Mozilla

Joining the growing list of remixed Mozilla applications such as Songbird and Flock is Spicebird. Besides keeping the avian theme in Firefox and Thunderbird, open-source Spicebird takes the core of Thunderbird, the calendaring power of the Thunderbird plug-in Lightning, and integrated contact list chatting capabilities, and ties them all together with a widget-based landing page.

Loaded with potential, but heavily in beta, India-based Spicebird has a long way to go before it's ready for general use. The bugs and challenges facing users are noticeable nearly from the moment you start up the program. The interface and most of the … Read more

Mozilla's open-source Firefox browser is more and more popular in Europe, hitting nearly 29 percent market share in March. It's also growing in popularity in New Zealand and Australia, where it reached 31.2 percent, according to web analytics company Xiti.

In North America, however, March saw Firefox drop 1 percent. No one seems to know why.

I suspect it's just a momentary blip, however, as Firefox has seen continued growth in market share over the past few years. There was a time that its growth might have been driven by ideology. Not any more.

No, Firefox … Read more

Mozilla has shuffled around mobile for several years now, initially with Minimo. Mozilla has finally decided to get into the mobile market in earnest, however, with Fennec.

If Fennec proves to be even a shadow of Firefox's potential, the world will never be the same.

Access to data, sites and applications on the Internet shouldn't be limited by the type of device being used, and Fennec will make that possible, said Mitchell Baker during a keynote speech at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

"The key to the Internet should be the same. The core … Read more

I started e-mailing files to myself as a form of ad-hoc backup soon after I signed up for a Gmail account. I'm not affected by Gmail's 20MB limit on the size of individual attachments, and I'm nowhere near my storage cap of 6.6GB.

I decided to formalize the process a bit by using the Gspace extension for the Firefox browser. The add-on lets you send files from your local PC to a virtual Gmail folder and view them much like you would in Windows Explorer.

After you install the Gspace applet and restart Firefox, you find … Read more

Mozilla's Chairman Mitchell Baker talked about "opening the mobile Web" this morning at the Web 2.0 Expo. While not discussing planned functionality in future products, Baker's vision of tomorrow's browser is less Minority Report and semantic search (see Hakia and Powerset) and more about making browsing a simpler experience by taking advantage of your browser history. She also vaguely mentioned Mozilla's plans to step into the mobile browser market later this year with a browser currently code-named "Fennec."

Mozilla has already taken the first steps to get to such a place … Read more

PayPal is seriously considering blocking some browsers from accessing its site, according to a paper (PDF) available to shareholders.

Titled "A Practical Approach to Managing Phishing," the paper admits that there's no one silver bullet to prevent fraudsters from making money on the Internet. However, authors Michael Barrett, PayPal's chief information security officer, and Dan Levy, the company's senior director of risk management for Europe, say companies could and should start addressing five specific areas:

Prevent fraudulent e-mail from getting into users' in-boxes

Prevent phishing sites by shutting them down

Authenticate users so that stolen … Read more

As great as it is to have tools such as Firefox and Thunderbird, backing user profiles and all their moving parts can be a tedious process. MozBackup is a tiny program that makes saving and restoring all your bookmarks, extensions, and other personal settings a streamlined and stress-free experience. It's dead simple to use because it walks you through both the backup and restore features. So, for example, even if you've backed up everything but you only want to restore your bookmarks, you can do that easily.

The program works with Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, and Netscape on Windows … Read more

Compared with Outlook and other commercial e-mail programs (are there any other commercial e-mail programs left?) Mozilla's free Thunderbird e-mail client has a lot going for it. Not the least of Thunderbird's time-saving features are its search capabilities.

If you don't see the search toolbar directly above the main Thunderbird window, click View > Toolbars > Search Bar. By default, you can view all your mail, all your unread mail, all mail with one of Thunderbird's five built-in labels attached (Important, Work, Personal, To Do, Later), mail from people in your address book, messages received recently, … Read more

Bob Lisbonne has long been one of my favorite venture capitalists and, indeed, people. He's a warm, intelligent person. I've passed more than one bad venture idea his way and had him very kindly tell me it was a pile of potty.

So it was with mixed feelings that I read his email today that he's leaving Matrix Partners to possibly rejoin the ranks of the entrepreneurs. Here's the guy who, while senior vice president and general manager of Browser Products at Netscape, helped to give us Firefox. Here's the guy who invested in promising open source-related companies like PostPath and LucidEra. And now he's leaving. Or coming back.

Or both:

Over the years, I've tried to make time for my own little software projects during nights and weekends, but, as you can imagine, that's whetted my appetite more than satiated it.… Read more