Digital Media

Mozilla has launched a usability test plug-in for its open-source Firefox browser, in a bid to make testing and user feedback easier and more attractive.

Test Pilot, an add-on for Firefox 3.5, was rolled out on Wednesday. "We are looking for Firefox users of all levels of skill and all levels of technical knowledge to help improve Firefox and Labs experiments," Mozilla Labs employee Jinghua Zhang wrote in a blog post.

(Credit: Mozilla)

The opt-in program allows those who sign up to "try out the newest features and user interface ideas before anyone else, but also see and learn how those results may contribute back to the product design," Zhang wrote, adding that participants would not have data about their product usage submitted without their permission.

Test data will be anonymized and aggregated for presentation to the general public without the user's individual data being identifiable, Zhang said.

Test Pilot was first announced by Mozilla Labs in March last year. At the time, Chief Innovation Officer Chris Beard wrote in a blog post that Mozilla had to "rely upon the blogosphere and word-of-mouth to attract the attention" of people interested in trying out new Mozilla experiments.

"The problem is that we are systemically biasing feedback towards only those who happen to hear about a particular experiment (on a given day) and in those cases skew to the technically savvy early adopter," Beard wrote. "It is therefore very hard to derive conclusions representative of our much larger and increasingly mainstream user base."

Beard added that each of Mozilla's feature tests was isolated, and the organization had to "start from scratch" in finding volunteer testers each time.

With Test Pilot, an icon is permanently visible at the bottom right-hand side of the browser window, allowing the user to keep an eye on which tests are upcoming or currently under way.

Those signing up for the program will first need to complete a survey, which gauges their level of technical knowledge.

According to Zhang, the Test Pilot program is "still in its 0.1 release," and revamped iterations will be made available "within the coming weeks."

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.

CARLSBAD, Calif.--Although it has managed to grab nearly a quarter of the browser market, Mozilla now finds itself in an unenviable position--competing against Microsoft, Apple, and Google all at the same time.

Speaking at D: All Things Digital on Thursday, Mozilla's Mitchell Baker noted that the company didn't set out with that in mind.

"That's not the business model you are going to pick," Baker said. "It is a daunting space to compete with the three giants of the era."

That said, Baker and fellow Mozilla executive John Lilly said there is still a place for Firefox.

"We've just got to be us," Lilly said. "Mozilla has always been about scratching an itch."

Another challenge, Lilly said, is that people don't perceive the browser as something that changes their Web experience. "Most people just think it's this pane of glass," Lilly said. Three quarters of people use the browser that comes with their computer, he said.

But browsers are important, Lilly maintained.

"We spend more time with our browser than we do in our cars," Lilly said. "The real truth, I spend more time with my browser than I do with my family."

Brand Thunder, a company that lets people customize Firefox with brands, has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Ohio TechAngels and other angel investors, the company said Tuesday.

The company revamps the open-source Web browser with various brands such as Nascar, hockey teams, country singer Julianne Hough, and various other partners.

To fund its business, Brand Thunder also changes the default search engine to Yahoo, which shares resulting advertising revenue with the company.

Brand Thunder also said it's signed a new partnership with Major League Soccer for a branded browser.

Update 9:45 a.m. PST: The company followed up with details of the funding: $350,000 from TechColumbus, $200,000 from the Ohio TechAngels Fund, and $200,000 from other angel investors.

In addition, the company said it expects to break even by the end of the quarter. It had hoped to do so in February, but a slowdown in Yahoo search delayed it slightly. The company also receives revenue from maintenance, upfront fees, and other sources.

Brand Thunder lets people customize Firefox with assorted brands.

(Credit: Brand Thunder)

Firefox 3.1 alpha 2, code-named Shiretoko, adds functionality for Web developers with very little eye candy for users.

Johnathan Nightingale of Mozilla described Firefox 3.1 as having more refinement than new features. This alpha release is intended for developers and testers only and should not yet be for general-purpose use.

