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What is Boot to Gecko? Boot to Gecko (B2G) is a project with the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the Web. It is not a product offering yet, but we are working on transforming it into one.

That is exactly what they are doing, with support from a large number of operaters:

http://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/07/02/firefox-mobile-os/

Well, instead of wondering and fantasizing about it, maybe you should take a look on this page:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI

Specifically one of the Security pages:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/Security/WebTelephony

Well, instead of wondering and fantasizing about it, maybe you should take a look on this page:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI

Specifically one of the Security pages:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/Security/WebTelephony

Most be cold in hell, because Mozilla has had iOS apps for years which use webkit, like:

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/home/

Because Apple doesn't allow Opera, Google Chrome or Mozilla to port their engine to iOS and "sell" it on in the Apple App Store.

>>>Firefox OS (neé Boot2Gecko) is a complete operating system

I have an anonymous coward saying one thing, and Mozilla saying something else. I think I'll side with Mozilla and ignore the Asshole Coward: "Q: Will this be yet another platform for developers to code for?

"A: No; the project is extending what developers can do with the Web, especially in the context of mobile devices, and to do so in a way that leads to interoperable standards. Just as with HTML5, ES5, CSS3 and other Web technology it will reach different browsers and operating systems at different times, but the pace of Web platform development gives us confidence that good Web technology can reach a lot of people pretty quickly.

"We don't want this work to lead to applications that only run atop one platform, or only run in Firefox. That's an important difference between what we're doing and proprietary mobile stacks today: we don't seek a competitive advantage for Mozilla, we seek a competitive advantage for the Web." http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/b2g/

>>>while I'm not sold on the idea that we need another phone OS

A lot of people seem to think Mozilla is trying to replace or compete with iOS and Android. Not the case. QUOTE: "The Firefox OS for mobile devices is built on Mozillaâ(TM)s 'Boot to Gecko project' which unlocks many of the current limitations of web development on mobile, allowing HTML5 applications to access the underlying capabilities of a phone, previously only available to native applications..... Due to the optimization of the platform for entry-level smartphones and the removal of unnecessary middleware layers, mobile operators will have the ability to offer richer experiences at a range of price points including at the low end of the smartphone price range, helping to drive adoption across developing markets."

"We believe the Web is the platform. Ideally, the technology pioneered or refined in the Boot to Gecko project will make its way into all mobile browsers, so that enhanced Web applications can be great regardless of operating system or device...... This is not going to be yet another platform for developers to code for. The project is extending what developers can do with the Web, especially in the context of mobile devices, and to do so in a way that leads to interoperable standards.

"Just as with HTML5, ES5, CSS3 and other Web technology it will reach different browsers and operating systems at different times, but the pace of Web platform development gives us confidence that good Web technology can reach a lot of people pretty quickly. We donâ(TM)t want this work to lead to applications that only run atop one platform, or only run in Firefox. Thatâ(TM)s an important difference between what weâ(TM)re doing and proprietary mobile stacks today: we donâ(TM)t seek a competitive advantage for Mozilla, we seek a competitive advantage for the Web."

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/b2g/

Please read https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Zombie_compartments and file a bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi if you cc :kbrosnan I will do my best to forward it to the correct people.

Please read https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Zombie_compartments and file a bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi if you cc :kbrosnan I will do my best to forward it to the correct people.

Ah. I thought I still had subscriber credit. I got one of those 'as thanks for...you can now use Slashdot without ads' emails.

I get "Disable Ads" too. Perhaps it comes if someone subscribed in the past and then consistently keeps his account's karma Excellent for months, or possibly if someone has configured his browser's Flash Player in click-to-play mode.

Beyond captchas?

After trying for months to keep ahead of spam using a regex extension called AbuseFilter, I ended up realizing that Google's ReCAPTCHA was broken. I switched my MediaWiki to QuestyCaptcha. Each of about a half dozen questions about classic literature links to a Wikipedia article that contains the answer. Successful spammer registrations dropped to zero. Someone using a wiki farm wouldn't have this sort of story to tell to an interviewer.

