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Well,I don't know about him but I prefer the versatility of Gecko myself. When a customer comes in with older hardware or they only care about speed I can give them Kmeleon,if they are into the social sites I can give them Flock,the old folks that still like to download their mail I give Seamonkey,and for the everyday Joes I give Firefox. I have also started giving out Songbird,which is also based on FF,thus the Gecko engine,and so far folks are really liking it. If Firefox wants to know where the next "Firefox killer" is going to come from,IMHO they just need to look in the mirror. Their engine is so easy to customize that I wouldn't be surprised if the next big thing ran Gecko under the hood.

Minefield. Not a beta. A nightly build.

Firefox Betas.

The link in the summary goes to Minefield. Not the beta. Minefield is, by definition, not stable.

in late 2006. So this has been in the works for almost 2 years. Considering that Google kept Chrome under wraps fairly well, this is not a great example of competition driving the market.

When in doubt, consult the source.
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Firefox+makes+unrequested+connections

Speed means nothing if the browser is unstable.

http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=eu&forumId=1&comments_parentId=172574

I use Firefox 3.x all the time and it seems to me the FF folks are so eager to get a grip on the market that they decided that some annoyances are acceptable. Such as, the Bookmarks click right after starting FF that shows the "Edit this bookmark" dialog instead of the actual bookmark list, an effect similar to the result of clicking on the star icon in the location bar (1, 3, ).

Windows Mobile builds are fairly close:
http://blog.mozilla.com/blassey/2008/10/11/windows-mobile-update-3-fonts/

I know there has been interest in a Symbian port, but I don't know if anyone is looking into it. As opposed to something like the N810 (Linux) or Windows Mobile, porting to an entirely new platform is a bit more work, so it can take a significant effort. The iPhone port wouldn't be a huge amount of work, but the distribution would be a non-starter, so it hardly seems worth the effort.

Windows Mobile builds are being worked on:
http://blog.mozilla.com/blassey/2008/10/11/windows-mobile-update-3-fonts/

Given Nokia's existing work with Gecko, the N810 platform was an easy place to start. Most of the work so far has focused on the Fennec UI and mobile performance. Ports will happen, the Gecko code is very portable, it just takes some time to finish a port to a new platform. (Or, for WinCE, a platform whose port hasn't worked in a while.)

Why no Gears for offline Gmail access at very least, Google?
I believe it's called POP/IMAP access, and it's been around a long time. Oh, downside - you might need a program called Outlook/Express or Thunderbird. Free download available.

http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html
http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/10/introducing-geode/

And what if they say, "It looked like a square-headed cartoon guy wearing a wig"? How long will it take you to figure out what that person means?

Unfortunately, my experience suggests it would go something like this:

Me: "What did you click on to open it?"

"The little thing."

Me: "What little thing?"

"Um... I mean, it's little, and it's on your desktop, and you kind of move it around...?"

Me: "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"It's plastic, and you move it around..."

Me: "Do you mean your mouse?"

"Yeah."

Me: "I mean, what icon did you click on?"

-blank stare-

Me: "The icon?"

-blank stare-

-I return the blank stare-

"An icon?"

Me: "Yeah, you know, like the little squarish picture that you click on to run a program?"

"I don't think my computer has anything like that. It's new. I think it runs Vista..."

And then I'd just have to continue on where I said, "Umm... Ok, whatever. Does it give you any kind of error message when you try to get your e-mail?"

Sometimes continuing to ask questions just gets you in deeper.

You missed the last part of that, which reads by a limited number of testers.

If an app is delivered to end users, then it's not beta.

Says who? Are we going to complain about Mozilla's definition of beta too then?

Well, like I said, you need an Exchange server to use Outlook. On the other hand, if you need a mail client with good IMAP support for Windows you know where to find it.

I really think they should keep lightning included with thunderbird, once version 3 is finished. It turns Thunderbird from a simple mail client to an organizer like outlook. and Spicebird is worthless IMO. I hate the tab interface.

Well, like I said, you need an Exchange server to use Outlook. On the other hand, if you need a mail client with good IMAP support for Windows you know where to find it.

*snip* ...and rewrites it if any of the other users change it back to what it "should" be. That fucks things up for *everyone*, which kind of defeats the whole idea of having separate user accounts that protect everyone from each other.

