firefox

Forget Facebook. The Web's platform is Firefox

Correction: This post was updated to correct the time line of John Lilly's meeting with Jerry Yang.

I spent an hour Thursday with John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, and Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of Engineering, and learned a few things. For one thing, I once argued that Mozilla should hire more "capitalist pigs." John's riposte Thursday was, "We have more capitalist pigs than you think."

John didn't mean that Mozilla is just another commercial open-source company. It's not. Clarifying that comment, John went on to point out that four out of its five executives are entrepreneurs. In other words, though Mozilla is tiny compared to its proprietary competition (and big by open-source project standards), Mozilla's team and community are well-architected to compete. It's not going to fall over at Microsoft's feet anytime soon.

But while competing, Mozilla is heavily focused on its customers first and its competitors second. As John indicated to me:

Our question is always, how do we grow in a way that is leveraged? We always lead with the user experience and think about the money secondarily.

That user experience is starting to evolve beyond today's browsing experience. The most interesting topic discussed in our meeting was just how compelling Mozilla's Firefox will increasingly be as the platform for much that happens on the Web. Forget Facebook, MySpace, the iPhone, and other so-called platforms. Firefox could well prove to be the most disruptive Web platform on the market. Here's why.… Read more

Run Firefox betas without losing your cool

One of the more useful tools that came with Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 was a toolbar button that easily switched between the beta and the previous stable iteration of the program, IE7. Nobody seems to have written a Firefox extension that does that--yet--but there are still several ways to have separate installations of Firefox 3 beta and the stable Firefox 2 on your computer, for both Mac and PC.

I covered one way Windows users can have dual installations back when FF3 beta 1 came out. Using PortableApps' Firefox 3 Portable beta 4, you can keep your Firefox 2 … Read more

gDocsBar now turns Google Docs into a Web archiving tool

Remember gDocsBar (download), that handy Firefox extension we checked out a few months back? It got a pretty neat update today that lets you do things that might not have been originally intended for Google's Documents and Spreadsheets service. The first is called Webclips, which is a fancy way of saying automatic copy and paste. If you find a big chunk of content you like, you can simple copy it, then drag it into the toolbar. gDocsBar will create a new document out of whatever you've highlighted, and preserve, as much as possible, the formatting and links.

The … Read more

Get your hands on Firefox 3 beta 4

Claiming a massive number of fixes, Mozilla has released Firefox 3 beta 4 (download for Windows and Mac). This version is more stable than previous FF3 betas, but it also showcases some of the more interesting new features that we'd been promised, but until now hadn't yet arrived.

Of the more than 900 changes and fixes, four of the most useful are the add-on finder, the full-page zoom, the one-click site info, and greater cross-platform integration. Extensions are handled the same way as in FF2: users can click on an XPI and it will automatically be saved to … Read more

Firefox 3 beta, memory usage, and overlooked extensions

The big news today in the software world is a new beta version for Mozilla Firefox. The world has been sitting on Version 2 for almost a year and a half now, but the open-source foundation is making sure that Version 3 is fully baked before releasing a final version.

The latest beta release promises "more than 900 enhancements from the previous beta," but a large number of those improvements are back end and mostly invisible. Two significant features in the fourth beta that I appreciate are: an improved password manager toolbar that replaces the old semifunctional dialog; … Read more

RealPlayer vulnerable in Internet Explorer

If you use the RealPlayer on Internet Explorer, watch out. Researcher Elazar Broad has posted to the Full Disclosure mailing list a so-called heap overflow vulnerability that makes it possible for an attacker to modify heap blocks after they are freed and overwrite certain registers. This could allow code execution on a compromised machine. The vulnerability affects all versions of RealPlayer running under Internet Explorer.

Exploit code for this flaw has not yet been made public.

Without a patch from RealPlayer, security experts recommend disabling the killbit for the following ActiveX ClassIDs:

2F542A2E-EDC9-4BF7-8CB1-87C9919F7F93 CFCDAA03-8BE4-11CF-B84B-0020AFBBCCFA Please note that disabling the killbits … Read more

Equal opportunity open source

I just downloaded Mozilla's Firefox 3.0 Beta 4, and loved what I saw:

See that? Firefox is localized into a wide range of languages, which is great. But what I appreciate even more is that it treats Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux as peers. In Microsoft's world, software runs solely or best on Microsoft's operating system, database, etc. Given the chance, most proprietary software companies behave like this.

Not Mozilla. Not Eclipse. Not Zimbra. Etc.

There's something about open source that speaks up for the potential user who isn't part of the mainstream. Somebody, somewhere, is like that person and has contributed the code to bring the outsider in.… Read more

Mozilla releases Firefox 3.0 beta 4

The fourth beta of the Firefox 3.0 browser (download Firefox 3 beta 4 for Windows or Mac, (English-US) from Download.com) was released Monday and includes more than 900 enhancements over the previous beta, Mozilla announced.

The creator of the open-source browser said the new beta includes improvements to performance and memory usage, fixes for stability, and platform-specific enhancements. Some of the enhancements include a new download manager to make locating downloads easier; a full page zoom feature that allows you to zoom in and out of pages more easily; and integration for Vista, Mac OS X, and Linux … Read more

Bold, stylish Zune themes are a knockout

Microsoft started it. And this time we can all give thanks.

The Seattle giant's search for a sleek, cool iPod competitor produced the Zune, and the Zune's youth culture appeal produced Microsoft's Zune-flavored desktop theme. Couple that with the Firefox Zune theme created by the prolific theme meister Brett Bodine--also known as Bodizzle--and you've got yourself a bold, sleek screenscape in orange and black gradations, with just enough strokes of white for emphasis.

iPhone rules pose Net neutrality, antitrust concerns

Apple's recent announcement of the iPhone application software development kit is drawing criticism from Net neutrality activists. While the company has previously angered many for its practice of bricking unlocked phones, it is now being accused of anticompetitive behavior.

Could Apple take Comcast's place as the poster child for the Save The Internet movement? Furthermore, by blocking competing Web browser Firefox, could Apple draw Microsoft-like antitrust lawsuits?

Control

Thursday, Apple released its eagerly awaited iPhone software development kit. Putting an end to hopes of user choice, Apple has declared that the only way for users to install applications … Read more