If you're merely showcasing a web application, you don't need SSL.

In other words, the "warn" method.

Facebook exposes a Jabber/XMPP protcol for chatting on Facebook.

If you really must chat on Facebook then you and your friends could use the OTR encryption plugin, though it's not as a cool hack as implanting some kind of transparent layer into Facebook itself but maybe that's something that could be done with GreaseMonkey or something.

A 1920x1080 monitor (HDTV) has more pixels than a 1600x1200.

As for form-factor, it seems some people just can't stop hating on any computer monitor that matches up to HDTV's 16:9 display ratio. Why is this? I have no problem with convergence... it greatly reduces manufacturing costs, resulting in lower consumer prices for quality monitors.

Reducing manufacturing costs. Right. Because there are soooo many 15" and 22" 16:9 HDTVs being made and sold.

HDTVs are 16:9 (1.78:1) because it better fits the widescreen format of most movies which are 1.85:1 up to 2.35:1. That makes them good for watching movies.

16:9 sucks on PCs because of the way user interfaces have developed. Take a close look at the web browser you're using right now. Excluding the 5 pixel borders, from top to bottom we have:
the browser's title bar
the menu bar
the navigation bar
most people have a bookmark and add-on bar(s)
the tabs bar
then the webpage contents
a status bar
Windows' task bar at the very bottom.

Meanwhile going left to right we have:
the webpage contents
the scroll bar

PCs need more vertical space to better match the way user interfaces have developed. Instead, manufacturers have been doing the opposite and whittling away at vertical resolution to give us more horizontal resolution. 16:9 is the culmination of this backwards trend, giving us more width while keeping the height at the same amounts which were standard 10-15 years ago (1366x768 vs 1024x768, 1280x1024 vs 1920x1080).

That's why 16:9 sucks on PCs. I've resorted to installing the tree style tabs extension to move my tabs to the side, to free up more vertical space. And before Mozilla did it by default in more recent versions, I reconfigured Firefox's UI to combine the navigation, URL, and bookmark bars into a single bar. (Interestingly, they eliminated your ability to do this on later FF 3.x versions, but my config carried over when I upgraded.) In Lightroom, I have the top and bottom tool boxes set to auto-close, while the left and right remain open. All to free up more vertical space so I can see a bigger version of the photos I'm working on.

1920x1080 may be more pixels than 1600x1200, but they're not useful pixels on a PC. Vertical pixels are simply worth more than horizontal pixels. Manufacturers like 16:9 because it fits better with the aspect ratio of the keyboard + trackpad, so is easier to put into a laptop's clamshell design. About the only benefit of 16:9 on a PC is that you can open two apps/pages side by side. And even there I insist on buying a 16:10 1920x1200 monitor.

This is when the bulk of the MemShrink work will land, which should make a lot of people very happy. To see what they've been working on, check this site out: http://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/

So when will that be? In Firefox it'll be version 16 so the 28th of August, in 7 weeks (and another 6 weeks if I really care about ESR users)

For fun, here's a site that forgot to unprefix their javascript from .MozOpacity to .opacity when it was unprefixed 8 years ago in Firefox before version 1.0, then the author filed a bug asking "why was this SUDDENLY DONE in June 2012?" and plans to invoice Mozilla for the work he does updating his site.

[...] so my company can actually use firefox?

What is stopping you from doing just that?

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/10.0.5esr

You can disable automatic updates.

Right. Plus, you could try the Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release) version, which is supported for the not quite long-term period of one year. It won't shut up the high-version numbers but it would allow you to skip from, say, version 10 to 15+ or whatever version comes a year after the initial release of the current ESR.

(ever try loading Slashdot with firebug accidentally enabled?)

