Posted 03/08/10 at 10:47:13 AM by Paul Lilly

As part of a regulatory requirement imposed by the European Union, Microsoft has implemented a browser ballot for European Windows users, and as expected, the ballot has given rise to alternative browsers.

According to Mozilla, more than 50,000 people had downloaded Firefox as a direct result of the choice screen Microsoft is forced to show.

"It's definitely being taken up, so consumers are paying attention and taking advantage of the choice being offered to them," said Thomas Vinje, legal counsel to the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, a lobbying group based in Brussels whose members include Opera.

While the initial results look promising for Firefox and other competitors, Microsoft said it's too early to draw a conclusion on whether the choice screen could lead to significant users ditching Internet Explorer.

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Posted 03/04/10 at 10:00:06 AM by Paul Lilly

Mozilla today made its Mozilla Developer Preview available for anyone who wants to play around with it. This marks the second pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.3 platform.

The biggest news with this latest release is the out-of-process plugin support. Plugins, such as Flash and Silverlight, now run in a separate process similar to Chrome, so if a plugin goes belly up, it won't crash the browser along with it. In addition, unresponsive plugins are automatically restarted in the developer preview.

There have also been several performance improvements made to the engine, including the removal of link history lookup from the main thread. Combined with making this asynchronous, Mozilla says this results in less I/O during page loads. Loading HTML5 spec purportedly no longer causes long browser pauses, and there have been several enhancements to the JavaScript engine resulting in better string handling and faster closures.

See here for a full list of features and download information.

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Posted 03/01/10 at 06:31:00 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Google launched their Chrome browser just over a year ago, and new figures from analytics firm Net Applications seem to indicate things are going quite well indeed. The plucky young browser was the only one of the top five to see any gains in the month of February. While certainly far from being the market leader, Chrome is now solidly in third place with 5.61% of the market. Internet Explorer and Firefox took first and second with 61.58% and 24.23% respectively. IE lost 0.54% and Firefox lost 0.20% last month.

Chrome has gained a reputation for being speedy and usable out of the virtual box. It is also reputed to be more standards compliant than other leading browsers. Whatever the reason, users are responding. The recent 4.0 release brought better HTML5 support, bookmark syncing, and the all important extension support.

Firefox came about at a time when Internet Explorer dominated the market almost completely. There was only one fight to be had for the Mozilla team at that point. Chrome is now up against a still widespread Internet Explorer and a very number two in Firefox. Google may not be overtaking a competitor any time soon, but Chrome is definitely moving in the right direction. So, do you use Chrome? Is it better for you than Firefox?

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Posted 02/17/10 at 12:00:00 PM by David Murphy

Ok, Safari fans. If you're still holding out for a few of your favorite features to appear in Mozilla's Firefox before you're convinced to make the switch, the cosmetic add-on Fission might be enough to get you to jump ship. This little add-on doesn't clone or skin your Safari browsing experience, nor does it actually build anything extremely useful into the browser that's otherwise lacking between the two competing platforms. But that's OK--not every add-on should move mountains just as long as it provides some kind of neat feature that you wouldn't be able to find normally, right?

Well, that's the definition of Fission. All this little add-on does is move the typical loading status bar from your tabs to Firefox's address bar. That's it. Though, I admit, I kind of like having this larger area serve as the status for my page loading efforts. There's a lot more space to work with (in case you're suffering from a page that's taking forever to load.) More than that, it's a lot easier to see the "snap" of the bar filling up, giving you an easy visual reference--beyond the loaded page itself--whenever your browser is done rendering content.

Will Fission win any awards for its unique fix? Likely not. But it does make Firefox just a touch bit prettier (provided it doesn't break any of your themes), and we can all be grateful for that.

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Posted 02/09/10 at 11:55:54 AM by Paul Lilly

Listen up Mac fans - if you wish to continue running Mozilla's Firefox browser, you may want to considering upgrading your OS, at least if you're still rolling along on Mac OS X 10.4. Going forward, Mozilla will no longer support Tiger with upcoming Firefox releases.

"We would like to take advantage of more modern technologies on Mac OS X, and 10.4 support has been a hindrance," Josh Aas, one of Mozilla's Mac experts, said in a mailing list post. "We are planning to make the decision to remove 10.4 support final and remove the code from the tree. If you have any strong objections please let us know now."

