firefox

Power Downloader surfs with confidence

Recently, Power Downloader received a instant message from his sister, Maggie Mouse. When he clicked on the blinking Pidgin icon, he found himself confronted by a distraught question: Firefox would crash on her in the middle of browsing her email. She had tried restarting the browser and restarting her computer, and she'd even reinstalled Firefox. Maggie Mouse had turned off all her extensions, and Mozilla's browser would still die on her. Although not a dastardly crime, this was definitely a job for Power Downloader.

For all situations, Power Downloader recommends keeping a second browser installed and ready to … Read more

Mozilla VP talks IE 8, Firefox 3

LAS VEGAS--Mozilla Vice President Mike Schroepfer said Microsoft's decision to support a more standards-compliant mode by default should keep Web developers from having to waste so much time.

With the current set-up, he said that developers have a fairly easy time getting a site that renders properly in Opera, Safari, and Firefox, but often spend a lot of energy trying to get that same site to also render correctly in Internet Explorer.

"Web developers burn through a tremendous amount of time getting their sites to work with IE because of IE's special quirks," said Schroepfer, who … Read more

IE 8, Firefox 3 to tackle malware

Web browser updates in development from Microsoft and Mozilla will include better built-in protection against phishing, viruses, and other maladies.

At its Mix conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Microsoft demonstrated IE 8 for the first time publicly.

Larry Dignan at ZDNet points out that IE 8 will include better malware protection through a new feature called the Safety Filter, which improves on IE 7's phishing filter.

A beta test version of IE 8 is available for download now. Microsoft executives told News.com's Ina Fried that a broader test release of IE 8 will come this summer.… Read more

Firefox hits 500 million, yet can't get a break on mobile phones

Mozilla's Firefox browser is truly one of the grand success stories of open source. This week Mozilla is celebrating 500 million Firefox downloads. Yet for all its success, it can't seem to crack the mobile wall, which is almost shameful given the innovation and competition it has sparked on the desktop:

One reason this walled garden approach benefits cellular operators is that they get paid both by subscribers and by content providers. With open Internet access, only subscribers pay. Another benefit is that their approach reduces use of limited 3G bandwidth, meaning carriers don't have to build a more robust network.

So, because mobile Firefox might benefit customers more than cellular providers, it's shackled. At least we can safely say this has nothing to do with a fear of open source. Rather, it's a fear of customers getting value, which the carriers spread to all software providers, open source or not.

Bozos.… Read more

Why wouldn't Apple document performance-boosting APIs?

Vladimir Vukićević from Mozilla's Firefox team eventually managed to turn Firefox 3 into a speed demon on Mac OS X. But Apple sure didn't help with the process.

Apple may not have been trying to cripple non-Apple applications on Mac OS X, but the fact that it's not open source means that the world is beholden to Apple's whims, as Vlad writes:

I do not think that Apple is in any way trying to purposely "cripple" non-Apple software. I also do not think that undocumented APIs give Safari any kind of "significant performance advantage" (as Firefox 3 should show!). … Read more

Growing open source in the land of pirates

Despite its myriad of other benefits, one of the primary reasons open source has spread so far so fast has been its price tag. $0.00.

As Mozilla is finding out in China, however, "free" as in price has less relevance to a market accustomed to software piracy. Firefox is looking to more than double its market share from 2 percent of the Chinese market to 5 percent in 2008. Its price ($0) is not helping it.

What is Mozilla to do?… Read more

Mozilla may hold the clues to the future of commercial open source

Much is rightly made about the quality of open-source software like JBoss and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. These, however, are arguably not the source of the quality of the businesses behind them. Their networks were/are.

JBoss was doing well before it created the JBoss Operational Network using Hyperic's software as a foundation. But it was the Network that dramatically boosted JBoss' renewal rate and ASPs (as JBoss lead investor David Skok noted in his OSBC 2007 presentation). Red Hat was Red Hat before it had Red Hat Network (RHN), but RHN gave customers an easy justification for paying for what they could get for free elsewhere.

The Network, in other words, is the not-so-secret sauce that makes great open-source companies. The principle behind it is to give the "core" software away to lower the cost of sales and marketing, while providing "complementary" services like an RHN to facilitate a purchase.

Which brings me to Mozilla.… Read more

Firefox crosses 500 million download mark

Sometime last night, Firefox downloads crossed the 500 million threshold.

It's an arbitrary but interesting milestone for the open-source Web browser, whose development is overseen by Mozilla but that's also developed and extended by a large number of outside programmers. In September 2007, Firefox crossed the 400 million download mark, indicating an average rate a bit shy of 20 million per month at present.

According to the Spread Firefox site, there had been 500,168,448 downloads as of 6:15 a.m. PST. About 12 hours earlier, there had been more than 499,900,000.

Firefox has … Read more

Fast and simple browser performance tweaks

Browsers just naturally seem to slow down over time. Maybe it's because the add-ons start to accumulate, or because you forget to clear their cache and perform other standard maintenance via Windows Disk Cleanup app. But there are also some simple settings changes you can make to keep Internet Explorer and Firefox running at top speed.

Increase the number of simultaneous connections in Internet Explorer: This tip has been around for a while, but if you haven't implemented it yet, you can see a real boost to your browsing speed. It entails a Registry edit, so create a … Read more

Save your quick reads for later

Read It Later is a Firefox extension that should appeal to anybody trying to minimize bookmark and open tab clutter. As you peruse links sent from friends and RSS feeds that deposit little nuggets of truth that you just don't have time for right now, Read It Later gives you a one-click option for saving the links and keeping track of which ones have been read.

When you restart Firefox after loading the extension, it will automatically prompt you to install the two Toolbar buttons that are used to control the extension and manage your reading list. Users can also control adding bookmarks to their reading list via the context menu, the Bookmarks menu itself, or with hotkeys, making access to your daily detritus fast and painless.