Yeah, it takes forever. But what is much faster is using the built in Web Console in the tools menu in newer versions of Firefox. I forget what version it was that started natively supporting debugging but it got a lot better (4 I think?). I'm very excited to see these improvements but my JavaScript has to support versions of Firefox all the way back to 3.6 so I'm still using Firebug and I'm still super grateful that Firebug came around. It literally revolutionized debugging web applications for me. There could have been tools before it but, man, that was the final nail on IE's coffin for support from us. Hell, even Chrome's built in debugging is way better than anything I can find on IE. I know the latest IE versions have gotten better but it's my strong opinion that every single person who uses the internet should be thankful for Chrome, Mozilla, Venkman and these debugging tools. They made the web experience a hell of a lot better and open by empowering developers.

Has this hypothetical smug Linux user also magically fixed all remote execution bugs in his/her browser? There continue to be an awful lot of those on Firefox. http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/

See that red color ? "Vulnerability can be used to run attacker code and install software, requiring no user interaction beyond normal browsing."

Not to mention Linux kernel bugs in themselves. Hundreds of millions of android phones being shipped right now are vulnerable to being rooted so that you can install CyanogenMod. How lovely that the Linux devs continue to introduce vulnerabilities in every single release to make this possible.

Ignorance is bliss.

Possible benefit to vendors: it's an alternative to Android that's based on industry standards and thus with much less lock-in.

Also Telefonica claims it "will be more open than Android, and will run on lower-specification hardware", we'll see about the latter. The HTML5 UI layer "Gaia" and the additional web APIs are well-isolated from hardware, hence there are nightly builds of B2G for Mac and Windows without the phone part. From the architectural overview Mozilla's initial smartphone target is a "Gonk" hardware abstraction layer on top of parts of the Android runtime and an Android kernel, but people are already porting to generic Linux + framebuffer/Open GL.

I suspect the development isn't easier than a native Android or iOS port, but if you've got a web site or HTML version of your app, then the additional work to make it an installable web app is minimal; besides, a lot of Android and iOS webOS apps are just HTML5 under the covers. Tizen, Blackberry OS, even Windows Phone — everyone who isn't yet successful in phones and tablets — are all promoting development using HTML5 technologies.

Possible benefit to vendors: it's an alternative to Android that's based on industry standards and thus with much less lock-in.

Also Telefonica claims it "will be more open than Android, and will run on lower-specification hardware", we'll see about the latter. The HTML5 UI layer "Gaia" and the additional web APIs are well-isolated from hardware, hence there are nightly builds of B2G for Mac and Windows without the phone part. From the architectural overview Mozilla's initial smartphone target is a "Gonk" hardware abstraction layer on top of parts of the Android runtime and an Android kernel, but people are already porting to generic Linux + framebuffer/Open GL.

I suspect the development isn't easier than a native Android or iOS port, but if you've got a web site or HTML version of your app, then the additional work to make it an installable web app is minimal; besides, a lot of Android and iOS webOS apps are just HTML5 under the covers. Tizen, Blackberry OS, even Windows Phone — everyone who isn't yet successful in phones and tablets — are all promoting development using HTML5 technologies.

I wish they'd just get it over with and fully disown Thunderbird so that others who do give a damn can do something with it.

You seem rather unclear on the concept of open source. Anyone who cares can contribute to Thunderbird development. Anyone who has a better idea for its direction can take the code and fork it, even turn it back into a commercial product. And they have, there's a list of e-mail clients based on Thunderbird on Wikipedia, one of which is Postbox for $30.

Only in the minds of entitled armchair whiners does Mozilla paying salaries for Thunderbird engineers and even a messaging team for years somehow equate to "not giving a damn." The reality is there's little interest and clearly no money in a standalone e-mail client, and it's somewhat tangential to Mozilla's mission. As users moved to web mail and ISP-provided clients, Mozilla's various experiments to do cool collaborative and communication things with Thunderbird didn't have much impact.

(I've used the SeaMonkey browser-editor-mail-IRC suite since it was Netscape Navigator 2.0. SeaMonkey 2.11 remains a solid useful product with all the performance and memory wins of recent Firefox, and I really appreciate the talented few who keep it going with the aid of Mozilla's infrastructure.)

I wish they'd just get it over with and fully disown Thunderbird so that others who do give a damn can do something with it.

