a complicated transaction, bought rights to the Netscape server software.
AOL never devoted much effort to Netscape, though the Netscape.com Internet portal still is up and running. But the Mozilla Foundation AOL spun off had more success. The Firefox browser that grew from it now has significant adoption, though still trailing Internet Explorer by a wide margin.
AOL wasn't successful in trying to resurrect the Netscape browser using a Firefox foundation, Drapeau said.
"While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions."
So yes, it's a sad chapter for Netscape Navigator, but at least it lives on as Firefox to give IE a run for its money.
Mozilla's bug-munching mascot
(Credit: Mozilla)Mozilla on Friday released the third update to Firefox this month, version 2.0.0.11, to fix a stability problem in the previous version.
"We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release," a post on the Firefox developer blog said.
The open-source Web browser update arrived swiftly after version 2.0.0.8, released October 18, version 2.0.0.9 from November 1, and version 2.0.0.10 from November 26. Which explains why I'm getting a lot of software update messages from my Web browser.
Version 2.0.0.10 broke a feature that lets images be displayed with special effects such as rotated pictures and image reflections, according to Mozilla's bug-tracking site. The problem was fixed within a day and distributed within five, but not before some whose sites were affected by the bug had voiced frustration.
"Customers are complaining because their Firefox automatically updated to 2.0.0.10 and now they can no longer order photo prints in our shop. I think this is a very serious problem and I hope it will be fixed immediately in a 2.0.0.11 update," a post by Klaus Reimer said.
In an indirect response, Firefox coder Nick Thomas pointed to mailing lists that people can use to test their sites with imminent new Firefox versions. Thomas also said that the five-day turnaround is "the fastest turnaround between Firefox releases to date."
As long as the Mozilla coders are stamping out bugs, one that's annoyed me has become more prominent of late because it shows up when I install a Firefox update.
When I restore my Firefox browser sessions upon rebooting my computer, it's impossible to get rid of the "You've been updated to the latest version of Firefox" page. Even if I close that tab, it comes back later, so I have to start with a clean browsing slate to make it go away. It's not a stability or security problem, but it's not a credit to what is a notably influential project.
Mozilla released the first beta version of Firefox 3, called Gran Paradiso, less than two weeks ago. The second Firefox 3 beta should be done in "late December" if all goes well, according to another Mozilla developer blog post Friday.
Mozilla released Firefox 3 beta 1 on Monday.
(Credit: Mozilla)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. You can also download the English versions for Windows or Mac from CNET Download.com.
Although Microsoft's Internet Explorer remains the dominant Web browser, the open-source rival has achieved a critical mass of users--Firefox has been downloaded more than 400 million times--and it's now common for designers to make sure their Web pages work with the browser. Even Microsoft has bowed to the reality, testing its Live.com Web sites with Firefox and helping with technical issues such as playing Windows Media files from Web pages.
According to the release notes, the core Gecko rendering engine--the component that interprets Web page instructions and draws text and graphics on your screen--has seen major changes in the upgrade to the new version 1.9 used in Firefox 3.
"Gecko 1.9 includes some major re-architecting for performance, stability, correctness, and code simplification and sustainability," the notes said. Those changes "put foundations in place for major performance tuning which have resulted in speed increases in beta 1, and will show further gains in future beta releases."
The Firefox 3 beta had been due to arrive in July, and there's no word yet on when the software will come out of beta. "The final version of Firefox 3 will be released when we qualify the product as fully ready for our users," the release notes said--a polite way of saying it'll be ready when it's ready.
The location bar automatically presents Web pages with the text you type.
(Credit: Mozilla)
A quick test
A quick test of the new browser revealed that various important sites including eBay, Gmail, Amazon.com, and Icanhascheezburger appeared to work fine.
However, I got error messages at two, both with snazzier Web 2.0 user interfaces. Yahoo Mail threw errors and choked, and Adobe Systems' Buzzword online word processor told me the browser wasn't supported. On the other hand, others rich sites were happy, including Picnik and Flickr's Organizr.
Even in just a few minutes of use, I found the location bar's automatic search handy. It popped up lists of previously visited URLs and page titles that contained the words I typed into the location bar, trimming a couple steps out of a few searches.
Yahoo Mail wouldn't work for me with Firefox 3 beta 1.
(Credit: Mozilla)One of Firefox's chief merits is the large collection of extensions that can be downloaded to bring new abilities to the browser. Alas, all four of the ones I use--Fotofox, FireFTP, Delicious Bookmarks, and Foxmarks--don't yet work with the new beta. That's no surprise--the release notes warn such breakage is likely.
Another feature I've been eagerly awaiting is the support for color profiles, which lets people see photos correctly even when they're encoded with color systems besides the long-in-the-tooth sRGB standard. It's not enabled by default, but I switched it on and was delighted to see the test images in a CNET News.com story displayed correctly.
New features
Besides Gecko 1.9, there are a number of areas of change for Firefox 3. Among them:
• Security. New features include the ability to integrate antivirus software with downloads; one-click Web site identity verification; automatic testing to make sure plug-ins aren't older versions found to be insecure and automatic disabling if they are; and support for Windows Vista parental controls.
The location bar indicates bookmarked Web pages with a star.
(Credit: Mozilla)• Ease of use. Touted improvements include downloading that can be resumed after the browser has been restarted or network connection reset; users can zoom in and out of Web pages in their entirety, including layout, text, and graphics; plug-ins can be managed centrally with the Add-On Manager; and mailto links can now launch Web-based e-mail applications such as Gmail, not just local applications on the PC such as Outlook.
• Personalization. Web pages can be bookmarked with one click and tagged with a double-click (though the interface looked rough to me); the aforementioned feature provides a list of possible matching Web pages based on what you type in the location bar; and a new Smart Places folder provides access to pages that are frequently visited or that have been recently bookmarked and tagged.
I'm a week late with this, but in case others also didn't notice, Christopher Blizzard, who has been a prominent programmer for Red Hat for nine years, has left to take a new job with Mozilla. He announced the move on his blog.
Mozilla backs the development of both the Firefox Web browser and the Thunderbird e-mail client.
(Credit: Mozilla)"Starting in mid-November I will be joining the evangelism team at Mozilla Corp....to help tell the story of the Open Web. My role will be to work with other open-source projects that are well aligned with Mozilla's mission and help them take part in writing that story," he said on his blog.
The Mozilla Foundation, fueled by revenue from a Google deal, is in a growth spurt right now. Its Mozilla Corp. subsidiary develops the Firefox Web browser, which has won significant market share from Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer. The Mozilla Foundation also funds development of the new Prism software for turning Web software into desktop software, , the Sunbird calendar software, and the Lightning plug-in for endowing Thunderbird with calendar abilities, and various other open-source projects.
Blizzard has been active in projects including Fedora, Red Hat's free and fast-moving Linux product, and the One Laptop Per Child effort.
