Slashdot Mirror

SharkLaser writes "Last week it was announced that Google has renewed their search deal with Mozilla. The amount Google paid to Mozilla was surprising: $300 million per year, despite the slightly falling market share of Firefox. Many took this as charity, and for the purpose of advancing the web. Now sources in the bidding process have revealed that Google's main rival in the bid was Microsoft's Bing, along with Yahoo. This bidding war was costly to Google, which is now paying 300% of what they used to, just to be Firefox's default search provider. Mozilla veteran Asa Dotzler is also giving insight into the deal between Google and Mozilla. 'Google started out as a search company. But that's not what they are today. Google's primary business is advertising. Google brought in $9.7B in revenues in Q3'11. 96% of that revenue was from ad sales. Not all traffic to Google ads is 'organic' though. To help drive ad sales, Google pays for traffic to their ads. They paid out $2.21 billion, or 24% of their ad revenues in 'Traffic Acquisition Costs.' That money goes to revenue shares with their AdSense partners and to 'distribution partners' — presumably browser makers, PC OEMs, and mobile OEMs and operators.' Google also pays shareware and freeware distributors to bundle Chrome and Google toolbar with their programs and games."

darthcamaro writes with this news from InternetNews: "Mozilla's Calendar effort has been in a tailspin for years as Firefox and more recently Thunderbird, have been actively pushed forward. Mozilla Lighting which is a calendar add-on for Thunderbird is finally hitting home with a 1.0 release as soon as September 27th. '"We're going to bite the bullet and call either our next release or the one after 1.0," Mozilla developer Philipp Kewisch blogged. "Afterwards we can newly decide on version numbers and I'll tell you one thing: I'm not going to go into the version number trap again. If at some point the next available version number is 2.0, then that's the way it is."'"

An anonymous reader writes "Firefox product manager Asa Dotzler determined that figuring out the 64-bit confusion surrounding Firefox it will be 'near the top' of his to-do list this summer and fall. One could conclude that Mozilla has no idea at this point what people are expecting from a 64-bit version of Firefox, so Dotzler is asking for some feedback. More speed? More security? What about plug-in availability? All of the above, please."

theweatherelectric writes "Mozilla's Robert O'Callahan has investigated the performance differences between Firefox 4 and IE9. He writes, 'As I explained in my last post, Microsoft's PR about "full hardware acceleration" is a myth. But it's true that some graphics benchmarks consistently report better scores for IE9 than for Firefox, so over the last few days I've been looking into that. Below I'll explain the details [of] what I've found about various commonly-cited benchmarks, but the summary is that the performance differences are explained by relatively small bugs in Firefox, bugs in IE9, and bugs in the benchmarks, not due to any major architectural issues in Firefox (as Microsoft would have you believe).'"

theweatherelectric writes "Mozilla's Robert O'Callahan has investigated the performance differences between Firefox 4 and IE9. He writes, 'As I explained in my last post, Microsoft's PR about "full hardware acceleration" is a myth. But it's true that some graphics benchmarks consistently report better scores for IE9 than for Firefox, so over the last few days I've been looking into that. Below I'll explain the details [of] what I've found about various commonly-cited benchmarks, but the summary is that the performance differences are explained by relatively small bugs in Firefox, bugs in IE9, and bugs in the benchmarks, not due to any major architectural issues in Firefox (as Microsoft would have you believe).'"

An anonymous reader let us know that "Mozilla has committed to not implement DRM in Firefox for WebM HTML5 video even though it is theoretically possible. Microsoft has asked Google and the WebM community several other questions that still have not been answered, but this one seems more important: will Google commit to keeping WebM in Chrome DRM-free? Does our community think that is important for the open web and free software?"

An anonymous reader writes "Over on the IE blog Microsoft's Ted Johnson writes, 'With IE9, developers have a fully-hardware accelerated display pipeline that runs from their markup to the screen. Based on their blog posts, the hardware-accelerated implementations of other browsers generally accelerate one phase or the other, but not yet both. Delivering full hardware acceleration, on by default, is an architectural undertaking. When there is a desire to run across multiple platforms, developers introduce abstraction layers and inevitably make tradeoffs which ultimately impact performance and reduce the ability of a browser to achieve 'native' performance. Getting the full value of the GPU is extremely challenging and writing to intermediate layers and libraries instead of an operating system's native support makes it even harder. Windows' DirectX long legacy of powering of the most intensive 3D games has made DirectX the highest performance GPU-based rendering system available.' Some Mozillians hit back in the comments to the IE Blog post and others have written blog posts of their own. PC Mag's Michael Muchmore seems to conclude that IE9 and Firefox 4 are more or less the same (despite the title of his article) while Chrome currently lags behind."