You seem rather unclear on the concept of open source. Anyone who cares can contribute to Thunderbird development. Anyone who has a better idea for its direction can take the code and fork it, even turn it back into a commercial product. And they have, there's a list of e-mail clients based on Thunderbird on Wikipedia, one of which is Postbox for $30.

Only in the minds of entitled armchair whiners does Mozilla paying salaries for Thunderbird engineers and even a messaging team for years somehow equate to "not giving a damn." The reality is there's little interest and clearly no money in a standalone e-mail client, and it's somewhat tangential to Mozilla's mission. As users moved to web mail and ISP-provided clients, Mozilla's various experiments to do cool collaborative and communication things with Thunderbird didn't have much impact.

(I've used the SeaMonkey browser-editor-mail-IRC suite since it was Netscape Navigator 2.0. SeaMonkey 2.11 remains a solid useful product with all the performance and memory wins of recent Firefox, and I really appreciate the talented few who keep it going with the aid of Mozilla's infrastructure.)

For anyone who's actually interested, the Memshrink Blog is a fascinating account of how a team of developers have been reducing Firefox's memory usage. Interestingly, Firefox's memory usage has never been particularly bad (it just seems to be because web pages are so much more complicated), but addons have had horrible memory problems for a long time (and unfortunately, that's pretty hard to detect).

I do not want the add-ons manager [...] in a tab because I am using a windowing operating system with a high resolution display.

Blowing my own trumpet a bit here, but you may be interested in Classicish Addon Manager, which I wrote to fix that. It works in Seamonkey (and Thunderbird) too.

Also: Old Default Image Style, which fixes another one of those Firefox stupidities that are actually in the toolkit, and thus affect Seamonkey as well.

I do not want the add-ons manager [...] in a tab because I am using a windowing operating system with a high resolution display.

Blowing my own trumpet a bit here, but you may be interested in Classicish Addon Manager, which I wrote to fix that. It works in Seamonkey (and Thunderbird) too.

Also: Old Default Image Style, which fixes another one of those Firefox stupidities that are actually in the toolkit, and thus affect Seamonkey as well.

I've downloaded the source to Thunderbird a few times when I got frustrated that something was broken and figured I'd try to fix it. The code is terrible.

Well, that's too harsh. What I should say is that it's written without thought of user supported patches. Features I've been waiting on for years just died at various points in times. Simple things like sharing address books between applications or syncing to a phone just never were realized. The developers whining at the users with comments like "unless you're willing to write the replacement" doesn't help. Obviously, the developer isn't willing to write it either so we're at an impass.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=382876

So what's the alternative? Not web based email, that's inflexible for various reasons. Getting something that will do multiple mailboxes, encryption/signing, just those two are show stoppers for everyone. Hushmail can do the second but not the first. It's still a WIP for Zimbra and most other web suites. I'm carefully watching Zimbra and waiting for the last couple of things I need and maybe I'll be able to officially be clientless.

I'm going to check on evolution again and see if it's up to par. My initial problems with it were related to it not having a windows version and the lack of certain features, but things may have changed.

Among the more recent comments for that bug:

Happy 10-year anniversary! :o)

Hahaha... classic! 8)

Reminds me of a bug some years back, before the Firefox/Thunderbird rename of Mozilla. I lost all my settings and emails, and discovered that the reason was that all settings "*.js" files were written out line-by-line in place, without even any buffering. Any crash or system problem during the shutdown of the browser would leave a partial and corrupt user profile. On the next startup, this would be detected, and the browser would wipe your entire profile and reset everything to defaults for your convenience. Including all of your email. Archives too.

At the time, most people had POP3 email, and would rarely have a backup copy anywhere to synchronize with. There were something like 3 or 4 dupes of that bug, all many years old, each with literally thousands of comments from terrified users begging for help to recover their lost data.

It took me all of an hour to figure out what was going on just by using SysInternals Process Monitor to watch the behavior during shutdown. The fix would have been trivial, and was suggested by no less than about twenty posts in the Bugzilla forums: just write configuration changes to new files, and then 'swap' the file names with the existing files at the end. That in combination with the use of a buffered C++ IO stream or something similar would have also resulted in the shutdown process speeding up by almost a factor of a hundred.

