minefield

Firefox Aurora debuts, Mozilla's 'dev' channel

Somewhere between a nightly and a beta lies Firefox Aurora, Mozilla's first public browser under its new publishing schedule. Announced yesterday, Firefox Aurora for Windows (download), Mac (download), and Linux (download), is most analogous to the intent behind the Google Chrome developer's channel (download Windows | Mac | Linux): to provide a place where users who don't mind browser instability can test out new features, and contribute feedback to the developers.

Mozilla is now running all four of the browser builds that it mentioned in this blog post: Minefield, or the nightly test builds; the new Aurora; the beta … Read more

Touring the Minefield: Firefox nightlies hands-on

Browser development can be a risky place, even for a team of savvy, crowd-sourced enthusiasts. So it's no surprise that Mozilla calls their nightly Firefox build "Minefield." What is surprising is that, in general, today's version tended to be fairly stable.

The version I spent the day with, Firefox 3.7 alpha 6, offers multiple in-development improvements. Besides being built on the next version of Firefox's rendering engine Gecko, the current nightlies will eventually become Firefox 4, expected to be released later this year.

For right now, though, the nightly builds are a rough work … Read more

Pinpointing landmines from the air

Landmine "contamination" continues to plague developing countries, where more are laid every year than are cleared, according to a UN estimate. Now, a company promises a new technique to locate and map landmines from the air-three times faster and at half the price of conventional detection methods.

A Canadian company, Mine Clearing Corp (MCC) has acquired licensing to the latest in radiometry technology; technology so sensitive it can pick out the tiny electromagnetic reflections emitted by buried objects from as high as 200 feet in the air. MCC plans to incorporate this technology into a landmine detection and … Read more

New Firefox privacy mode released to testers

Late Monday a small, yet big Firefox feature was released to testers of Minefield, Mozilla's testbed application for new browser innovations. The new feature is private browsing, also known in some circles as "porn mode." When toggled, it takes your Web history, user names, passwords, searches, and cookies and bins them the second you close out the window, effectively making it appear that the session never existed.

Monday night's Minefield build included said privacy mode in all its glory, giving browser users the freedom to hide their browsing habits from others.

Similar to the implementation found … Read more

Think Firefox 3 is fast? Try Firefox Minefield

A colleague today showed me a cool, new browser that he's been using to browse the web at blisteringly fast speeds. The browser? Minefield. The author of the code?

Mozilla.

Yes, that same Mozilla that makes the Firefox browser. Minefield is, in fact, a way to glimpse into the future of Firefox, as it's a pre-release/alpha version of the Firefox browser.

After spending some time with Minefield, one thing is clear: the future of Firefox is fast. Lightning fast.

How fast? Some claim that it has the fastest javascript engine on the planet, which means it leaves … Read more