An anonymous reader writes "Over on the IE blog Microsoft's Ted Johnson writes, 'With IE9, developers have a fully-hardware accelerated display pipeline that runs from their markup to the screen. Based on their blog posts, the hardware-accelerated implementations of other browsers generally accelerate one phase or the other, but not yet both. Delivering full hardware acceleration, on by default, is an architectural undertaking. When there is a desire to run across multiple platforms, developers introduce abstraction layers and inevitably make tradeoffs which ultimately impact performance and reduce the ability of a browser to achieve 'native' performance. Getting the full value of the GPU is extremely challenging and writing to intermediate layers and libraries instead of an operating system's native support makes it even harder. Windows' DirectX long legacy of powering of the most intensive 3D games has made DirectX the highest performance GPU-based rendering system available.' Some Mozillians hit back in the comments to the IE Blog post and others have written blog posts of their own. PC Mag's Michael Muchmore seems to conclude that IE9 and Firefox 4 are more or less the same (despite the title of his article) while Chrome currently lags behind."

It was only a matter of time before ISPs began doing more than just redirecting failed DNS requests to their own pages. An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the largest ISP in Hong Kong has started bypassing search results from Firefox's location bar (which typically uses Google), forcing their own search provider (yp.com.hk) onto their users. ... Can an ISP just start re-directing search traffic at will?"

We recently discussed news that YouTube and Vimeo are each testing their own HTML5 video players using the H.264 format. Firefox does not support H.264, and Mozilla's vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver, has now made a post explaining why. Quoting: "For Mozilla, H.264 is not currently a suitable technology choice. In many countries, it is a patented technology, meaning that it is illegal to use without paying license fees to the MPEG-LA. Without such a license, it is not legal to use or distribute software that produces or consumes H.264-encoded content. Indeed, even distributing H.264 content over the internet or broadcasting it over the airwaves requires the consent of the MPEG-LA, and the current fee exemption for free-to-the-viewer internet delivery is only in effect until the end of 2010. These license fees affect not only browser developers and distributors, but also represent a toll booth on anyone who wishes to produce video content." Mozilla developer Robert O'Callahan has written a blog post on the same subject, following a talk he gave on Friday about the importance of open video on the web.

Andorin writes "Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, has published a brief blog post in which he recommends that Firefox users move from using Google as their main search engine to Bing, citing privacy issues. Disregarding the existence of alternative search engines such as Ask and Yahoo, Dotzler asserts that Bing's privacy policy is better than Google's. Dotzler explains the recommendation with a quote from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google: 'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time...' Ars Technica also covers the story."

mjasay writes "Mozilla's Asa Dotzler points to some interesting long-term trends in browser market share, noting that 'browser releases aren't having any major impact on the macro trends,' which suggests that a better IE will likely have little impact on its sliding market share. The most intriguing conclusion from the data, however, is that Firefox could surpass IE market share as early as January 2013 if Firefox continues to gain 5 percent every year, even as IE drops 5 percent each year. In the past, Microsoft might have fought back by tying IE to other products to block competition, but with the EU keeping a close antitrust eye on Microsoft and the US Obama administration keen to make an example of an antitrust bully, Microsoft may have few good options beyond good old fashioned competition, which doesn't seem to be working very well for the Redmond giant, as the market share data suggests. Microsoft's loss of IE market power, in turn, could have serious consequences for the company's efforts to compete with Google on the Web."

daria42 writes with news that Mozilla has released the second alpha build for Firefox 3.1, codenamed "Shiretoko." The new build includes "support for the HTML 5 <video> element" and the ability to "drag and drop tabs between browser windows." ComputerWorld is running a related story about benchmarks shown by Mozilla's Brendan Eich which indicate that Firefox 3.1 will run Javascript faster than Chrome.

dotne writes "Microsoft has submitted Embedded OpenType (EOT) to W3C and a slimy campaign for EOT has been launched. EOT is a DRM layer on top of normal TrueType/Opentype files; EOT ties a font file to a certain web page or site and prevents reuse by other pages/sites. Microsoft's IE has supported EOT for years, but it has largely been ignored due to the clumsiness of having to regenerate font files when a page changes. Now that other browsers are moving to support normal TrueType and OpenType on the web (Safari, Opera, Mozilla, Prince), W3C is faced with a question: should they bless Microsoft's EOT for use on the web? Or, should they encourage normal font files on the web and help break Microsoft's forgotten monopoly?"

monkeymonkey writes "Mozilla has integrated tracing optimization into SpiderMonkey, the JavaScript interpreter in Firefox. This improvement has boosted JavaScript performance by a factor of 20 to 40 in certain contexts. Ars Technica interviewed Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich (the original creator of JavaScript) and Mozilla's vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver. They say that tracing optimization will 'take JavaScript performance into the next tier' and 'get people thinking about JavaScript as a more general-purpose language.' The eventual goal is to make JavaScript run as fast as C code. Ars reports: 'Mozilla is leveraging an impressive new optimization technique to bring a big performance boost to the Firefox JavaScript engine. ...They aim to improve execution speed so that it is comparable to that of native code. This will redefine the boundaries of client-side performance and enable the development of a whole new generation of more computationally-intensive web applications.' Mozilla has also published a video that demonstrates the performance difference." An anonymous reader contributes links the blogs of Eich and Shaver, where they have some further benchmarks.

