mozilla

Security patch closes holes in Thunderbird

Following the early February Firefox update comes a Mozilla Foundation security patch for its popular Thunderbird e-mail client. Download it for Windows and Mac.

The fix addresses one critical flaw that could've potentially allowed an attacker to run arbitrary code, and closed up three other holes that only posed moderate risks, according to Mozilla. One of those included addressing persistent albeit minor crashes caused by memory corruption. More substantial fixes are expected when Mozilla releases Thunderbird 3.0, due later this year.

Growing open source in the land of pirates

Despite its myriad of other benefits, one of the primary reasons open source has spread so far so fast has been its price tag. $0.00.

As Mozilla is finding out in China, however, "free" as in price has less relevance to a market accustomed to software piracy. Firefox is looking to more than double its market share from 2 percent of the Chinese market to 5 percent in 2008. Its price ($0) is not helping it.

What is Mozilla to do?… Read more

Mozilla may hold the clues to the future of commercial open source

Much is rightly made about the quality of open-source software like JBoss and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. These, however, are arguably not the source of the quality of the businesses behind them. Their networks were/are.

JBoss was doing well before it created the JBoss Operational Network using Hyperic's software as a foundation. But it was the Network that dramatically boosted JBoss' renewal rate and ASPs (as JBoss lead investor David Skok noted in his OSBC 2007 presentation). Red Hat was Red Hat before it had Red Hat Network (RHN), but RHN gave customers an easy justification for paying for what they could get for free elsewhere.

The Network, in other words, is the not-so-secret sauce that makes great open-source companies. The principle behind it is to give the "core" software away to lower the cost of sales and marketing, while providing "complementary" services like an RHN to facilitate a purchase.

Which brings me to Mozilla.… Read more

Firefox crosses 500 million download mark

Sometime last night, Firefox downloads crossed the 500 million threshold.

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 … Read more

Fast and simple browser performance tweaks

Browsers just naturally seem to slow down over time. Maybe it's because the add-ons start to accumulate, or because you forget to clear their cache and perform other standard maintenance via Windows Disk Cleanup app. But there are also some simple settings changes you can make to keep Internet Explorer and Firefox running at top speed.

Increase the number of simultaneous connections in Internet Explorer: This tip has been around for a while, but if you haven't implemented it yet, you can see a real boost to your browsing speed. It entails a Registry edit, so create a … Read more

Mozilla's big opportunity in social networking

I've been reading through David Ascher's excellent blog today, and was intrigued by David's comments on social networking and how it intersects with email. If David gets even half of this right it will eliminate my need to start a business around the idea, as I've been mulling since 2000.

David is right. Most collaboration schemes go barren because they force users into a corporate starting point. Mozilla has the chance to disrupt this way of thinking:

There's one major distinction between my vision and the one [Yahoo!'s] oneConnect seems to promote, which is that I think individuals should be at the center of their own "social manifold", not Yahoo, or Yahoo/Microsoft, or Google, or any other central party.… Read more

Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0: New calendar, better search

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.

… Read more

Mozilla releases third Firefox 3 beta

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.

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 … Read more

Firefox and the future of the web

Mozilla's Firefox browser is a true community effort. Though Mozilla itself employs 45 full-time developers, there are an additional 1,000 community code contributors to the Firefox project with over 20,000 nightly testers and 500,000 beta testers to ensure the core developers can offload much of the test load so that they can spend more time on core development. With over 50 million daily users and 125 million total users, Firefox has a huge presence on the web.

With so many users Mozilla feels it has a huge responsibility as a guardian of the web for the 21st Century, suggested Chris Blizzard in a presentation he gave at the SCALE conference this week. Chris' slides are online and tell the story of an organization that takes its role as a community platform - with the aspiration to be an essential facility - very seriously.

I've been critical of Mozilla's muted voice in the community, but reading through a report on Chris' comments, I wonder if I've just been listening for the wrong voice:… Read more