Mozilla moving forward with Metro-style Firefox for Windows 8
Mozilla has decided to begin work on a touch-enabled version of its popular Firefox web browser for Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 operating system, the company revealed yesterday.
The Windows 8 OS allows companies to develop apps for its touch-based Metro interface as well as for a traditional desktop interface. But while Mozilla has the traditional side essentially covered with the current iteration of Firefox for PCs, the company has to start developing the Metro app, … Continue Reading
Chrome finally comes to Android, get the new beta now
If you’re running the Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, a.k.a. Android 4.0, on your smartphone or tablet, you can run along right now and download Chrome for Android.
The latest addition to the Chrome family is a mobile beta that brings a (purportedly) better and faster browsing experience to Android devices. Perhaps most exciting of all, it allows for the desktop-to-mobile syncing and sign-ins we have loved so much in competitor Firefox for Android.
“Like … Continue Reading
Web companies beg Congress to “step back” from IP legislation
Hoping to amplify the voice of the Internet, web companies including Mozilla, Reddit, and WordPress have banded together with public interest and human rights groups to urge Congress to stop its work on intellectual property laws.
Monday, more than 70 organizations signed an open letter addressed to the House of Representatives and the Senate.
“Now is the time for Congress to take a breath, step back, and approach the issues from a fresh perspective,” the … Continue Reading
Firefox 10 gets developer-friendly with Inspector features
Firefox 10, the latest version of the Mozilla web browser, was released today and brought a bunch of developer tools with the new update. Non-developers get a few new features too: faster updates and better add-on compatibility.
Page Inspector, a new feature in this release, lets developers view a page’s layout and HTML structure. Firefox highlights the page area you want to inspect and display the HTML tag for the part of the page. Want … Continue Reading
Node at scale: What Google, Mozilla, & Yahoo are doing with Node.js
When the scale of your application is “everyone on the Internet,” you have to think a bit differently about adopting new technologies.
At the Node Summit today, a bevy of “big boy” company executives gathered to chat about Node.js, the server-side JavaScript technology that’s been taking the developer world by storm.
Representatives from Google, Yahoo, Mozilla, and startup i.TV were on hand to talk about using Node when instability is not an option.
One overarching … Continue Reading
SOPA blackouts and protests go live (gallery of screenshots)
A handful of U.S. websites have decided to go dark today in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act as well as its senate cousin the Protect IP Act — two piece of proposed legislation aimed at curbing piracy efforts abroad.
Perhaps the most vocal protester of the bunch is search engine giant Google, which has decided to update its homepage with a large sideways black box over the company’s logo. Since the site prides … Continue Reading
Microsoft celebrates the demise of Internet Explorer 6
Microsoft pulled out the champagne today with a report that its Internet Explorer 6 browser had dropped below 1 percent usage in the U.S., a sign that businesses and crazily stubborn users have finally upgraded to a better browser.
“IE6 has been the punch line of browser jokes for a while, and we’ve been as eager as anyone to see it go away,” wrote Roger Capriotti, Director of Internet Explorer Marketing, in a company blog … Continue Reading
Google paying nearly $1B for Firefox search deal
The prominent search box atop the popular Firefox browser played the coveted prize jewel in a Christie’s-like bidding war between the web’s wealthiest whales.
Google competed in an aggressive auction with Microsoft and Yahoo to maintain its place as the default search engine on Firefox, according to AllThingsD. It successfully renewed a three-year deal, but the placement came with a massive markup and will now cost the company $300 million a year.
That’s one heck … Continue Reading
Google decides to keep Firefox around for 3 more years
Mozilla has renewed an agreement that will keep Google as the default search engine on its Firefox web browser.
The agreement replaces a similar default search deal between the two companies, which ended in late November. As part of the new three-year deal, Google will pay open-source development organization Mozilla for its default search engine placement in Firefox. Mozilla plans to announce the renewal later today, according to All Things D.
The renewal is especially … Continue Reading
Salesforce to acquire social enterprise player Rypple, re-name it ‘Successforce’
Cloud-based software giant Salesforce.com has agreed to buy performance management firm Rypple for an undisclosed sum, the two companies announced today.
Rypple dubs itself as a “cloud-based social performance management company.” Basically, it provides software designed to help managers improve employee performance through “social goals” and consistent feedback and recognition. It competes in an increasingly competitive (and essential) market for cloud-based human resource management services. Leading competitors include SuccessFactors, which enterprise giant SAP recently announced … Continue Reading
Chrome passes Firefox in popularity, but Internet Explorer is still number one
Don’t start sniggering into your sleeves over your puerile “number two” jokes, but Chrome is now the second most popular Web browser in the world.
