mozilla

Buzz Out Loud 797: The superbug of piracy

Today's BOL Theory of the Day: the RIAA's constant crackdown on sites and services that ought to be fair use is creating cockroach-like, drug-resistant strains...like Opentape. Also, we reveal the Internet's biggest security hole, an iPhone ad is banned, and an iPhone app is banned (Apple only did the second one). Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 797

Google tests custom highlights, comments in search http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/08/27/1531241.shtml

Revealed: The Internet’s biggest security hole http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/revealed-the-in.html

Computer viruses make it … Read more

Mozilla Ubiquity, Microsoft IE8, and the fracturing of Web pages

Mozilla on Tuesday released a public prototype of Ubiquity, a curious command-based interface to locating information on the Web and creating compilations of information from various sources. See: Mozilla offers do-it-yourself mashups for all.

At the moment, it's most capable as a command-line browser. You press the hot key, ctrl-space, and you can just start typing lookup commands, like "imdb Blade Runner." Or, if text is already selected in the browser, your command will act on them. Mouse over a restaurant page in Yahoo Mail, press the hotkey, and type "yelp" for a review, for … Read more

Mozilla offers do-it-yourself mashups for all

Mozilla released an experimental browser plug-in Tuesday that aims to connect the Web with language to help users perform common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

Ubiquity, created by Aza Raskin--son of Apple Mac pioneer Jef Raskin--is a command-line interface that enables users to use plain language to manipulate Web tasks, such as mapping, translation, shopping, or retrieving entries from Wikipedia, Yelp, or Twitter.

The free Firefox plug-in enables the creation of "user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs," according to a post on Mozilla's site Tuesday. "In other words, allowing everyone--not just Web developers--to … Read more

IE 8 to include private browsing feature

As CNET News first reported last week, Internet Explorer 8 will include a way to surf somewhat anonymously, allowing the user to suspend browsing history, cookies, and other identifying information. Mozilla had considered such a feature for its Firefox 3 release, but dropped it for technical reasons. Apple Safari also includes a similar feature.

Known as InPrivate, Microsoft is touting the feature as one of several security enhancements within its next major browser release. The scenarios for using InPrivate include when you're using someone else's computer, when you need to buy a gift for a loved one without … Read more

After speed boost, Firefox a developer default?

Firefox is already plenty fast. In one test, it comes in just behind Safari in speed, but in this case, "slightly slower" still means "blazingly fast."

Thanks to Mozilla's pioneering work with TraceMonkey, however, Firefox is about to become even faster. Think massive performance boost.

CNET's Stephen Shankland has already covered the story in detail, so I won't belabor it here, but this promises to be an impressive breakthrough for browser performance--and especially for Firefox. As Mike Shaver, Mozilla's interim vice president of engineering and former chief evangelist, declares:

The goal of … Read more

Mozilla, MontaVista, ARM, and others collaborate on a new/old device

I was surprised to see that a collection of seven companies - including Mozilla Corp., ARM, and MontaVista - are collaborating on a web-enabled mini-PC. Why surprised?

Because companies have been throwing money at similar ideas for the past decade, and always without success.

When I was at Mitsui Comtek in 1997, we built a similar device. A few years later at Lineo, we worked on something similar (though this time purely from the software angle).

Now MontaVista, a company with which I competed back in my Lineo days, is at it again, but this time hopes that greater openness can be the differentiator:… Read more

Firefox to surpass IE? Yes, but only among the geeks

Webmonkey flatters to deceive with numbers that suggest that Mozilla's Firefox could exceed Internet Explorer's market share by the middle of 2009.

Unfortunately, the data is gathered from a sampling of techies, not mainstream users. As such, it's not time to uncork the champagne and dance on Microsoft's corporate grave just yet.

While the data doesn't point to Firefox's imminent world domination, it does beg an equally intriguing question: why are so many of the technical elite still using Internet Explorer at all?

Not that I consider myself among the "technical elite," … Read more

Firefox out to prove that open source can innovate

When you think of browser innovation, admit it: You don't think of Internet Explorer. Netscape originally took the wheel of browser innovation, and its descendant, Mozilla's Firefox, is at the innovation wheel again, this time with two very different (and exciting) products:

Snowl, a unified messaging/browsing experience, and the second is Aurora, the next-generation Firefox browser that we, the people, will define and build at Mozilla's request.

Indeed, it's this latter innovation - true community feedback on what can and should be in the browser, and then the development process to deliver it - that … Read more

Mozilla experiments with a universal content reader, Snowl

Mozilla has released a 0.1 version of Snowl (official blog post), an experimental add-in for Firefox that reads news and nanoblog feeds. It's an attempt to marry together the incoming separate content streams that many of us have feeding on to our desktops full time: News and blog stories via RSS, and social and personal communications from services like Twitter.

Of course, under the skin they're all just RSS feeds. The key to mashing these feeds together is treating them somewhat differently depending on where they came from, and adding in capabilities to let you take action … Read more