An anonymous reader points to a mention at MozillaZine of "a screencast by Mozilla developer Mike Beltzner, demonstrating some of the new features in Mozilla Firefox 3, which is due out very soon. Weighing in at under four minutes, the screencast gives a concise overview of why you should be excited about Firefox 3. Due to its visual nature, the screencast shows Firefox's features far more clearly than the many written previews that have been published. A picture really is worth a thousand words."

An anonymous reader writes "Recent articles in the New York Times and at CNET have highlighted the growing concern that Google holds significant power and influence over Firefox's development. In an interview published today, Mozilla's technology strategist Mike Shaver did his best to proclaim Mozilla's independence. Yes, Google pays Mozilla $56 million per year, Google is the default search engine, and supplier of many of the browser's features (anti-phishing, anti-malware, incorrect URL resolution). Shaver insists that in spite of these ties, Mozilla still calls the shots over Firefox's development."

Kelson writes "Mozilla has announced a new initiative to bring Mozilla to the mobile web, including a fully functional mobile version of Firefox (yes, with extensions). The focus will be part of Mozilla 2, the big revision coming after Gecko 1.9 and Firefox 3. Minimo, the previous attempt to port Mozilla to mobile platforms, is apparently dead, but 'has already provided us with valuable information about how Gecko operates in mobile environments, has helped us reduce footprint, and has given us a platform for initial experimentation in user experience.'"

Kelson writes "Mozilla has announced a new initiative to bring Mozilla to the mobile web, including a fully functional mobile version of Firefox (yes, with extensions). The focus will be part of Mozilla 2, the big revision coming after Gecko 1.9 and Firefox 3. Minimo, the previous attempt to port Mozilla to mobile platforms, is apparently dead, but 'has already provided us with valuable information about how Gecko operates in mobile environments, has helped us reduce footprint, and has given us a platform for initial experimentation in user experience.'"

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is reporting that Mozilla Thunderbird is to move to a 'new separate organizational setting' as the Mozilla Foundation focuses more and more on Mozilla Firefox. Citing a blog post by Chief Lizard Wrangler Mitchell Baker, MozillaZine outlines the three possibilities for Thunderbird that are being considered: 'one is to create a entirely new non-profit, which would offer maximum independence for Thunderbird but is organisationally complex. A second option is to create a new subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation for Thunderbird, which would keep the Mozilla Foundation involved but may mean that Thunderbird continues to be neglected in favour of Firefox. A final option is to recast Thunderbird as community project, similar to SeaMonkey, and set up a small independent services and consulting company to continue development. However, there are concerns over how the Thunderbird product, project and company would interact'. Lead Thunderbird developer Scott MacGregor favours the third option."

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is reporting that Mozilla Thunderbird is to move to a 'new separate organizational setting' as the Mozilla Foundation focuses more and more on Mozilla Firefox. Citing a blog post by Chief Lizard Wrangler Mitchell Baker, MozillaZine outlines the three possibilities for Thunderbird that are being considered: 'one is to create a entirely new non-profit, which would offer maximum independence for Thunderbird but is organisationally complex. A second option is to create a new subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation for Thunderbird, which would keep the Mozilla Foundation involved but may mean that Thunderbird continues to be neglected in favour of Firefox. A final option is to recast Thunderbird as community project, similar to SeaMonkey, and set up a small independent services and consulting company to continue development. However, there are concerns over how the Thunderbird product, project and company would interact'. Lead Thunderbird developer Scott MacGregor favours the third option."

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine reports that Netscape 9 has been announced. The most interesting thing is how they seem to be re-evaluating many of the decisions they made with Netscape 8. Netscape 9 will be developed in-house (Netscape 8 was outsourced) and it will be available for Windows, OSX, and Linux (Netscape 8 was Windows only). Although Netscape 9 will be a standalone browser, the company is also considering resuming support for Netscape 7.2, the last suite version with an email client and Web page editor. It remains to be seen whether Netscape will reverse the disastrous decision to include the Internet Explorer rendering engine as an alternative to Gecko but given that there's no IE for OS X or Linux, here's hoping. After a series of substandard releases, could Netscape be on the verge of making of a version of their browser that enhances the awesomeness of Firefox, rather than distracts from it?"