The most visible enhancement in this alpha release is a feature that allows you to drag and drop tabs between two open Firefox browsers.

There are considerable under-the-hood enhancements here. Built on a pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering engine, Firefox 3.1 alpha 2 includes support for a video tag element in the HTML 5 standard, which allows designers to embed video directly into pages without using proprietary formats. It also includes support for CSS 2.1 and 3, further enhancing the browser's overall performance.

To make Javascript run faster, there is support for "Web workers," a threading process that allows scripts to run in parallel in the background.

For Windows Vista users there's a new Aero "glass" style for the Mozilla browser interface. This means that developers can write Web applications that will appear to be translucent on browsers running Windows Vista with Aero turned on.

The first public beta for Firefox 3.1 should be available in late September or early October. Final release will be in late 2008 or early 2009.

Firefox 3.1 alpha 2 is available from Mozilla.

Google Chrome is a warning shot over the bows of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

The open-source software project, to be detailed later Tuesday at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., should dispel any lingering thoughts that the browser wars are over. To be sure, it's less cutthroat now than in the 1990s, but one of technology's most powerful companies is now on the battlefield.

So how does Chrome change the competitive landscape?

Google Chrome has many competitors to contend with, according to these August stats.

(Credit: Net Applications)

Initially at least, it's not likely to change the market share rankings. According to Net Applications' browser market share statistics for August, IE has 72 percent share, Firefox 20 percent, Safari 6 percent, and Opera 1 percent.

But even before Google's browser became available for download, its repercussions were traversing the industry. There are plenty of implications from a company as large as Google that builds a browser tuned to advance the company's agenda of Web-based applications.

Here are some possible implications for the four major alternatives to Chrome.

Internet Explorer
IE still claims the dominant share of the browser market, and it still has the hard-to-beat distribution channel of being built into the most widely used operating system.

Firefox has been chipping away at IE's share for years, but the dominance has remained fairly secure, and unless Chrome offers revolutionary new abilities, it's not likely to do more than perhaps increase the chipping rate a bit.

Microsoft has lit a fire under its IE team, and given that Google is such a powerful Microsoft rival, that fire doubtless will burn all the hotter because of Chrome. The forthcoming IE 8, with beta 2 released last week and the final version officially due to ship by the end of January, is a sign of how serious Microsoft is.

Officially, Microsoft welcomes the competition. "The browser landscape is highly competitive, but people will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online," Dean Hachamovitch, Internet Explorer general manager, said in a statement.

Vast numbers of people haven't upgraded from IE 6, which is ancient in Internet years. That cuts both ways for Microsoft: it's hard to get people to upgrade to IE 7 much less to IE 8, but those folks aren't moving to the competition either.

Of course, with Google's Web application agenda, the bigger long-term threat is to Microsoft's Office team, not to its IE team.

Firefox
Firefox potentially stands to lose the most from Chrome.

It's the leading alternative to IE and the standard bearer for those who love open-source software and revile Microsoft's technology, its business practices, and its philosophy. If you're hell-bent on taking down Microsoft, you could pick worse allies than Google.

Mozilla has something for the philosophical purists that Google lacks, though: a measure of independence. "Uniquely in this market, we're a public-benefit, nonprofit group, with no other agenda or profit motive at all," Mozilla Corp. Chief Executive John Lilly said in a blog posting Monday.

Survival is a powerful motive even if profit isn't, though, and the Mozilla Foundation, the parent of the Mozilla Corp., relies on Google for tens of millions of dollars each year in exchange for prominent placement of Google in the browser's search. Happily for Mozilla, Google just signed up for three more years of subsidizing Mozilla, so Firefox and other foundation activities should be financially sound at least for the time being.

Firefox has built a massive grassroots fan base, though. And even Google, for all its charisma, money, and power, will have a hard time replicating that.

