Desktop software

Mozilla hopes to release the final version of Firefox 3.6 later this month and a stability-improving update code-named Lorentz by March as part of a revised updating strategy.

Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, said Tuesday that he's pleased so far with his scrutiny of test data from the more than 1 million people using the first release candidate of Firefox 3.6, which came out late last week.

"So far we haven't found showstoppers," he said. If no more major issues are uncovered, "we're looking at releasing somewhere in the last … Read more

IT spending worldwide will reboot in 2010, rising 8.1 percent after last year's 8.9 percent freefall, Forrester Research predicts in a report released Tuesday.

Businesses and governments are expected to spend $1.6 trillion on information technology throughout 2010, Forrester predicts. In the U.S. alone, IT spending is likely to grow 6.6 percent this year to $568 billion after last year's drop of 8.2 percent.

The largest gains are expected to be in computer hardware and software. Purchases of computer equipment globally will increase by 8.2 percent, while communications hardware will see … Read more

Mozilla has released its first release candidate, RC1, for Firefox 3.6 for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The new version includes Personas, which lets people customize the browser's appearance; blocks third-party software from encroaching on its file system turf to increase stability; and perhaps most significantly given the competitive threat from Google Chrome, shortens start-up time and improves responsiveness and JavaScript performance.

Firefox 3.6 RC1 is also available from Mozilla's download site.

People can notice skins and better performance, but there also are changes deeper under the hood that developers should know about. One is support for the File interface, … Read more

Extension support is active again and bookmark synchronization has arrived in the Google Chrome developer's build for Mac OS X. Default extension support was disabled in Chrome for Mac in December, followed by promises that it would be re-enabled within a month.

Bookmark sync does not yet work flawlessly: a known bug related to the sync process will crash the browser when you add a new bookmark folder.

The latest developer's build, version 4.0.288.1, is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Windows users will only see two bug fixes: one prevented HTML5 audio and video … Read more

In a new sign of Microsoft's ambitions to make Internet Explorer more competitive with rival browsers, the company said Tuesday it's joining a group overseeing a graphics format that offers some advantages for today's Web.

Specifically, Microsoft signed up for the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Working Group, part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, Opera Software's Opera, and Google's Chrome all support the SVG format along with a different variety of graphics called Canvas 2D.

"We recognize that vector graphics are an important component of the next-generation … Read more

Mozilla released Firefox 3.5.7 and 3.0.17 on Tuesday to fix a common crash problem and the lack of a prominent suggestion to upgrade.

Firefox is supposed to prominently tell people when a major upgrade is available, but Mozilla was puzzled by recent data suggesting that fewer-than-expected people actually installed the new version, according to a bug report.

"What's happening is that users who do not leave their browser open for 12 hours...will never see the major update dialog, only a little notification slider," Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, said in … Read more

Opera Software has promoted Chief Commercial Officer Lars Boilesen to chief executive, the Norwegian maker of the Opera desktop and mobile browsers said Tuesday.

Boilesen, 42, replaces co-founder Jon S. von Tetzchner, who still will work for the company in a full-time strategy role. The company signaled that although management is changing, Opera's overall direction won't.

"Our focus going forward is to execute on our current strategy and continue to deliver the best browser experience to the breadth of our customer and user base," Boilesen said in a statement. "We provide browser technology not only … Read more

Mozilla is building a number of features into the upcoming Firefox 3.7 browser--but the organization now has begun stewing over whether to introduce some of them in a significant update, as planned, or to rewrite some sooner for a variation of the current browser.

Programmer Benjamin Smedberg proposed the retrofit approach with a version called Lorentz on a Mozilla mailing list in late December. In the resulting discussion, developers and observers weighed the tactical advantages to each approach and wondered whether the quickening pace of Firefox development is ill-suited to browser users among businesses.

Firefox is based on a … Read more

In its 15th month of public existence, Google's Chrome browser surpassed Safari for share of worldwide usage in December.

Chrome jumped from 3.9 percent to 4.6 percent of usage, according to statistics that analytics firm Net Applications publishes based on the 160 million monthly visitors to the network of Web sites using its services. Safari increased from 4.4 percent to 4.5 percent.

Chrome's jump came as Google released the first beta version of its browser for Mac OS X and Linux computers. Previously only a developer-preview version was available.

As of last month, Google … Read more