Second five-eighth writes "The Amiga is alive and sort of well (you can get the OS, but not the hardware), and Ars Technica has a review of the final version of AmigaOS 4. New features include limited memory protection, 3D display drivers, an improved suite of applications (the bounty for porting Mozilla to AmigaOS has yet to be claimed), and much better 680x0 emulation. Perhaps most telling, the reviewer was able to move his daily writing workflow from Windows XP to AmigaOS 4.0: 'Not only was it possible to do this, but having done so I feel no urge to switch back. It is nice to not have any distractions when working — there is no waiting for the system to swap out when switching between major applications, no constant reminders for updates or to download new virus definitions and even if the worst happens and the system locks up, it takes only seven seconds to reboot and get back to a functional desktop.'"

Chris Beard was "point" on this interview, but got help writing his answers to your questions from other Mozilla and Firefox people. (Since this was sort of a "companion" interview to one we did just before it with MSIE dude Dean Hachamovitch, you might want to look at the two Q&A posts side by side and compare the way they answered.)

1) cake
by Anonymous Coward

How was the cake from MS?

Chris: It was a nice surprise actually, and we think it's great that Microsoft is taking an interest in browser development again. Of course there wasn't nearly enough of it to go around since there are thousands of people worldwide working together to make Firefox possible, but those of us at the Mountain View office made sure to enjoy it for everybody :) .

2) FireFox 2 Rendering Speed Compared to IE7
by MSTCrow5429

Dear Chris Beard, I have used Firefox since before 1.0, and one thing that Internet Explorer has always beaten FF on is rendering speed. With the release of IE7, Microsoft has made IE at least feel faster than before, and it certainly has adopted many features that made FF such a stand-out, security not withstanding. I would like to know if Mozilla has made it a priority in the past to give FF a rendering speed competitive with or faster than IE, and if we will see FF becoming competitive with or faster than IE in rendering web pages in future releases? Thanks.

Chris: Performance continues to be a high priority for us, and we test every nightly build to make sure that we're getting faster, not slower than our previous releases. We're really happy with Firefox 2, it's a very solid release with three or four times the amount of fixes and work as went into 1.5. We're hearing a lot of positive feedback about the performance of Firefox 2 as compared to Internet Explorer 7, especially on interactive web sites (even Robert Scoble recently blogged that "Firefox 2 was a LOT faster on AJAX". Zimbra, who makes a really rich web-based productivity suite also recently posted that by their internal tests, "Firefox was more than twice as fast as IE 7 and four times faster than IE 6".

But we're still looking to do better, and the next version of Gecko (the platform which is used for rendering web pages) has several improvements to our graphics infrastructure and layout engine which should continue to speed up our page rendering time. Brendan Eich recently blogged about Mozilla 2, which will contain even more improvements for performance. So yes, it's definitely something we have as a continual priority.

3) Competition
by Phroggy

What do you feel are the greatest strengths and weaknesses of Opera?

What do you feel are the greatest strengths and weaknesses of Safari?

What do you feel are the greatest strengths of IE7? (I won't ask about weaknesses...)

Chris: First of all, I just want to say that we're totally thrilled to see a revitalized ecosystem around the Web experience. That was our primary goal from the inception of Mozilla (to promote choice and innovation on the Web) and I think it's clear that users now have more choice and the Web is a much more innovative place.

Specifically and personally, I think that Opera is a great tool for fans of those really big swiss-army knives. It's an everything-in-one approach, much like the original Mozilla Suite and Seamonkey, and that totally works for some people. However, the experience can be quite overwhelming for the average Web user.

For Safari, I think they've got some excellent system integration. It's really nice that they can leverage Keychain and Address Book like they do, and of course, it's a Cocoa based application which gives it a bit of UI integration that we don't yet have. I'm a little disappointed that they're so focused on making the entire experience Apple-centric, though, and would love to see more ability for users to customize their experience and the applications they can integrate with Safari.

IE7 has taken a lot of steps forward from IE6 and it's nice to see them following along with the features introduced by Opera, Safari and Firefox -- and that have made Firefox so popular; that's a huge vindication for us, and we're flattered to be imitated. They've shipped some improvements to the standard Windows printing platform which I'm a little jealous of, but hopefully those will be part of Vista so that all Windows applications can take advantage of them, too.

4) Future?
by nine-times

What does the long-term future have in store for Firefox? Is the web browser going to become more feature rich, or is the Mozilla team going to aim at keeping Firefox very minimalist and optimized? If the former, what features do you think will help advance the user experience of the web? If the latter, how will you differentiate Firefox from its competitors and maintain the brand in absence of flashy new features?

