mozilla

Mozilla Labs vetting user talent for new products

On Monday, Chris Beard, vice president and general manager of Mozilla Labs, posted a rather vague, yet optimistic, blog entry about opening up Mozilla Labs projects to the Web community at large. The move comes just a week after the company lost Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla VP of engineering, to Facebook.

Beard has coined it a "concept series" and included three videos of products and services currently at a the conceptual level and not yet ready for public consumption. Of the three embedded in Beard's post, the most buzz-worthy was the mobile version of Firefox, which surfaced two months ago. The other two are a little more out there, with a bookmarks visualizer and what is seemingly the most complicated-looking interface demo ever done by the folks at Adaptive Path for a project called "Aurora" which was unveiled last night.

To get involved, Beard is asking users to keep their ideas structured into one of three buckets:

Ideas It all begins with an idea. A sentence, paragraph, or even bullet-points kick-start the process. Ideas can be simple and non-technical. It should be easy for anyone and everyone to help shape the future of the Web. So throw your notions, inspirations, dreams and visions out to the community. Mockups Turn your idea (or someone else's) into an image, sketch or video. Words are great, but you know what they say about pictures. Mockups offer up a visual and communicate ideas in terms that are just a bit more polished and real. They draw the next person in, tempting them to pick up the concept and run with it. Prototypes A prototype is interactive. Feel, touch and play with developing concepts. Prototypes get ideas across by showing off the moving parts. They aren't always fully functional or pretty, but they're more than a static image or two. They're a dress rehearsal of sorts, with minimal programming. Make a prototype in HTML, Flash, or whatever puts things into action.

Mozilla is also using tags on popular Web services to let people post up their mockups, the first of which have already shown up on Flickr.

I've embedded all three concept videos below. The aurora one is in HD only if you watch it on Vimeo, so click here to see it in it's full-resolution glory.… Read more

Google bans the Mozilla Public License

First it was the Affero General Public License that Google banned from its Google Code site, an open-source code hosting site. Google contended that it didn't want to encourage license proliferation by accepting projects using licenses that don't have widespread use and acceptance.

This week, however, Google nixed a highly popular, important license license: Mozilla Public License.

Google's Chris DiBona played the proliferation card again against the MPL, but also admitted that how Google determines whether a license is suitably popular is "so arbitrary." Great. That makes me feel better. At least there's a … Read more

Mozilla's head of engineering leaves for Facebook

Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of Engineering, has left Mozilla to join Facebook as its director of Engineering. I only met Mike once but was hugely impressed by him. His loss, while it shouldn't significantly hurt Mozilla's continued momentum, is a loss to Mozilla.

That's the problem with being a non-profit. It will always be hard to retain people long-term since there's no possible pay-out at the end. Mozilla has done an exceptional job of hiring great people, but I worry that it (along with Eclipse, Linux Foundation, etc.) will be able to keep those … Read more

Featured Freeware: Lightning

Lightning makes Thunderbird soar above Outlook for home use, and places it on nearly equal ground in the office. It includes an overhauled interface with easy-to-use buttons for jumping between e-mail and your calendar, LDAP directory support for event invites, and Sun Java Calendar Server support.

Work on the plug-in is now handled by Mozilla as it prepares to integrate its code into Thunderbird for the big Version 3 update coming later this year, but that doesn't mean Lightning isn't ready to be used now. A menu bar for switching between mail and calendar views can live either … Read more

Mozilla updates Firefox with three security patches

On Thursday, Mozilla pushed out a new security update for its new Firefox browser. Version 3.0.1 for Windows and Mac addresses vulnerabilities in malformed GIF files on Mac OS X, command-line URLs that could launch multiple tabs when Firefox is not running, and a potential remote code execution by overflowing CSS reference counter.

Meanwhile, Mozilla updated the earlier version of Firefox with 2.0.16 on Tuesday. The update addresses two of the Firefox 3 critical issues--command-line URLs and overflowing CSS reference counter.

Version-specific updates have been pushed out automatically to existing Firefox users.

Mozilla will continue to … Read more

Check your spelling in Firefox, IE

Some people seem to think they have carte blanche to spell any which way they want to when they're on the Internet. But whether you're writing Web mail or IMs, filling out a Web form, or just entering a term in Google's search box, spelling matters.

And that's not just because an abundance of spelling errors can make people think you're an eighth grade dropout. (Nothing against eighth grade dropouts!) It's also because misspellings can prevent you from finding the information you're searching for and lead to e-mail miscommunication.

Firefox 2 and 3 … Read more

Google's Android and the dream deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore-- And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Langston Hughes may have been talking about the legal and social equality of the races in the United States when he penned "A Dream Deferred," but Google's would-be Android developers are suffering their own "dream deferred" with the the festering and stink of a … Read more

Would the cloud have saved Apple's iPhone 3G launch?

Apple had a serious problem with its iPhone 3G product launch last week, coupled with its limp-along release of its iPhone 2.0 software. Could Amazon.com's cloud have helped? Lee Faus, in his "Popularity Sucks" post, thinks so.

As he notes, the ability to spin up resources for a short-term crush on Apple's servers could have worked wonders (at least, for the 2.0 software upgrade), just as it could have benefited Mozilla during its launch of Firefox 3.0:

This would have been ideal for Mozilla (Firefox 3 Install Images on S3 with Apache … Read more

Bank of America may finally embrace Firefox

The largest bank in the United States has officially ignored the second most popular Web browser--until recently.

A tipster for Networkworld.com pointed out recently that Bank of America's Web site did not list the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox as a "supported browser," even though Firefox now commands almost 20 percent of the browser market. The bank's site lists Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Apple's Safari, and Netscape as acceptable browsers.

Netscape? Even AOL, Netscape's former owner, doesn't support Netscape Navigator anymore.

Of course, Firefox, which was released in 2004 and recently set a Guiness record for downloads … Read more

Featured Freeware: ThunderBrowse

ThunderBrowse remains one of the best plug-ins for Mozilla Thunderbird. It's a favorite of mine, but if you haven't tried it recently there are some excellent new features worth noting.

If you've never used it before, ThunderBrowse lets you open Web links in Thunderbird's preview pane. It's that simple, which is why it's such an useful tool to have. From social networking friend invites to quickly scanning that hometown article sent by Your Dear Ma, ThunderBrowse cuts out huge chunks of time from your work flow by speedily opening HTML pages in its own … Read more