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 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 02/03/10 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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Posted 01/20/10 at 12:15:41 PM by David Murphy

Whenever you want to download a file in Firefox, you get a little gremlin tagging along for the ride. He's a helpful little monster, and his eerie resemblance to a common "download window" allows you to quickly see the status of, pause, and cancel your file transfers as you see fit. Easy as cake! Simple as can be! Insert more similes here! Seriously, how could one really improve a pop-up window whose sole purpose is to tell you how much time you have left on your download, only to scurry away into your browser's back pocket once the file is done?

I just gave you a clue. But this isn't a Sherlock Holmes mystery, so I'll jump straight to the big spoiler. Your download window in Firefox doesn't have to be a pop-up element that rests overtop your browser. In fact, this can be kind of annoying. Given that Firefox is all about the tabbed browsing, it makes much more sense to pull the download window out of the airspace and chain it to its own individual page amongst your plethora of open tabs. You can't do this via Firefox natively, and that's where this week's Firefox Addon of the Week comes into play.

Click the jump to discover this week's pick!

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Posted 01/18/10 at 07:38:27 AM by Paul Lilly

Mozilla over the weekend began doling out update notifications to beta users to update to Firefox 3.6 RC2, just one week after the first Release Candidate was released.

From what we can tell, there doesn't appear to be any new features in the latest update, nor does Mozilla tout anything groundbreaking in its release notes. Instead, it appears this is mostly a bug-fix release, the biggest of which is a fix to a JavaScript bug in the Linux build. All told, there have been some 70 bugs squashed since the last beta (not RC) build.

This will likely be the last Release Candidate before the final build of Firefox 3.6 goes public, which could come next week on January 26.

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