Chris: The Firefox Charter states that our goal is to provide the most useful browser to the largest possible market while maintaining a simple interface that focuses on helping users accomplish their online tasks. That means adding the features which we think are useful for accomplishing tasks, but making sure that they're not thrust into users' faces unless they want them. We think people are doing more interactive things online these days, and are visiting more places than the average web user visited 4 or 5 years ago, so we're looking at features that help people navigate their "local web" and are also looking at providing tools for helping them act on the information they find there. If we design them right, they'll "just work" like users expect, much like we feel the Search Suggestion and Spell Checking features of Firefox 2 "just work".

5) Tackling The DOM
by x3nos

With the most recent releases of FF 2.0 and IE7 almost simultaneously, from a person who does QA for a web deliverable software company, trying to debug and locate the source of inconsistencies in the way that FF 2.0 and IE7 handles DOM - what steps is the Mozilla foundation taking to help blaze the trail for some kind of standardization in DOM? I realize that IE has its own version of DOM, but is there hope that 1) Mozilla will better respond to erratic DOM programming from those that develop for IE or that 2) Mozilla will somehow influence the Microsoft camp to come over to standards?

Chris: Compatibility with IE is something we look very seriously at (in all areas, not just the DOM API) and in the obvious cases where there's no specification (de facto or "standard") that dictates what the right thing is -- we do our best to match IE's behavior. But we also realize that trying to be bug-for-bug compatible with IE is a dead end. So, we work with the W3C and groups like the WHATWG to find the common ground and a resolution that benefits everyone. We also actively promote and encourage developing to open standards, but Microsoft's decisions in this area are obviously out of our direct control.

6) Firefox Features
by Eideewt

Firefox was created partly as an alternative to the bloated Mozilla suite. Now as Firefox matures, it too is gaining features. While all of them are fairly useful, some, such as spell check, web feed previews, and session restoration, might be better implemented as extensions. Firefox is still a fairly lightweight browser, and I appreciate Firefox 2.0's improved response speed, but I still worry that Firefox is becoming the kind of software that I hate.

How committed is the team to keeping Firefox's core as small as possible, and what, if any, features might be turned into extensions in the future?

6A) Re:Firefox Features
by diamondsw

As an add on to that question, since you can distribute extensions with the installer, why not just make these "official" extensions rather than building them into the app? Then people could easily switch them off or substitute third party ones (think tab management).

You've created a great extension management system, yet aren't using it yourselves.

Chris: A lot of the answer for question 4 here applies as well. Our community is surprisingly conservative, and we ask ourselves a lot of tough questions about whether or not a feature is really needed and used by a majority of users before we add it into Firefox. Spellchecking is a perfect example. As more and more users move to Web-based e-mail and other types of online content creation, a feature like inline spellchecking just makes sense. For those who don't need it, it's mostly out of the way and costs them nothing in terms of usability. But when you do need it, it's there, and it helps.

We're also encouraging more and more feature development as extensions, and promoting that work through programs like Mozilla Labs, as a way of allowing us to test things out before accepting them into the main product itself.

I don't know if there's a need for "official" extensions, but we are planning on making it easier to understand which extensions have been extensively tested by the Mozilla community for performance and compatibility issues, as part of an upcoming upgrade to the Firefox add-ons site.

7) Add In Validation
by Jarhead1972

Chris;

Does FF worry that an unscrupulous add-on developer could produce what could be a click-fraud capable bot net hidden in an add-on that could be promoted and distributed by FF team? What steps are taken to prevent it given the add-ons are not signed or hosted by FF?

Chris: We've got a committed team of contributors who keep a close eye on recommended extensions distributed by Mozilla. And we continue to build out the community and tools available at addons.mozilla.org to keep up with the increasing activity and demand for Firefox add-ons. We're also working on a major revision to this site that we'll be launching soon.

8) Old Bugs
by SeaFox

Has the Mozilla team considered adopting timeframes to the resolution of bugs, no matter what the severity? I've seen bugs on Bugzilla that, while minor, have been open since before the browser was named Firefox, some without any comment besides the initial confirmation they exist. Why do issues stay unaddressed after multiple major releases?

Chris: We're always evaluating and prioritizing the most important bugs. Thousands of bugs are of next to no consequence for most users and those will be prioritized below the bugs that affect large numbers of users. Putting some timeframe on bugs would encourage bug fixing around age rather than severity or visibility and that prioritization doesn't best serve the needs of our users.

Of course, we do understand that there are some issues which, while they're not a high priority for most Firefox users, might be very important to one or a small group of users and that's why we leave these Bugzilla reports open and we encourage interested people to become a part of the Mozilla project by contributing fixes for even the lower priority issues.

9) Firefox and Macs
by chrisgeleven

When will Firefox get some much needed love on Mac OS X? The toolbars look hideous, the form widgets don't look aqua like, and there is no integration into OS X services (like the dictionary). Plus there is always a need for speed improvements.

