“We believe a Mac OS X 10.5 minimum will allow us to provide the best experience possible to our users,” Mozilla Mac programmer Josh Aas said Tuesday in a mailing list announcement. Firefox is built on a browser engine called Gecko, and the upcoming version 1.9.3 will have technology for Mac OS X 10.4 and before removed, he said.

Mozilla is working on an update to Firefox 3.6, which uses Gecko 1.9.2, that puts plug-ins such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight into a separate memory location in an effort to increase stability. The group hopes to release a beta version of that Firefox version by the end of March.

Full article at CNET

Luckily for Mozilla, a relatively small sliver of the mobile phone-toting population actually has one of the two compatible devices, so there’s time to smooth out Firefox before it matures on another mobile platform. Windows Mobile is slated to be next, with Android to follow. You can download Firefox 1.0 for Maemo here, and read more details in Mozilla’s blog post.

Full article at CNET

Specially when the changes are so minimal. Looking at the before and after images requires Sherlockian powers of deduction. [..] The changes are very subtle and, if you ask me, they are as good as the original intentions of the logo. I can’t say it’s an improvement because I don’t think there wasn’t anything in the previous one, merely two years old, that needed 14 iterations to improve. This is simply two ways of rendering a fox over a non-descript globe. You can make it more furry, you can make it less furry. You can have more land, you can have less land. You can have more shine, you can have less shine. Etcetera. Both options are perfectly acceptable.

Full article at Brand New

This makes Mozilla projects like Firefox a safe place for an open-source community to congregate, contribute, and win. For this reason, Microsoft and Google are going to struggle to compete with Firefox, because both have too much vested, corporate interest in steering the Web to their own parochial interests, whereas Mozilla can exist solely to make Firefox better for the world.

More information at CNET

Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is specifically for testing purposes and the developers recommends that it is not used for production or daily user. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and is available to download in various languages. There will be a number of other betas released before the final Firefox 3.1 which is due by the end of the year. (jk/c’t)

Continue reading News javascript engine for Firefox 3.1 beta

I’ve long complained that I, as a non-developer, can’t do much to influence open-source projects. Mozilla, however, is tearing down that wall. That’s true innovation, in my book.

Keep reading Firfox determined to show that open source can innovate

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.

Firefox 3 – the final release – is due later this month. But definitely check out the new Release Candidate if you’re the cutting edge type. As always, it’s a free download and meant for people that understand there will be bugs and glitches before the final release.

Get RC2 Now

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.

Read More: Firefox 3 Timeline (The Register)

Download Day – as Mozilla dubs it – will begin the minute Firfox 3 is generally available and continue for 24 hours. Ahead of this release, expected in mid-to-late June, Mozilla has set up a website. This encourages people to organise Download Day parties, to run around collecting sign-up pledges at their university or place of work, and to place Download Day buttons on their websites.

Read More: Firfox and Guiness Book of World Records (The Register)

“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 article at ComputerWorld.

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