Ilya Kozhevnikov

Browser Newsletter #30

July 20, 2008

about:mozilla — Official World Record, Firefox 2.0.0.15, security metrics, Weave, JavaScript, and more…

Weave is a Mozilla Labs project focused on building online services into the browser. The project’s goals are to enhance the new Firefox user experience and increase your control over how you share your personal information between computers, and with other people. Version 0.2 is a major update to the Weave client and to the servers than control it, and has significant new features. For more information, including details about the changes, or to try it out for yourself, check out the Mozilla Labs’ weblog post.

Mozilla Labs’ Aza Raskin has posted about “next generation JavaScripting” over on the Labs’ weblog. In it he points to three very interesting recent JavaScript-related projects by folks in the Mozilla community: John Resig’s Processing.js, a port of the Java-based Processing programming language; Atul Varma’s Parchment project, which is a JavaScript-based interpreter for the Z-Machine; and Aza’s own ContextFree.js, a project focused on drawing striking images and making art with minimal amounts of code. Check out the full blog post for more details.

Opera brings Web standards to classrooms worldwide

Opera today launched a sweeping education initiative aimed at supporting and enhancing Web standards education and training in secondary schools, colleges, universities and businesses worldwide.

The first planned step in this initiative is the Opera Web Standards Curriculum, a complete curriculum of learning material to provide a thorough understanding of client-side Web design and development from the ground up.

Mozilla’s mobile Firefox targets summer release

Later this summer, Mozilla hopes to unveil an alpha release of a mobile version of the popular desktop Web browser. A beta release could be available by year-end. The development project for mobile Firefox, with the code name Fennec (a species of fox), was launched in October 2007. It promises to deliver in open source a full, power-efficient Web-browsing capability for smartphones and other mobile devices.

IBM Slims Down the Web for Your Phone

Researchers at IBM have developed software that lets mobile users create slimmed-down Web pages that can be viewed more easily on a small device such as a mobile phone.

Called Highlight, the software is an extension to the Firefox browser and was built by researchers at IBM’s Almaden Research Center.

Highlight lets users record the steps required to perform a simple task on the Web, say looking up flight arrival information on a Web site. Users can “clip” sections from a Web site and then save them on another Web server, which then serves the slimmed-down pages to the mobile device.

The software lets Web surfers create their own versions of Web sites, free of the clutter that makes them hard to navigate on a small screen.

In addition to acting as a Web server for the mobile user, this second Web server actually runs a copy of the Firefox browser that fetches the data from the Web site being copied and then serves it up to the Highlight user.

iPhone 2.0 Software Update Includes 7 Security Fixes

The iPhone 2.0 software update fixes seven Safari bugs and three flaws in the Web Kit browser engine used by Safari. One of these flaws were exploited by a veteran hacker, Richard Miller, in March. Apple patched Miller’s Safari vulnerability for the desktop in April, but waited until July 11th to issue a similar patch for the iPhone.

IE8 AJAX Navigation

One of the AJAX improvements we adopted in IE8 from HTML5 is AJAX page navigations. In IE8 mode, we provide support for script to update the travel log components (for e.g. back/forward buttons, address bar) to reflect client-side u

XBL 2: The component model is coming to WebKit and Gecko

I talked about XBL in one of my Web Archeology posts, and how Jonas Sicking of Mozilla was back working on the implementation for Firefox. In WebKit land, we can now see that Julien Chaffraix is making it happen with very current commits. This means that fairly shortly we will have Firefox and WebKit/Safari running with XBL 2 support.

about:mozilla - Firefox marketing, Guinness record, Colbert bump, Fx3 features, community calendar, and more…

Mozilla received the official Guinness World Record certificate for the “largest number of software downloads in 24 hours” on July 9th, 2008. The final and official number that appears on the certificate is 8,002,530, which is an incredible achievement and one of which our entire community should be proud. Tristan Nitot accepted the certificate on behalf of the Firefox Community, receiving it from Gareth Deaves, Records Manager for Internet and Technology at Guinness World Records. The certificate was awarded in front of a 300-strong community gathering in central London to celebrate the release of Firefox 3 and the World Record achievement. A photo from the ceremony and further details are available at the Mozilla Blog.

Percy Cabello has published an article at Mozilla Links that outlines some of the lesser-known features you can find in Firefox 3. “While the awesome bar, download pause and resume, malware protection, the new themes, and serious performance improvements are perhaps the most representative features introduced with Firefox 3, here are some other useful ones…” Percy’s list includes how to duplicate a tab, move tabs between windows, resize the search bar, add a keyword search, and several others. Read the full article over at the MozillaLinks weblog.

Chris Double writes, “The patches to add support for the WHATWG video and audio elements has been applied to the Firefox mozilla-central repository. This means you can get the source for Firefox and build it with support for “video” and “audio” by using the configure flag ‘-enable-media’. The patch that landed does not yet include a backend decoder. It won’t play any videos as a result. That will be fixed as various backends are landed.” For more information, see Chris’ weblog post.

Now web browser s/w for visually impaired

Lighthouse International, a leader in advocating accessibility for people with low vision, is announcing an innovative new add-on software tool that will enable millions of people worldwide with low vision to access previously inaccessible web pages.

While existing programs enable blind people to access the web effectively, LowBrowse is the first program to enable people with moderate or severe low vision to both view web pages as the original web author intended and read the text on those pages tailored to their own visual needs.

The highly anticipated program, which runs in conjunction with theMozilla Firefox browser, will be offered at no charge and is expected to be available to the public for download via the Firefox add-on site in late summer or early fall of 2008.

Firefox 2.0.0.16 security and stability update now available for download

As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 2.0.0.16 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux [...]

New tab switching added for Firefox 3.1

As announced before, tab switching is getting a dramatic update for Firefox 3.1 in both visual and behavior.

Press Ctrl + Tab (or Shift + Ctrl + Tab) and you are presented with tab thumbnails and titles with the most recently visited ones first so you can more easily determine which tab you want to go, have the one you most probably want to go closer, and as a result get to it faster. Hold Ctrl pressed and keep pressing Tab to see the thumbnails smoothly scroll to the left while the status bar displays the tab web address.

AdMob: Mobile Web Use Doubled in Past 12 Months

According to the latest data from mobile advertising marketplace AdMob, the mobile web has grown by over 100% in the last 12 months. AdMob’s data also shows a 20% increase since May alone. Ad impressions on Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch grew by 32% in June, making it the 9th most popular mobile device for online browsing in terms of ad impressions.

Firefox 3.0.1 update available now

Exactly one month after the original Firefox 3.0 release comes its first security and stability update labeled Firefox 3.0.1, the first also to feature the new three digit versioning instead of previous 4-digit scheme.

The update includes fixes for three critical vulnerabilities including the one reported through TippingPoint’s Zero Day Initiative program, the same day Firefox 3 was released, that could lead to remote execution.

IEPNGFix 2: Now supports CSS background position and repeat

This script adds near-native PNG support with alpha opacity to IE 5.5 and 6. Now you can have full translucency and no more ugly grey borders! It requires only one line in your CSS file, and no changes to your website HTML. tags and background images are both supported.

Hands on: first Opera Mobile 9.5 public beta a real winner

Today, some of my precious dignity will be restored. With the newly released Opera Mobile 9.5 public beta, I no longer have to hang my head with shame when I surf the Internet from my cell phone. The new version of Opera Mobile brings an excellent browsing experience to the Windows Mobile platform and comes close to rivaling the iPhone’s Safari.