Chris: It turns out that it's hard to find developers with rich experience in application development on Mac, but we'd be happy if any passionate open-source Slashdot Mac users want to help out! We're constantly improving our platform support and Gecko 1.9 will have support for Cocoa which will improve our form widget rendering as well as the ability to integrate with OSX services.

10) Future of Thunderbird
by Kelson

Thunderbird, as a companion to Firefox, seems to be getting the "also-ran" treatment. Releases tend to trail Firefox releases by weeks or months, and there seems to be very little promotion or marketing.

Do you expect the influx of Eudora developers to change this? Are there any plans for more coordination between Firefox and Thunderbird in terms of scheduling, marketing and promotion?

Chris: Thunderbird has achieved a solid position in the email client market, with several million active users worldwide. As you note, we're focused as an organization on Firefox but we're also starting to look and think about what modern communications should look like online. Especially as we see more and more people making the Web their primary communications medium. Thunderbird has a loyal following and has made inroads into the enterprise, so any future planning around Thunderbird will take those factors into account.

-----

Thanks to everyone for all the great questions and remember that the conversation doesn't have to end here. As an open source project you can reach us through the newsgroups and other forums, or join us in our global effort to make the Web better for everyone.

grandgator writes, "Hyped by a good deal of fanfare, outfitted with some new features, and now available for download, Firefox 2.0 has already passed 2 million downloads in less than 24 hours. However, a growing number of users are reporting bugs, widening memory leaks, unexpected instability, poor compatibility, and an overall experience that is inferior to that offered by prior versions of the browser. Expanding on these ideas, this list compiles nine reasons why it might be a good idea to stick with 1.5 until the debut of 3.0, skipping the "poorly badged" 2.0 release completely." OK, maybe it's 10 reasons. An anonymous reader writes, "SecurityFocus reports an unpatched highly critical vulnerability in Firefox 2.0. This defect has been known since June 2006 but no patch has yet been made available. The developers claimed to have fixed the problem in 1.5.0.5 according to Secunia, but the problem still exists in 2.0 according to SecurityFocus (and I have witnessed the crash personally). If security is the main reason users should switch to Firefox, how do we explain known vulnerabilities remaining unpatched across major releases?"
Update: 10/30 12:57 GMT by KD : Jesse Ruderman wrote in with this correction. "The article claims that Firefox 2 shipped with a known security hole This is incorrect; the hole is fixed in both Firefox 1.5.0.7 and Firefox 2. The source of the confusion is that the original version of this report demonstrated two crash bugs, one of which was a security hole and the other of which was just a too-much-recursion crash. The security hole has been fixed but we're still trying to figure out the best way to fix the too-much-recursion crash. The report has been updated to clear up the confusion."

linuxci writes "Firefox 2.0 has had over two million downloads in 24 hours with a peak rate of over 30 downloads a second. This means Firefox is well on track to beat IE7's three million in four days. Of course stats don't equal users but it's interesting to see that the demand for Firefox is currently outstripping IE."

A number of readers alerted us to the [link removed] day-early [accidental] posting of Firefox version 2.0. At this writing the top page at mozilla.com still doesn't mention its availability. One reader pointed us to [link removed] a mirror and another recommended a comprehensive review of Firefox 2.0, with many screenshots, over at mozillalinks.org. Update by RM: - links above removed at request of Mozilla release people. They asked us to link to this note instead. They're only asking us to wait until Tuesday Afternoon (U.S. Pacific Time) for the official 2.0 download, which isn't long. (Patience is a virtue, etc.)

An anonymous reader writes "mozillaZine is reporting that over two-thirds of British universities and colleges have installed Mozilla or Firefox on their campus computers. They cite an open source survey by OSS Watch that also shows rising support for Mozilla Thunderbird, Moodle and Octave, though a decline for OpenOffice and LaTeX. Predictably, all open source offerings are blown away by Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office's 100% deployment rates."

An anonymous reader writes "mozillaZine is reporting that over two-thirds of British universities and colleges have installed Mozilla or Firefox on their campus computers. They cite an open source survey by OSS Watch that also shows rising support for Mozilla Thunderbird, Moodle and Octave, though a decline for OpenOffice and LaTeX. Predictably, all open source offerings are blown away by Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office's 100% deployment rates."

kbrosnan writes "Are you a fan of Firefox? Want to spread the word to a friend who hasn't heard of it yet? If you can convince just one person to switch to Firefox before September 15th, you'll both be immortalized in Firefox 2.0's source code."

cyclomedia writes "While more and more platforms are getting (or aiming for) Firefox ports, the trunk itself seems to be going the other way. In an effort to clean up the API calls used and reduce the codesize a patch was posted at Bugzilla removing support from pre-W2k versions of Windows. There's a fiery discussion going on over at the Mozillazine forums about this after a counter bug was filed. The official position appears to be that Firefox 3.0 will maintain this un-compatibility, but developers are, obviously, free to work on a separate Win 98 compatible 'port.'"