Finally, though Chrome at first blush is bad news for Firefox, there's a subtler reality at play: IE is the dominant browser, and the greater the number of credible underdogs that exist, the more that dominance can't be taken for granted. Don't be surprised to hear Mozilla and Google present themselves more as allies than foes.

Safari
Apple has expanded its Safari ambitions from Mac OS X to Windows, most notably by letting the browser hitch a ride along with the iTunes update software. However, Safari has yet to become a force to be reckoned with.

But Safari could benefit indirectly from Chrome: both browsers are based on the open-source WebKit rendering engine.

If Google sponsors aggressive Webkit development--and doesn't end up wrestling with Apple for power over the project--both browsers stand to gain. Google's Android browser for mobile phones, it should be noted, also is based on WebKit.

Opera
Opera has a small share of the browser market, so it's the most likely to drop in position if Google Chrome catches on. It already fights for relevance against the bigger players.

But Opera is a scrappy company. Not surprisingly, it prefers to look at its own growth rather than its sliver of share, and CEO Jon Tetzchner points out that its share has grown each time a new browser has emerged as a viable competitor to Internet Explorer.

"Last year, we had more than 50 percent growth in our user base," Tetzchner said. "I think we'll do quite well this year as well. It seems every time there's talk of new browsers, that's been a positive thing for us. It has been good there is focus on browser alternatives."

Click here for full coverage of the Google Chrome launch.

Mozilla and Google have extended a search deal through 2011, providing some financial security to the backer of the open-source Firefox Web browser.

"We've just renewed our agreement with Google for an additional three years. This agreement now ends in November of 2011 rather than November of 2008, so we have stability in income," Mozilla Foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker said in a blog post Wednesday. (Updated: there was a misleading timestamp on the post; a Mozilla representative told me it actually went live Wednesday evening.)

Google pays for prominent placement in Firefox, including the default home page and the default choice in the search box.

The deal has been lucrative for the Mozilla Foundation, whose two subsidiaries create Firefox and the Thunderbird e-mail software. In 2006, Google supplied $56.8 million of Mozilla's revenue--85 percent of the total for the foundation.

Google is the default search provider in the Firefox search bar.

(Credit: Mozilla/Google)

And the money will come in handy. Firefox grew to its current position as the second-ranked Web browser during a hiatus when Microsoft rested on its Internet Explorer laurels.

Now Microsoft is fighting back hard with Internet Explorer 8, and Apple is spreading its Safari browser to Windows, the iPhone, and iPod Touch. Even fourth-ranked Opera Software is determined to stay in the game.

Mozilla hopes to release Firefox 3.1 by the end of the year with improvements to JavaScript execution speed, the ability to run JavaScript tasks in the background, and built-in video and audio support.

(Via TechCrunch.)

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 remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing."

The challenge, as Mozilla sees it:

Mashups help in some cases, but they are static, require Web development skills, and are largely site-centric rather than user-centric.

It's even worse on mobile devices, where limited capability and fidelity makes this onerous or nearly impossible.

Most people do not have an easy way to manage the vast resources of the Web to simplify their task at hand. For the most part, they are left trundling between Web sites, performing common tasks, resulting in frustration and wasted time.

Ubiquity grew out of Firefox's new Smart Location Bar, or "awesome bar," which helps resolve incomplete URL entries into browser address bars. Ubiquity doesn't replace the awesome bar, but a separate command line is generated by typing Ctrl-Space for Windows or Command-Space for Macs.

Mozilla Labs released a prototype of Ubiquity for all platforms, as well as a tutorial, as an "illustration of a concept."

Mozilla says this is the type of mashup it hopes its users will be inspired to create.

(Credit: Mozilla.com)

Raskin, a Mozilla Labs engineer who worked to bring Firefox to the mobile platform, created the Ubiquity platform concept. "Ubiquity's interface goal is to enable the user to instruct the browser (by typing, speaking, using language) what they want to do," Raskin wrote in his blog post.

Webware's Rafe Needleman is taking the plug-in for a spin and has posted his impressions.