I checked back every few months. That bug was there for at least three or four years after that. Sometimes old copies of the bug where closed as "will not fix" or "can't reproduce", bugs were merged, split, and thousands of new comments appeared from more panicked users. I suspect that in total, some idiot at Mozilla spent ten times as much time maintaining and rearranging those bug tickets than it would have taken to fix the issue in the first place.

I was almost tempted to try and fix it myself, but apparently several other people have tried but were shot down for not following Mozilla's rigorous coding standards. I laughed and laughed, and then switched to Outlook and never looked back.

So your solution to "POP synchronization is so ridiculously badly broken that you almost might as well rip it out" is "run your own IMAP server for a single user account and use something like fetchmail to populate it from the POP account"? Is that seriously supposed to be a workaround for an average user? Are you responsible for TB bug triage? Because that would explain the 10 year old folder-renaming bug someone pointed out. :-) Seriously, though, if fetchmail/getmail/fdm manage to get it right, why doesn't someone copy the bloody algorithm from any of those 3 programs into TB? I don't think that POP3 bug has been in there for ten years, but I've been bitten by it at least a few times over the past 5 (and I don't tend to delete messages from webmail that often). It's apparently common enough that someone has written an add-in to deal with the duplicates but no one has fixed the root cause.

And don't forget this little 5 years old bug. Now I'm sure it will survive until the end of TB.

The chronology here seems odd. Thunderbird certainly was not a torn-down/rebuilt Eudora. Qualcomm owns Eudora, and in '06 they switched it over to the same platform as (the already existing) Thunderbird.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Penelope

The project is laid out on Mozilla's wiki, and I believe is considered a community project, but you'll notice all the drivers are Qualcomm people.

If you're still interested in contributing to Thunderbird development, especially to improve its UX, then the “parity with Postbox” meta-bug would be a good place to start. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=737347

Fixing https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213945 (and its dependencies) would do more for the benefit of the public than stupid previews in "New Tab" or other similar misfeatures in Firefox.

What more is there for email?

Something more for Thunderbird is integrated instant messaging. I want unified email and instant messaging in one application so I'll have unified contacts and search. The number of instant messaging services supported by Thunderbird seems like it will be limited at first but that will improve with time and perhaps there will be add-ons available to support more services.

Or what about this one right here that many, many people have been asking for, but has been languishing for years because it's not "interesting" to developers?

IMO, Thunderbird stopped being industry-leading or interesting from a UI/UX perspective years ago. As one who uses it on a daily basis, it makes me sad.

Things like Postbox show that the code base can still function well and can be used with some UI/UX love, but since Postbox is a closed project, the majority of extensions, etc. cannot be used with it unless they are "Postbox-specific" versions. (Note, I am not knocking them for this, just stating the facts.)

I just wish we had the Postbox UI with the community of Thunderbird around it...

Lightning, the calendar - addon for thunderbird, is the only aspect of thunderbird development where I feel some work is still needed, but apparently there are no resources available for it. For years.

This may turn out to be somewhat offtopic, I'm not at all sure about the actual relation of the sunbird/lightning and the thunderbird dev team and whether the decision has effects for the lightning development.
However, thunderbird and lightning are so tightly integrated that deficiencies in lightning look like thunderbird problems to me.

I think of tasks administration in lightning:
- support for hierarchical tasks (allow subtasks)
- sync with Google Tasks

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194863 is nine years old and still has status New.

I don't like Thunderbird (hilarious bugs like this one are part of the reason why), but it's what most people at work use on Windows. Mac users primarily use OSX mail.app. I also find the searching majorly FUBAR.

So now that Thunderbird is getting fewer resources, are there any other options? What other clients are people using on windows?

No matter how little you charge for something, some people will always pirate it. Hell, even if you give it away for free they'll still pirate it (if that makes sense).