Mini-Geek writes "Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.3 has been released. As with previous 1.5.0.x patches, 1.5.0.3 can be downloaded as a small, incremental download. From the article: 'This update fixes a publicly disclosed denial of service weakness. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this version. The bugfixes previously planned for Firefox 1.5.0.3 were shifted to 1.5.0.4, and a quick update was released shortly after the recent to address the publicly reported issue.'"

Mini-Geek writes "Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.3 has been released. As with previous 1.5.0.x patches, 1.5.0.3 can be downloaded as a small, incremental download. From the article: 'This update fixes a publicly disclosed denial of service weakness. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this version. The bugfixes previously planned for Firefox 1.5.0.3 were shifted to 1.5.0.4, and a quick update was released shortly after the recent to address the publicly reported issue.'"

Mini-Geek writes "Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.3 has been released. As with previous 1.5.0.x patches, 1.5.0.3 can be downloaded as a small, incremental download. From the article: 'This update fixes a publicly disclosed denial of service weakness. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this version. The bugfixes previously planned for Firefox 1.5.0.3 were shifted to 1.5.0.4, and a quick update was released shortly after the recent to address the publicly reported issue.'"

Mini-Geek writes "MozillaZine is reporting that Lightning 0.1 is released. Lightning is a new Mozilla-made calendar extension for Mozilla Thunderbird that will eventually (once it becomes more mature and stable) be built into Thunderbird. From the article: 'The Lightning Project is a redesign of the Calendar component. Its goal is to tightly integrate calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Mozilla Thunderbird.'"

TeachingMachines writes "A stable developer preview release of XULRunner 1.8.0.1 is now available. Based on the Firefox 1.5.0.1 codebase, it is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. From the Mozilla Developer Center (beta): "XULRunner is a Mozilla runtime package that can be used to bootstrap XUL+XPCOM applications that are as rich as Firefox and Thunderbird. It will provide mechanisms for installing, upgrading, and uninstalling these applications. XULRunner will also provide libxul, a solution which allows the embedding of Mozilla technologies in other projects and products." Help with programming with XUL and its related technologies can be found at XULPlanet. Beginning programmers will benefit especially from the XUL Tutorial. Also check out the XUL Element Reference to get an idea of what's available. "

A couple of other resources are worth mentioning. First, there is the XUL Programmer's Reference Manual which covers interface elements for XUL version 1.0. "Rapid Application Development with Mozilla" is available for download at Bruce Perens' Open Source Series page. If you get the book, make sure to check out the errata. Unfortunately, the author Nigel McFarlane has passed away, so this is likely the final version. One final reference, "Creating Applications with Mozilla," is available here.

For those individuals who are looking for an extremely powerful application framework that is relatively easy to use, Mozilla is definitely worth a look.

SenseOfHumor writes "The Firefox memory leak is not a bug. It's a feature! The 'feature' is how the pages are cached in a tabbed environment." From the article: "To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited less than 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last five session history entries for each tab. This is a lot of data. If you have a lot of tabs, Firefox's memory usage can climb dramatically. It's a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web."

Mini-Geek writes "MozillaZine is reporting that Mozilla Camino 1.0 has been released. The latest release includes a new tab bar appearance, pause and resume for downloads, improved advertisement and popup blocking, enhanced certificate support, bundled java embedding plugin, form fill from Address Book and inline search of history and bookmarks. See the Camino 1.0 Release Notes for more details."

chrisd writes "Firefox module owner Ben Goodger has written what I think is a very interesting post about how Firefox came into being. It goes into details unheard of to date about the inner workings at Netscape and he fills in a timeline spanning from the open sourcing of Netscape to the release just recently of Firefox 1.5. Especially interesting and poignant are comments like this: 'I was told I could not expect to use Open Source tricks against folk who were employed by the Company (all hail!). I held true to my beliefs and refused to review low quality patches. I was almost fired. Others weren't so lucky.'. Anyhow, I consider this required reading for any fan of the Firefox browser." Or even just a programmer. Worth reading.

An anonymous reader writes "The Mozilla Team has quietly enabled a new feature in Firefox that parses 'ping' attributes to anchor tags in HTML. Now links can have a 'ping' attribute that contains a list of servers to notify when you click on a link. Although link tracking has been done using redirects and Javascript, this new "feature" allows notification of an unlimited and uncontrollable number of servers for every click, and it is not noticeable without examining the source code for a link before clicking it."

