Hasta La Gadget!

Sure the OUYA may have captured the imagination of indie game developers everywhere, but open-source fans will be glad to know it’s sparked the interest of Mozilla’s Firefox team as well. According to an OUYAForum post by administrator Ed Krassenstein, a Mozilla developer had sent him a note detailing the process of bringing the popular browser to the Kickstarter-funded gaming console. The team apparently managed to get it running after some preliminary patches, but it still has a ways to go — WebGL, Canvas and relevant API support still needs polish. The dev in question has since been identified as mobile platform engineer Chris Lord, who tweeted the revealing picture above along with the note that it’s “kinda unusable” for now. Still, they do have around three months before the console ships, which could be enough for them to perfect an OUYA version of the foxy browser just in time for launch day.

[Image credit: Chris Lord, Twitter]

Filed under: Gaming

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Via: TechCrunch

Source: OUYAforum

Mozilla has revealed its first devices for Firefox OS developers wanting to code for the new platform, with the so-called “Geeksphone” Keon and Peak handsets aiming for both the affordable and mid-tier of the smartphone market. Keon, the first Firefox OS Developer Preview Phone has surprisingly humble specifications for a modern device – a 1GHz Snapdragon S1, 3.5-inch HVGA touchscreen, and a 3-megapixel camera, for instance – but fits in perfectly with Mozilla’s ambitions to dominate the entry-level market; meanwhile, its Peak sibling ramps up the specifications to a Snapdragon S4 dualcore.

As well as the dualcore chip – running at 1.2GHz – Peak also has a 4.3-inch qHD IPS display, an 8-megapixel main camera, and a 2-megapixel front camera. There’s 4GB of ROM and 512MB of RAM, along with WiFi b/g/n, triband UMTS (2100/1900/900) and quadband GSM/EDGE. Mozilla also squeezes in a microSD card slot, light and proximity sensors, a g-sensor, and GPS, along with an LED flash for the camera and a 1,800mAh battery.

In comparison, the Keon lacks a front-facing camera, though it has the same connectivity options, RAM, and ROM. Its battery runs to 1,580 mAh. Both devices will be supplied unlocked and SIM-free, ready for developers to slap their own SIM card inside and get coding.

That coding, meanwhile, may well be done at one of the Firefox OS App Days, happening this week across the world. However, Mozilla also has a Firefox OS Simulator for those wanting to code without hardware; there’s more detail on Firefox OS here.

Mozilla says the Keon and Peak Firefox OS Developer Preview Phones will begin shipping from February, though pricing for each device is yet to be confirmed.

[Thanks Al!]

Firefox OS Keon and Peak developer phones revealed for eager coders is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

To say that the Android-powered OUYA game console has garnered some serious attention is a hell of an understatement, and that’s sure to be the case as developer units keep trickling out into the wild. As it turns out, it’s not just game devs that are getting some hands-on time here — some of the folks at Mozilla may be working on getting a version of its Firefox mobile browser up and running on the game-centric cube in short order.

The news comes courtesy of Ed Krassenstein, an administrator for OUYAforum.com. According to him, a Mozilla developer reached out to him earlier today to talk briefly about the process of bringing the browser to the OUYA platform:

We’re investigating what we need to do to make Firefox usable on Ouya. It already works and we have some preliminary patches for gamepad support, but there’s still quite a bit of work to be done to make it really usable. Part of this work will be making sure that WebGL and Canvas support performs well on the device, and making sure that the relevant APIs (such as Gamepad API) are also supported

The platform certainly presents some… interesting challenges, thanks mostly to its non-standard control scheme. After all, plenty of people have scrolled down a webpage on a smartphone screen, but I’d wager the number of folks who have done so with the assistance of a full-size game controller is considerably smaller. Still, the fact that some Mozillians have already worked to surmount that particular stumbling block is heartening news for fans of third-party Android browsers.

Krassenstein’s initial post didn’t offer a name for the anonymous Mozillian he had spoken with, but he eventually confirmed that it was Chris Lord, a Mozilla mobile platform engineer who happened to tweet an image of a Firefox build running on an OUYA earlier today (see above). Granted, it doesn’t actually work very well — Lords notes that it’s “kinda unusable” for the time being — but it’s a step in the right direction at least. Lords also revealed on Twitter that a gentleman named Kats (aka Mozilla software dev Kartikaya Gupta) is mucking around with Firefox for the OUYA as well, though there’s no word on how many others (if at all) are spending time on this.

Naturally, this project is in its very early stages, and there’s no guaranteeing that a final, fully-compatible version of the browser will ever actually become available to OUYA owners, but it looks like things are off to a promising start. And hey — they’ve still got a few months before OUYA’s official release, so there’s a chance an OUYA-optimized version of the browser could debut right in that launch window.

It’s far from the first time that computer users have been warned to disable Java, but this latest security issue has risen to some high levels at a particularly rapid pace. After first being reported by security researchers on Thursday, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (or US-CERT, a part of the Homeland Security department) stepped in with a warning of its own on Friday, which bluntly suggested that all computer users should disable Java in their web browsers (for its part, Oracle says that a fix is coming “shortly”). The flaw itself is a vulnerability in the Java Security Manager, which an attacker could exploit to run code on a user’s computer.

Not content to wait for a fix, some companies have already taken steps to block possible exploits. That includes Apple, which has added recent versions of Java to its blacklist covering all OS X users, and Mozilla, which has enabled its “Click To Play” functionality in Firefox for all recent versions of Java across all platforms (it was previously only enabled by default for older versions of Java). Apple’s move follows an earlier decision to remove the Java plug-in from browsers in OS X 10.7 and up last fall. You can find the full alert issued by US-CERT and additional details on the vulnerability at the links below.

Filed under: Internet, Software

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Via: The Verge

Source: US-CERT, Mozilla

As much as we’ve heard about Firefox OS, there hasn’t been a lot of talk about actual devices. We can put at least one major manufacturer on the list, however. ZTE’s US chief Cheng Lixin tells Bloomberg that his company is working with an unspecified European carrier to ship a Mozilla-friendly phone sometime in 2013. It’s a modest beginning, but Cheng notes that the OS could cross the Atlantic and reach the US this year if ZTE decides the platform is viable enough for the trip. Just what that that European phone involves is another matter — it’s unlikely that the mystery device we saw at CES represents ZTE’s future hardware. Between this and TCL’s commitment earlier this week, though, it’s evident that Mozilla’s platform is becoming a tangible reality.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Via: The Next Web

Source: Bloomberg