Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on August 21, 2008 by CyberNet.

After yesterday’s article about Mozilla rolling out Firefox 3 update notifications it’s clear that there are still some of you who don’t intend on making the leap to Firefox 3 just yet. Maybe you’re still waiting for extensions to get updated, have problems running Firefox 3 on your computer, or just don’t want the new features it offers. Those of you tightly holding on to Firefox 2 will have to let it go by the end of the year if you want any future security and stability updates.

The Firefox 2 download page states that Mozilla is targeting mid-December as the cutoff date:

Firefox 2.0.0.x will be maintained with security and stability updates until mid-December, 2008. All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.

That means they’ll be supporting the older version of Firefox for about 6-months after the general release of Firefox 3. That’s about the same amount of time Firefox 1.5 was supported after Firefox 2 was released, and so this doesn’t really come as a surprise.

As we approach the end of the year we’ll be keeping an eye on how many of you decide to make the upgrade. As it stands about 25% of our readers have not jumped on the Firefox 3 bandwagon, but I’d predict that we can get that down to 10-15% by the end of the year.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on May 08, 2008 by CyberNet.

Last week we took a look at where the various browsers stood up against each other in terms of market share. I was shocked (to say the least) when Internet Explorer triumphantly came out on top with a 1.22% market share increase. That really hit hard for Firefox who’s market share was sent spiraling down to 16.96%, which was nearly a percent lower than the previous month. It’s not too often that you see a single browser gain or drop an entire percent from one month to the next.

When the stats rolled out there were a number of red flags thrown up questioning the integrity of the data. Mozilla, confident that their internal numbers did not show such a significant drop, started to investigate the findings. Net Applications gave them a hand, and here are some of the things they found:

1. Usage of Firefox did not appear to decline in April.

2. Usage of IE saw an ultra unusual spike over the period of a few days in April. While there was steady traffic from IE users – as measured by page views – for a short period surrounding April 18th, there was a huge spike in traffic from IE users – as measure by unique visitors – during the same time period. When I say “huge spike”, I mean something on order of 25% to 50% greater than what could have been expected.

3. Most of IE’s spike was attributable to IE6 users on XP (with some assistance from IE7 users on Vista), and nearly the entire spike came from users outside North America.

Net Applications receives traffic data from nearly 40,000 different business websites, and as it turns out there was an online marketing campaign aimed only at Internet Explorer users. There was no details released as to what sites were running it, but Net Applications said that it was “totally unrelated to anything with Vista, Microsoft or Windows.”

They have now put additional filters in place to watch for abnormal behavior like this. According to them they were already watching for stuff like this to happen on any one particular site, but they weren’t expecting such a widespread campaign to occur.

The stats have been updated, and it looks like things have returned to normal. Firefox and Safari both dropped slightly in market share, but only by miniscule amounts this time. Internet Explorer only saw a 0.03% increase instead of the 1.22% that is was at with the incorrect data. Here are the revised stats:

Much better! If you’re curious about what the stats looked like before hop on over to our previous post.

[via ComputerWorld]

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This article was written on May 26, 2008 by CyberNet.

I always find it interesting to read and watch interviews with leaders of various companies, particularly when they give their take on their own products. Just last week a “Support Firefox Day” session was held over the IRC chat service, and in it they had four of the best known Mozilla employees answer questions that you may find interesting. If you missed the chance to participate you can still catch the full interviews over at Mozilla Links (links are below for each respective person).

I read through the dozens of questions and answers given by each person, and pulled out my favorite responses. Here they are in no particular order:

Mike Connor, Firefox’s development leader, was asked:

What didn’t you have time to implement in Firefox 3 that you’d like to implement in a future Firefox 4?

Some things include a powerful query builder for history and bookmarks, better handling of tabs.

Mike Beltzner, Firefox’s UI leader, was asked:

What frustrates you most about the Firefox 3 UI?

Heh, great question. There are a couple of things that are frustrating to me, both at the UI and underlying infrastructure level.

At the UI level, I’m frustrated that we’re not animating more, and not trying to offer more “emergent” interfaces that help users complete tasks based on what we can infer from the task the user is trying to complete.