CTho9305 writes "SeaMonkey 1.0 Beta is out! Since the alpha release in September, it has picked up numerous bugfixes, a new logo, and a few cool features (also discussed on the SeaMonkey blog). For those who don't know, SeaMonkey is the continuation of the Mozilla Suite after the Mozilla Foundation ceased shipping new releases, so if you liked Mozilla or Netscape be sure to try it."

An anonymous reader writes "Many people have complained about Firefox's memory use. Federico Mena-Quintero has a proposal for reducing the amount of memory used to store images, which, in his proof of concept code, 'reduced the cumulative memory usage... by a factor of 5.5.'."

Jasper Bryant-Greene writes "It doesn't look like the official website has updated yet, but Firefox 1.5 RC3 has been just been released. MozillaZine has the scoop."

Anonymous Cow writes "Almost a month after the release of Firefox 1.5 beta 1, the second beta of Firefox 1.5 has been released. Firefox 1.5b2 can be downloaded from Mozilla.org. A changelog outlining the changes in this release is also available. The official announcement is over at MozillaZine." From the announcement: " This release does not contain any major new features since Beta 1. Improvements to automated update system, Web site rendering and performance, along with several security fixes are included in this release. Beta 1 users that want to help test software update, should wait for the automatic update to be triggered sometime in the next few days. The incremental update from Beta 1 to Beta 2 is 700K bytes."

Juha-Matti Laurio writes "MozillaZine has a report about new Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 release. Among other changes, this minor release includes fixes for the Linux command line URL parsing security flaw. Thunderbird 1.0.7 can be downloaded from the Thunderbird product page. 'Extremely Critical' Secunia advisory will be updated very soon."

hackajar writes "Firefox 1.0.7 has been released today. From the announcement "Fixes are included for the international domain name (IDN) link buffer overflow vulnerability and the Linux command line URL parsing flaw. There are also other security and stability changes, including a fix for a crash experienced when using certain Proxy Auto-Config scripts. In addition, some regressions introduced by previous 1.0.x security updates have been resolved.""

An anonymous reader writes "SeaMonkey 1.0 Alpha was released last week. Users of the Mozilla Suite or Netscape should check it out - it contains numerous new features and bugfixes when compared to Mozilla 1.7, but offers the same basic look and feel. There are a few screenshots on the SeaMonkey blog showing off some of the features. For those who don't know, SeaMonkey is the continuation of the Mozilla Suite after the Mozilla Foundation ceased shipping new releases."

comforteagle writes "Scott Moschella, from Attack of the Show!, set out to make The Gimp a little friendlier with a simple UI make-over, creating GimpShop. Despite an outcry from some developers, users have picked it up with passion. Howard Wen has interviewed Scott about why he did this. From the interview: 'I've always thought that GIMP was just as powerful as Photoshop. My way of proving it was to make GIMP work as close to Photoshop as I possibly could, given my limited programming experience.' As more Windows/Mac users discover powerful open source applications are they bound (slashdot disc.) to make more discoveries of this kind?" Update: 09/16 18:48 GMT by Z : Some users have pointed out this is basically an update to a previous discussion we've had. Link added for the sake of completeness.

QT writes "Ars Technica has a lengthy but useful introduction to developing Firefox extensions with GNU/Linux. This guide comes hot on the heels of the RC for Beta 1 of Firefox. The article is a little more thorough than necessary, but I can't complain about anything that spurs Firefox development." From the article: "What can you do with a Firefox Extension? Firefox extensions can modify the Firefox user interface. This includes adding buttons to tool bars and menus; changing fonts, colors, and icons; capturing events in the client interface like page loads and clicks; and modifying web pages after the browser loads them and before the user sees them. All of this functionality comes with the aspect-oriented facility of overlays. Extensions also have as much access to the file system as the user running Firefox. Extensions can add protocol handlers, hooking actions to URLs like icq://, aim://, or stantz://. Extensions have UniversalXPConnect privileges, allowing them to harness any XPCOM component. Firefox comes with a rich library of XPCOM components that permit your extension to drive very low-level functionality like sockets from Javascript. You can also augment the XPCOM library with Firefox extensions by adding Javascript, linkable libraries, or XPIDL."

Juha-Matti Laurio writes "Plans are afoot to remove support for SSL version 2.0 in Mozilla Firefox, reports MozillaZine portal. Mozilla Foundation is eager to disable support for SSL 2.0 and have all Firefox installations use only the newer and more secure SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0 protocols." From the post: "Netscape Communications Corporation introduced SSL 2.0 with the launch of Netscape Navigator 1.0 in 1994. Netscape Navigator 2.0 included support for SSL 3.0 when it was released in 1996. The specification for TLS 1.0, essentially a standardized version of SSL 3.0 with some differences, was published in 1999."