I think you're misunderstanding the usage of FF's anti-phishing blacklists. Think of it as anti-virus definitions. You only need ONE copy. See http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/phishing-protection/ for more information. Downloading individual blacklists per-user would be like downloading anti-virus definitions per-user. Completely redundant.

You also seemed to miss my point regarding places.sqlite - it stores user history, bookmarks, and other things. Think of what you could do with multi-user access to this information (provided the DB tables are secured properly) - shared history, shared bookmarks...Mmmm...that's music to any administrator's ears that wants to share information, in say, a school. Shared bookmarks for each class. Shared history so someone can just say "go to my history" for a website. How cool would that be?

Cough... Room 641A... cough...

I was thinking about this while doing some background reading about the FireFox EULA problem.
Part of the reason for the FireFox EULA was that they needed to say something about the 'Website Information Services' that FireFox uses to check URLs against a database of malware and philsing sites.

The FireFox EULA (latest draft) has always had reference to their privacy policy, which has the following section in it about the forgery and attack protection feature :

While it is possible that a third party service provider may determine the actual URL from the hashed URL sent, Mozilla's third party service providers have entered into a written agreement with Mozilla not to use any data or other information about or from users of Firefox for purposes other than to provide and maintain their service. In addition, in no event will these third party service providers correlate any Firefox user data with any other data collected through other products, services or web properties of that provider.

So Mozilla promise they won't try to mine the data to recover the real URLs, and they have written agreements from their third party providers that they won't either.

But room 641A makes a mockery of their privacy promise. The US government can order them to hand over the data, and they would not be allowed to talk about it. So their privacy promise has a caveat "We promise to do all we can to keep your data private .... unless the US government tell us to do otherwise".

But Mozilla might not even know about it. If room 641A is real, then they may do all they can to protect the data, but their hosting company or telecoms provider may be ordered to record or analyze the data, and the service provider would be prevented from telling anyone it was happening.

This isn't specific to Mozilla, it applies to all US based companies and service providers. Basically, room 641A invalidates any privacy statement by any US based company.

I wonder what further bad will come out of Mozilla being too corporate. It starts to look like an elegant way of getting a paycheck and less like about making a good browser.

This is a good point. Many people laud Firefox as being the free, wonderful, open-source browser built by the community with the community's needs in mind, etc, etc. They fail to realize (or perhaps don't want to realize) that mozilla.com is a for-profit taxable corporation just like any other company out there.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing that companies are embracing open source and using it as a business model. I just want people to be aware that Firefox is a business model, not some open source wet dream come to life.

EULA: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/legal/eula/firefox-en.html

Summary:
Preamble - notice that the source is available and this license does not apply to the source.
1. License Grant - This license gives you the right to use the executable provided by Mozilla Corp.
2. Termination - if you breach this license, S1 is voided.
3. Proprietary Rights - again, the source code is not proprietary. The branding logos are, you don't have the right to modify them.
4. Disclaimer of Warranty
5. Limitation of Liability
6. Export Controls - you must comply with teh law.
7. US Govt End Users - 2 sentences of legal references related to employees of the US Govt using Firefox.
8. Misc, nothing interesting at all. This agreement constitutes the agreement...

Sounds like Mozilla Corp doing the bare minimum to cover their asses, in a responsible fashion, without actually affecting end users at all.

Here's one excuse: complications when trying to have multiple processes render content on a single window in Mac OS X (mentioned near the end of the tab process isolation section).

Why? Only the active tab needs to render anything.

If you do not like flash, There is a lot of nice SVG around. All of these examples work well under Firefox 3.0 or Opera 9. Perhaps also on other browsers. It took SVG a long time (spec is from around 2000), but it is seeing more adoption now.

There is no excuse for a modern browser to not have this, especially in light of the fact that their main competitor (IE) is developing it.

Here's one excuse: complications when trying to have multiple processes render content on a single window in Mac OS X (mentioned near the end of the tab process isolation section).

It's not clear to me if this is impossible or really difficult to achieve, but I think it'll be interesting to see what Chrome does for Mac OS X.

From firefox help:
Open in New Window : Shift+Left-click

That damnable bar is quite good, it gets better the more you use it and I now like it. Some people just don't like change though, but its fortunate for them that they can turn it off.