You mean like the Germans that this week got prison time for selling certain free Adobe and Mozilla software?
http://blog.mozilla.org/security/2012/07/05/subscription-trap-websites/

The absence of Firefox for your device isn't performance related. You can find a few unofficial builds of the source that seem to run fine (and there's no reason why it shouldn't - Opera Mobile runs just fine on a 600MHz ARMv6). Here's the relevant bugzilla thread: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=723946

By the way, the Optimus V is a variant of the Optimus One, is it not? As a fellow Optimus owner, I strongly suggest you to install Cyanogenmod if you haven't done it already. Our phones are shockingly speedier than LG's crapware allows them to.

Mozilla has such a long history of abandoning [lawrencemandel.com] really good ideas [mozilla.org] when they turn out not to be easy.

[Insert cliche about how if you're going to climb a mountain, you'd better be willing to turn around and run if you encounter a pack of hungry polar bears.]

While you certainly have a point, I think Mozilla gets treated unfairly in this kind of thing. You'll never hear about Apple's failed projects; they might have a much worse history than we do with this sort of thing, for all either of us knows.

FYI, the multithreaded bug has been recently resurrected. I'm still not convinced it's possible, but bhackett is one of the best hackers at Mozilla; if anyone can do this, it's him.

Not an OS. Just the Firefox browser running like an OS. "Is this going to be yet another platform for developers to code for?
"No..... We don't want this work to lead to applications that only run atop one platform, or only run in Firefox. That's an important difference between what we're doing and proprietary mobile stacks today: we don't seek a competitive advantage for Mozilla, we seek a competitive advantage for the Web." Read more here: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/b2g/faq/

I didn't learn from TFAs what Mozilla's commitment is to this. It seems like a good idea, but Mozilla has such a long history of abandoning really good ideas when they turn out not to be easy.

Yes, for example, there were a number of anecdotes of MySQL databases using 100% CPU time, and the article mentions the similar Java/Cassandra problem. I suspect these two probably account for the majority of issues encountered.
http://blog.mozilla.org/it/2012/06/30/mysql-and-the-leap-second-high-cpu-and-the-fix/

Also saw mysql go bonkers on two systems, both Ubuntu 12.04, one server, one desktop. Used 100% of a core. Restarting mysql didn't help but rebooting fixed it.

I saw 100% spikes on other servers at the time, but they sorted themselves out.

Apparantly Mozilla saw it also with MySQL and Java.
http://blog.mozilla.org/it/2012/06/30/mysql-and-the-leap-second-high-cpu-and-the-fix/

Based on the description of Ghostery on their website, it seems like their detection is default-permit. They seem to imply that it only catches known forms of tracking (1x1 pixels etc) which means that its developers are playing catch-up with the developers of tracking techniques.

RequestPolicy blocks ALL third-party content by default (well, if you deselect "trusted" sites such as youtube during the plugin installation process), regardless of whether it tries to track you or not.

When it comes to security, as soon as you use a default-permit rule you are doing something wrong, regardless of which Firefox plugin you use.

Directly relevant to this topic, if you use Firefox, try installing the Mozilla add-on Ghostery and monitor the little ghost icon which display a number greater than zero whenever the current web page contains one or more trackers.

If you've never seen it before, it's quite eye-opening how virtually every site contains trackers these days, some sites using large numbers of them. Ghostery blocks every tracker unless told not to, but even if you don't want them blocked, it can be interesting to monitor them and watch how they interact with NoScript.

Good add-on. I wonder whether Chrome and Chromium provide anything equivalent.

You can't get Firefox or VLC for iOS because of Apple's walled garden, both of which are things a non-technical person might reasonably want to use.

With the Mozilla marketplace opening soon for desktop web apps and App Tabs visibly separate in Firefox for over a year, it appears you haven't really picked up any info on other browsers yet.

With the Mozilla marketplace opening soon for desktop web apps and App Tabs visibly separate in Firefox for over a year, it appears you haven't really picked up any info on other browsers yet.

I don't see Microsoft, Mozilla, or anyone other than Chromium rebranders implementing support for the Pepper API used by Google Native Client applets any time soon: "Mozilla is not interested in or working on Pepper at this time."