Tag: FIREFOX

Later today, Firefox will undergo its biggest developmental upheaval ever. Mozilla-central, the source of nightly builds, will be renumbered to version 5 -- and at long last, after years of wallowing around version 1, Mozilla's rendering and layout engine, Gecko, will also have its version number updated to match Firefox. Shortly thereafter, Firefox's new channel system will be implemented. ...

Wladimir Palant, developer of the most popular add-on in the world, Adblock Plus, is also an active contributor to the Planet Mozilla blog community. Over the last few days, in response to Mozilla's new name and shame list of slow add-ons, Palant has been investigating whether Mozilla's testing methods are actually accurate. Rather surprisingly, it turns out that Mozilla's numbers could be ...

Mozilla's Engineering Project Manager, Christian Legnitto, has detailed the release schedule for Firefox 5, 6 and 7. If all goes to plan, Firefox 6.0a1 will be released next week, April 12, and Firefox 7.0a1 in the middle of May. The final build of Firefox 5 should be released on June 21, exactly three months after the release of Firefox 4. Along with the faster 6-week release cadence, ...

With the recent release of Firefox 4, Echofon has just put out a major update of its Twitter extension for Firefox, featuring a new design and takes full advantage of Mozilla's latest browser. Echofon can now be used as a Firefox sidebar or pulled out into a separate window, and it now includes inline photo viewing and an all-around nicer UI for your tweet stream. Some cool Echofon desktop ...

Mozilla Messaging, citing Mozilla's increased focus on Web-borne communications, will be reintegrating with Mozilla Labs. The Messaging subsidiary was formed in 2008 to focus on Thunderbird, but given Mozilla Labs' current focus on identity and contact management, it now makes sense for the groups to be merged. Thunderbird will be unaffected by the change -- some URLs might change, but that's ...

When Firefox 4's tab grouping tool, Panorama, had its keyboard shortcut changed to the finger-breaking combo of Ctrl+Shift+E, we thought Panorama would get dropped before FF4's final release -- but, thankfully, it made the cut! If you've used Firefox 4 and Panorama, you might have noticed that Mozilla's new browser doesn't always save your tab groupings when you close the browser -- a bit of ...

Mozilla, continuing its year-long crusade to speed up Firefox startup and shutdown times, has published a name and shame list of the Firefox's slowest add-ons. The list is just one part of Mozilla's new efforts to highlight slow add-ons, and to help developers make their add-ons more efficient. Over the next two weeks, 'slow performance warnings' will be introduced in the add-on gallery so ...

Over on the Internet Explorer Blog, Microsoft has posted results from an extensive comparison of the top five Web browsers. The goal: to determine whether Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 4, Chrome 10, Safari 5, or Opera 11 is able to squeeze the most life out of your laptop's battery. A baseline was determined with test systems sitting idle, and then browsers were pointed at about:blank, a ...

Moments ago, Mozilla stripped the release candidate moniker from Firefox 4 Mobile and pronounced it fit for public release. If you have a Nokia N900 phone, or a fairly-modern Android 2.0-or-later device, go ahead and install it from the Market, by using scanning the QR code after the break, or by visiting Firefox.com/m. Accompanying the release is the launch of Spark, a cute social game that's ...

Using some early numbers from both StatCounter and Net Applications, Mozilla's noisiest hominid, Asa Dotzler, has illustrated Firefox 4's meteoric rise to around 5% of Web browser global usage share. Internet Explorer 9, which launched two weeks ago, seems to be enjoying a much more casual stroll in the park with just 1.5% of the global Web usage share. Interestingly, we can see IE9 dipping ...

If you've had your head under a rock for the last few days, here's this week's Firefox news in brief: Firefox 4 was finally released. Yes, 13 months after the initial release of Firefox 3.7 alpha 1 and four more alpha builds, a renumbering to 4.0 and 12 beta releases, and finally a release candidate (or two), Firefox 4 has been released into the wild. Just like every other Firefox ...

In its first 24 hours of public availability, Firefox 4 was downloaded around 7 million times, beating out 3.5's tally of 5 million, but falling short of Firefox 3's monumental 8 million. Mozilla's new browser has maintained more than 4000 downloads per minute for the last 24 hours, peaking at around 9000 per minute in the late afternoon yesterday, when all of Europe and the Americas were ...

Just because the shiny, new Firefox 4 is now ready for downloading by the general public doesn't mean Mozilla is turning its back on users who can't (or don't want to) upgrade. Security is a big priority, and 3.X users will continue to see patches for quite some time. In fact, both Firefox 3.6 and 3.5 received security updates in tandem with the Firefox 4 release. The new versions blacklist a ...

So you've finally realized that while Chrome might be fast, it sacrifices creature comforts to be so. It's a little bit like living in a whitewashed room with nothing more than a beige-box PC and keyboard -- it works, but it's not a particularly fun experience. If you like car analogies, Chrome is like a race-tuned Ferrari with hard-plastic bucket seats and tubular titanium roll cage. Likewise, ...

Mozilla has just flipped the switch on the new, rather beautiful Firefox 4 download page. No, we have no idea who those three cute (and utterly crazy) characters are. Update: You can keep track of Firefox 4 downloads around the globe with Glow, a beautiful pseudo-real-time download counter. There's also Twitter Party, which builds a Firefox logo mosaic from Firefox-related tweets. Along ...