Next week, a tutorial on how to type "disable awesome bar" into google.

(Except when you don't.)

all GUIs are basically the same, aren't they?

In the final analysis, you have icons, you have a desktop, and you have a pointing device and you click on things with it.

No and no.

It's just that we have stuck with the same GUI for 30 years. But that doesn't mean there aren't other possibilities out there.

from the pet-peeve-of-mine dept...

If all you standardsstandardsstandards people wanted to fix the problem, you'd code to standard, and let MS worry about IEx incompatibilities.

But instead, people actually test IEx, and fix sites for IEx. Hypocritical, if you ask me. MS just increased your workload because you fix the non-standard for them. What incentive will they ever have to change?

This post is compliant.

My own view on this would be that a browser should help me in trying to reach/dispense 'information' with the least steps possible.

I just wonder sometimes why everything needs to be done in the browser.

It reminds me of one of their other experiments, Snowl. We used to have the newsgroups using its own protocol and application, and then that got replaced with forum web applications. Then that forum and weblog software started adding support for RSS so you could grab the feed and dispense with the defined UI. So then with Snowl it seems like they're essentially allowing you to treat the feeds like threads and reply directly-- and it suddenly made me wonder whether we're essentially returning full-circle to newsgroups, but using different protocols.

I don't have any real objections to the development, but there's been this general push to put everything into web applications, including e-mail, chat, discussion, and office applications. But then it seems like some of these browser experiments and extensions are being created specifically because we don't want to deal with websites. And that makes a certain amount of sense to me, because I'm the sort of user that much prefers to use a local IMAP client than webmail, and prefers to use a RSS reader separate from my browser, but the whole progression just seems a little weird and unplanned.

I'm half expecting people to declare IMAP to be obsolete in a new age of webmail, and then turn around in 5 years and build a complete e-mail client extension into the browser using XML to pass e-mail around, but no HTML for the interface. To me, the whole web application took a funny turn when I realized that Google Reader also published RSS, thereby allowing you to view their web-app RSS reader in a client-end RSS reader application.

It all make me wondering whether we might want to aim for a future without websites. Maybe not the complete end, but here's what I'm really starting to wonder: when I want to check the Wikipedia 10 years from now, will I be opening a web browser and typing "http://wikipedia.org"? Will the Wikipedia even bother to offer an HTML version? Or will they just have some database of articles with a pre-set API, and I'll be able to query the database for information from any number of applications, depending on the platform I'm using and the purpose of my query.

And then if that's the case, someone will have to develop a generalized viewer for these queries which would follow certain display specifications, and you'll end up with the reinvention of the web browser.

Blah. Sorry, I know this is kind of an aimless rant. But these Mozilla experiments do funny things to my head.

Firefox gained visibility and market share after being ported to Windows and not before.

When did misinformation like this start to get modded up as insightful?

Firefox has always been available for Windows, don't know where the idea that it was "ported" to Windows came from.

Here, check out the Phoenix 0.1 release notes.

I use Plaxo, Weave and Dropbox to do the same things.

http://people.mozilla.com/~schrep/tm-image-adjustment.swf

Lol, right. I mean, companies would just love spending billions of dollars to develop something and then having a rival just pick it up and copy it. That would _totally_ spur innovation, dude!

Yeah, you're right. The concept of open sharing sure hasn't spurred innovation in the past...

or you could run Firefox with AdBlock Plus, NoScript, and FlashBlock for a more comprehensive solution with a good user interface experience to boot. You might also want to add Customize Google for some extra Google specific functionality.

Here are some mostly self-explanatory links:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/
http://www.zindus.com/
http://lifehacker.com/software/download-managers/geek-to-live--wget-local-copies-of-your-online-research-delicious-digg-or-google-notebook-200360.php
http://lifehacker.com/399407/how-to-sync-any-desktop-calendar-with-google-calendar
http://gears.google.com/

Not sure about the social networking aspect of it, but from what I see on the Mozilla Labs page it's the RSS reader I've been looking for for a while now...

The bleeding-edge browser is part of a new Mozilla Labs initiative, in which the open-source foundation is encouraging people to contribute ideas and designs for the browser of the future.

