Firefox for the Maemo 5 platform has a few interesting conceits that set it apart from other mobile browsers, like Opera Mobile and Opera Mini. Mozilla is banking on the uniqueness of its claim to fame–third-party, customizable browser extensions–to help its browser win mobile market share. Add-ons, after all, helped make Firefox the top browser alternative to Internet Explorer in the desktop space. To punctuate the importance of add-ons for Firefox’s mobile browser, Mozilla also pushed out on Friday the general release of its bookmark and history-syncing extension, Weave Sync 1.0, for both desktop and mobile.

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Mozilla’s Firefox seems to hold a place dear in web designers’ and developers’ hearts as a bastion of open sourceness; to be honest, I’m not the most well versed in these matters so I don’t know if there are better open source browser options that have more street cred than Firefox — I’m sure there is some browser in beta called Cucumber (or whatever) that is more hardcore. But I digress. Point is that with Firefox there are no secrets, no here-is-the-latest-thing-and-you-will-like-it, it’s all about involving others. And their process to upgrade their huggable, foxy icon to coincide with the release of Firefox 3.5 was no different. Perhaps to an excruciating degree.

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In reality, I doubt there’s much separation between Mozilla, the corporation, and Mozilla, the foundation, but there is a world of difference between how Mozilla presents itself to the open-source development community and the most community-friendly of open-source companies, like Red Hat. Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, and money always seems to take second place to community with Mozilla.

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The Mozilla Foundation has released a first beta version of Firefox 3.1. This new version of the open source web browser shows some fundamental changes, including the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which adds just in time compilation and speeds up JavaScript execution when using web applications.

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Indeed, it’s this latter innovation – true community feedback on what can and should be in the browser, and then the development process to deliver it – that I find most striking. Mozilla is asking everyone – not merely developers – to get involved. When was the last time you saw a company do that or, more importantly, provide the means to actually be able to do it?

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For Mac/PC/Linux etc.

The programmers and development teams at Mozilla are working hard to get things flawless with the Firfox 3 browser. To reach their lofty goals they are releasing yet another release candidate. Dubbed Firfox 3 RC2, it has a few fixes from the first release candidate. Unlike the first release which might have had some very unstable features still, the RC2 is definitely a stable browser to test out and a reliable Firfox download.

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“It’ll be ready when it’s ready.”

That’s the basic response from Mozilla.

Mozilla decided to release a second release candidate for Firefox 3.0 at a meeting on Tuesday, in response to the discovery of 10 performance and stability bugs. The alternative would have been to patch these potential “showstoppers” after the browser shipped. But another round of testing is the safer option – not least from the standpoint of public relations. This will probably set back the official launch and Firfox download options by five days or so.

Continue Reading “Firefox 3 Timeline” »

Mozilla aims to make Firefox 3 a record breaker. It wants the release of the next version of its flagship open source browser to be accompanied by a record for the most software downloads in a single 24-hour period.

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Although Mozilla Corp. hasn’t even released the final version of Firefox 3.0, its developers are already hammering out plans for the next edition, which may come as soon as late 2008 and subsequently available on Firfox Download, according to posts written by company executives.

“There were a number of features that we held back from Firfox 3 because they weren’t quite ready, but they were nearly complete,” said Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering at Mozilla.

Continue Reading “Firfox 3.1 to be released later this year” »