According to data from StatCounter, as of November, Chrome claims a 25.7 percent share of the global browser market, while Firefox has a 25.2 percent share.
Chrome has grown massively since its launch in December 2008. In its first full year as a stable, public product, Chrome earned 4.7 of … Continue Reading
The mobile app is going the way of the CD-ROM: To the dustbin of history
“Forget being in love with the open web and all that touchy-feely stuff.”
Jay Sullivan is Mozilla’s vice president of products, and for a spokesperson of one of the open web’s dearest darlings, he’s on a tear.
“If you want to have a variety of mobile apps, it gets expensive… that’s a lot of apps to build,” he told VentureBeat in a recent interview.
Sullivan is making a strong case against building native apps and … Continue Reading
Firefox 8 gets official, adds handy Twitter search function
Mozilla has released the newest version of its popular Firefox browser today, Firefox 8, adding in a useful Twitter-search ability and disabling add-ons by default to boost performance.
Firefox users have seen quick updates of their browsers ever since Mozilla decided to mimic Google Chrome’s rapid release schedule. Six weeks ago Firefox 7 debuted with performance gains, and six weeks before that Firefox 6 hit with extra tools for developers. Mozilla has been a little … Continue Reading
Chrome to surpass Firefox in market share by December
Google Chrome is well on its way to surpassing Mozilla Firefox’s No. 2 market share position and should overtake the fox no later than December, according to Irish analytics company StatCounter.
We reported at the beginning of August that Chrome had overtaken Firefox in the UK, but now that trend appears to be intensifying on a worldwide scale. Chrome has gained an incredible eight percentage points in worldwide market share since January, which is a … Continue Reading
Go ahead, open more tabs; Firefox 7 runs even faster
Mozilla released Firefox 7 today, and the new version of makes web browsing faster than ever.
The update is especially helpful for the hardcore web junkies among us who browse with scores of open tabs and browsing sessions that span multiple days.
Firefox 7 reduces memory usage by 20 to 50 percent, which translates to quicker response times and fewer crashes. These improvements constitute the first publicly available implementation of MemShrink, Mozilla’s project focusing on … Continue Reading
Intel prepares to launch chip with scores of computing brains
Intel is preparing to launch its first chip with more than 50 cores, or computing brains, on a single piece of silicon. The chip, code-named Knights Corner, will be released soon.
Justin Rattner, chief technology officer at Intel, made the announcement in a keynote speech at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. Intel has researched such chips for many years, but it only has chips with a maximum of eight cores on the market … Continue Reading
Demo: Make video editing a social activity with Stroome
Video editing doesn’t have to be a lonely undertaking. Stoome, a web-based video editing startup, wants to turn the creation and sharing of videos into a truly collaborative and social experience. Today at Demo Fall 2011 in Silicon Valley, Stroome announced that Mozilla has come on board as a new adviser on its open source efforts.
Stroome combines web-based video editing tools with a lively social network of film makers. You can work alone, uploading … Continue Reading
Mozilla launches Firefox 6 with tasty treats for developers
Firefox 6 is available for download today, and Mozilla wants developers to know the release includes some special tools just for them.
There aren’t any major interface tweaks in Firefox 6; you’ll pretty much be seeing the same browser you’re used to already. Some of the user-facing changes include a highlighted URL in the address bar, easier access to Firefox Sync and some performance enhancements. The new release also gives users a new permissions tool … Continue Reading
Mozilla: Firefox 6 will be officially ready tomorrow
Though several reports have suggested users can download the new Mozilla Firefox 6 browser early from the company’s FTP server, Mozilla says that version is not final and the real build will be available tomorrow.
“As part of Mozilla’s open source development process, we post our builds publicly for testing and verification,” a Mozilla spokesperson told VentureBeat. “While we appreciate everyone’s excitement about the Firefox release, these builds are currently not final and are still … Continue Reading
UK takes a shining to Chrome, overtakes Firefox as No. 2 browser
Usually, it’s the first place team that makes the headlines, but in the global Internet browser competition, second place can newsworthy too. That’s the case today, with new data showing that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is losing market share to Google’s Chrome, now the second most popular browser for Internet users in the United Kingdom.
Last month, Chrome overtook Mozilla Firefox by a hair with 22.1 percent of the U.K. market, according to the web metrics … Continue Reading