Labs is more than that. Back in ought six, Slashdot covered their first extend Firefox contest where people were bated with Alienware swag and developer conference passes to develop extensions & plug-ins for Firefox. The second year saw Shareaholic come out as a winning plug-in. The third year just finished judging and I'm excited to see what Mozilla finds as the best Firefox 3 add ons.

It's nice to see a foundation aiding, encouraging and rewarding the average developer off the street for their work. Even better than that is when Mozilla backs a plug-in or add-on it's usually solid and reliable (unlike the many WinAmp plug-ins that plagued my college machine).

Yes

The official word from blog.mozilla.com is that acid3 is basically worthless.

[rant mode on]

Here is how to COMPLETELY disable the Awesome Bar:

Click Start, point to Control Panel, double click on Add and Remove Programs (or Programs and Features if on Vista), select Firefox 3.0 and click Uninstall.

Do the equivalent if on other platform.

If you installed a NEWER MAJOR version of a software, it is because you wanted NEW features.

The Awesome Bar is one of those things that I cannot live without anymore, and so won't you when you actually try to use it the way it should be used! And here's something I predict happening: Other browsers adopting the SAME behavior! So, you can either go back to your text based browsing age, or actually TRY the new feature!

This screencast shows how it can be very easy to use it in an effective way.

Trying to find a website by typing the EXACT BEGINNING of the URL doesn't make sense when you can search for things EASIER to remember, like TITLE, or BOOKMARK TAGS!

[rant mode off]

That was fixed two weeks ago in Firefox 3.0.1.

It looks suspiciously similar to the Firefox logo, I wonder if the artist was the same. At least he got the face pointed in the right direction this time.

eh, i beg to disagree. firefox's inline spellcheck and predictive text in the integrated search window are a few new features that, to my knowledge as i dont have windows, IE doesnt have. sure, the BSD memory management i agree is competition by performance, but isnt a browser 90% interface anyway? if ff hadnt competed at this level before, than what? the audience base for Firefox is much larger as well. competition aside, more people get to try firefox than IE. as microsoft keeps doing a good job of adopting "almost all of the features" in ff, i dont see how the road is going to get hard. how does the road get hard for a company completely oriented to its users as opposed to market share? http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/about/whatismozilla.html i see microsoft, if put in a pinch, making a BAU move: kill it with money and buy mozilla.

And... Wouldnt you consider Firefox 3.x to be the newest/latest version of Firefox?

Just asking, since, you know... the article is about people not upgrading to the newest. Sure 2.0.xx is still being maintained, but its not adding anything new, and stops being supported in December of this year.

That still leaves Windows 9x/ME S.O.L.

np: Nine Inch Nails - The Beginning Of The End (Year Zero)

I expect the only way to turn it off is by downloading and installing a release build. I got an update for Thunderbird a day or two ago, and the release notes page tells you how to check if you're in the beta channel, but it also says (Note: The effective value cannot be changed through the Config Editor. If you wish to exclude yourself from the beta program you must download and install the latest production release as mentioned above.)

For Firefox, you can check by entering about:config in the location bar, and then in the filter put in app.update.channel

Mine says "release" so I guess I installed a release build of Firefox on this PC; if it says "beta" you'll get earlier builds.

I also concur that this is a pretty good idea.

That issue is fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.16.

2000 should be fine (it's a NT). See http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/system-requirements.html.

Mozilla Weave

it would be legally OK if I took the source code to Firefox

Firefox is not GPL'ed. Your point is still valid, their license and all software licenses that I know of rely on copyright.

Many people think GPL = Open Source, we better not lead anyone to believe that here. :)

The more mainstream the web becomes, the more bullshit we have to sort through... the more useless it becomes. There used to be a banner ad. Now there's a banner, links on the left, links on the right, popups, flash over the actual text, sound, video, and 10x as many pages all with the same shit to click through just to get the same content. And, we're already hearing about ISPs adding their own shit to our shitty internet experience.

Firefox + AdBlock Plus + NoScript + Flashblock = Freedom from ads, fluff, and marketing bull.

Thanks for a link to an ad. I'll skip this story and find one posted on a site that doesn't hate users.

OR you could download the Firefox browser and customize it with the AdBlock Plus, NoScript, and Flashblock add-ons. Just say no to ads...