Predictably there has been a spattering of objections, such as one user who laments that "I still have two PowerPC machines that use OS X 10.4.11... As it stands now, it is impractical for me to update either machine due to lack of funds." Another user suggested Mozilla create two browsers, "one with all the fancy new stuff, then one for us poor people that can't drop $3,000 at the drop of the hat."

For those that object, we have a much better solution - see here.

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Posted 02/06/10 at 05:25:24 PM by Justin Kerr

Experimenting with new extensions is part of what makes Firefox great, but if you downloaded either the "Sothink Web Video Downloader", or "Master Filer", you probably snagged a nasty Trojan for your troubles. According to an entry on the Mozilla Blog both these extensions contain code which exploit vulnerabilities in all versions of Windows, and were downloaded close to 5,000 times before being spotted.

The extensions in question were contained in the "experimental" area of the official Firefox add-on site, and while it might seem like little consolation for anyone who got infected, users grabbing extensions from this section are warned before download that this could happen. Mozilla employs a special add-on scanner which supposedly checks all new entries for malicious code, but they were forced to acknowledge that the security process failed. "[Add-ons] performs a malware check on all add-ons uploaded to the site, and blocks add-ons that are detected as such," said yesterday's blog posting. "This scanning tool failed to detect the Trojan."

Mac and Linux users who downloaded these add-on's are unaffected, but anyone who used the extensions in Windows are being warned by Mozilla to delete all traces of the infected file, and run a virus scan. Mozilla is promising to boost the number of times it scans files for malware in the future, and will also step up how often it scans its entire catalog of add-on's.

Does this hurt your trust in Firefox extensions? Or was this bound to happen eventually?

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Posted 02/03/10 at 08:34:30 AM by Paul Lilly

It's long been believed that eventually Firefox would catch up with, and maybe even overtake, Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser as the most used browser on the planet. And while that's still possible, the race to knock IE down a peg could end up being a two-participant sprint between Firefox and a suddenly spunky Chrome browser.

In an uncharacteristic slide for Mozilla's open-source browser, Firefox dropped 0.20 percentage points from 24.61 percent to 24.41 percent between December 2009 and January 2010. Meanwhile, Chrome took a relatively big step forward to the tune of 0.57 percentage points, increasing its market share from 4.63 percent to 5.20 percent. Keep in mind we're talking about a single month here, folks.

Internet Explorer, meanwhile, continues to decrease its lead, having given up 0.51 percentage points to go from 62.69 percent down to 62.18 percent. IE stills holds a sizable lead, but continues to go in the wrong market share direction.

But for the first time in a long time, the overall focus isn't so much on IE versus everyone else, but the new battle that's shaping up between Firefox and Chrome. And this will only get more interesting with time now that Chrome has finally added extensions support, and has even tossed Greasemonkey scripts into the mix.

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Posted 01/28/10 at 10:00:00 AM by David Murphy

I'm not sure which of these is a more compelling criticism of the Apple iPad: "They named it what?" or "Where's the Flash?"

It's no secret that Apple harbors no love for Adobe's Flash architecture. John Gruber over at Daring Fireball recently wrote up a wonderful treatise as to why this is the case. If you have a spare hour or so, I recommend giving it a look-see. I'll spoil the ending for the sake of continuing on with this column: Flash is a proprietary architecture that Apple has no control over. Thus, when Flash-based elements wreak havoc on the stability of Apple platforms, Apple can't do much to fix the issue--nor can the company convert the 32-bit Flash binary over to Apple's goal of a system-wide, 64-bit experience.

Naturally, Apple's only real choice has been to dump support for Flash in certain use situations--namely, the company's iPhone (and surely the iPad as well, given the supposed similarities in their underlying operating systems). In order to incorporate a similar level of interactivity and video processing as delivered by Flash, Apple's turned to a combined replacement of HTML5 and JavaScript. But the media codec that Apple's thrown its support behind for HTML-based video rendering is H.264. Ain't nothing open about that.

The enemy of Apple's proprietary enemy might be the company's friend, but it's no friend to the Internet.

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