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.
- Helicon Focus software -- Combines multiple photos at different focus points into a single image with everything in focus. Somehow. More computational photography.
- A detailed review of Nikon D3 -- Very long review of the Nikon D3, favorable overall. Details include praise for GPS compatibility (UTC timestamps!), demerits for live view during macro shooting, and grumblings about long night exposures and weak infrared and ultraviolet performance.
- Creativepro.com -- Review: Canon PowerShot G9 -- A favorable review, but it says: "What I find frustrating is that there could be a G9-like camera with lower noise, if it didn't include such a high pixel count." Camera makers, are you listening? Last year, we wanted raw; now we want better high-ISO performance.
- Rumor: Nikon D60 to Replace D40x | Photography Bay -- Certainly the D40 and D40x are due for a replacement. (An earlier Canon digital SLR also was called the D60.)
- Thomas Hawk: Photophlow Rocks -- Some kind of communal photo search and discussion site to give a group interaction to Flickr. Intriguing.
- Zooomr moving to Japan, mobile version in the works -- Zooomr is trying to differentiate from Flickr, but Zipline wasn't enough, so a mobile version is under way so the company can get funding from Japanese investors; Zoho won't house the servers in 2008. Hard times for a photo-sharing start-up.
- Mozilla Labs: Weave project for sharing browser settings -- This looks potentially useful as an alternative to Firefox. Some folks have privacy concerns, but I don't think I'd put any passwords up there--just bookmarks and maybe browsing history.
- Inkscape's first two weeks with Launchpad | Infinite Knots -- Bug-hunting is easier now than at Sourceforge. "The change would have been easier if Launchpad was open source, but I feel confident that Canonical's commitment to opening it is genuine," according to Infinite Knots.
- Some open-source hardware, the Neuros OSD -- The New York Times -- A video recorder/translator designed to be extended. Maybe appealing to the serious hardware hackers, but you can't cut and paste with a soldering iron.
- Intel vs. OLPC blow-by-blow -- The New York Times -- Some juicy particulars of how Intel's alliance with One Laptop Per Child--never genial to begin with--fell apart.
- Intel PDF on SSE4 instruction set -- Some detail on what the SSE4 instructions do. SSE4 starts showing up in Penryn processors.
- Bad Astronomy blog -- My New Year's Resolution -- OK, I laughed. Nerd humor.
- What's In and Out for 2008 -- Washingtonpost.com -- I'm mostly out of the loop, but I was ahead of the times with Pastafarianism. I vote for Kakuro over Scrabulous, though, as a Sudoku successor.
- Lightroom color management PDF -- Some detailed articles on color management for Lightroom and Photoshop.
- D-SLR Systems catalog | PCPhoto magazine -- A snapshot of the camera and lens line-ups from all the SLR companies.
- Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips -- Another Before/After Shortcut -- I didn't know about the backslash key shortcut. Sounds pretty useful.
- People paparazzi -- Guardian Unlimited -- A look at the paparazzi business. Fixation on celebrities is so depressing.
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.
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.
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.
Mozilla, the group behind the open-source Firefox Web browser, disclosed its 2006 revenue Monday night: $66,840,850.
That's a 26 percent bump up from the $52.9 million that Mozilla garnered in 2005. And with 2006 expenses slicing off only $19.8 million, Mozilla has a tidy sum left at its disposal, even if it's no Microsoft.
Mozilla backs the development of both the Firefox Web browser and the Thunderbird e-mail client.
(Credit: Mozilla)"The highlight is that Mozilla remains financially healthy: we're able to hire more people, build more products, help other projects, and bring more possibilities for participation in the Internet to millions of people," foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker said in a blog posting. The foundation released the results in conjunction with its 2006 tax form.
As in 2005, about 85 percent of the revenue came from Google, according to a related frequently asked questions page. Google is the default option in the Firefox search bar, and a Firefox-branded Google page is the default home page for Firefox.
However, the Google contract expires in November 2008, Mozilla said, at which point the foundation could extend the deal or look for other partners. "We have significant retained earnings, which allows us a good degree of flexibility," the foundation said on the FAQ.
The foundation funded the work of about 90 people by the end of 2006. "In 2007 we expect our expenses to be significantly higher as we have continued to hire and fund more people and develop additional programs," she said.
The revenue was for both the Mozilla Foundation and its sort-of for-profit subsidiary, Mozilla Corp. (Yes, it's confusing, and it's not going away: the Mozilla Foundation just set up another subsidiary to focus on its Thunderbird e-mail software.)