So, specifically, I want the location bar to be even smarter, and things like saving pages and downloading files to be even smarter. And I want them to animate fluidly so that users can understand how one part of the UI associates with the next, or how one operation flows into the next.

At the underlying level, I’m excited about new platform enhancements like Compositor as it will let us float chrome over parts of the page more naturally, and of course better threading models will help us give users progress indication.

John Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO, was asked:

With so many people moving toward mobile devices in place of their PC, do you foresee the mobile project taking over as the primary vehicle for Firefox?

That’s a super-interesting question. Myself, I find that I use the mobile internet more and more with my iPhone & the Safari browser. Wwhen I travel, especially in Asia – Japan and China -, it feels like sometimes the predominant way of interacting with the web. Having said that, I think that PCs are very unlikely to go away or even decline. So I think of it as an addition of a major form factor, not a replacement. But there’s no question that it’s extremely important for us.

Asa Dotzler, an evangelist at Mozilla, was asked:

What do you think is the best way to spread Firefox amongst people that always used Internet Explorer and don’t know how Firefox could be better?

I think there are a lot of ways and that no one way is best for everyone. I like to ask people what’s painful about going online and then figure out how Firefox can help that pain point. Most people find the Web really uncomfortable. They’re not like a lot of us who love it and can deal with its problems. The web is a series of flaming hoops they have to jump through to get something done. So I try to show them how Firefox removes those flaming hoops so they can just go online, get done what they want to get done, and get back to the rest of their lives.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on March 28, 2007 by CyberNet.

We have been following the Minimo project for almost a year, and they have definitely made some progress. The last big release, however, was several months back and this has caused some people to think that the project is no longer active.

Minimo 0.2 brings a new look and feel to the table, and is definitely adding some competition to the mobile browser arena. The most recent release is a pretty drastic change over the old interface which can be seen in these screenshots:

As you can see the tabs closely resemble what you are already familiar with in the Firefox web browser, including the scroll buttons that appear after you have opened a large number of tabs. Mozilla actually hosts the Minimo project (which I think stands for Mini Mozilla), but as Doug Turner notes “This isn’t a Mozilla Corporation product.”

Anyone that has used a Pocket PC before will definitely be grateful that this browser is being developed. The Pocket Internet Explorer that is included with Windows Mobile is not very usable because the loading time for sites seems are painfully long and there is no tabbed interface. My favorite browser for Pocket PC’s is definitely Opera Mobile, but that costs money so Minimo is the perfect solution!

Get Minimo
Source: Doug Turner

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on May 27, 2007 by CyberNet.

I love Thunderbird as a desktop email client because it is light weight and fast. I used Outlook 2007 for a little bit, and the features it offered were amazing but it was all a lot more than what I needed. Then when Thunderbird 2 was released I saw it as a great opportunity to switch back.

I noticed today that the Mozilla Thunderbird wiki page had been updated with some of their plans for version 3. There isn’t much information provided, but there are two things they mention that I’m really excited to see in the next release.

—Easier Account Setup—

The first thing that they want is an easier way for users to setup their email account. This is primarily in regards to people who use the email service provided by their ISP, who often provide limited information on setting up an external email client such as Thunderbird.

To make it easier the Thunderbird team has two options in mind: shipping Thunderbird with popular ISP files, or hosting a service with the ISP files. I would rather not see Thunderbird ship with a bunch of ISP files that people would never use, so my preference would be that a site is setup to host the ISP configuration files. That way the selection would be a lot better because users would be able to submit their own configurations.

Of course I think Thunderbird should still do the hunting when it comes to finding the necessary files. For example, a user should begin setting up their account by entering in their email address. Then Thunderbird can go to an online database containing the ISP files and search for the appropriate configuration. All of this could easily be done transparently meaning that the user just has to sit back and sip their coffee while Thunderbird does all of the work behind the scenes.

—Simple Extension Installation—

I have said for quite awhile that Thunderbird needs a better way to download and use extensions. Here is what the Thunderbird team had to say about the current way of installing an extension:

Currently a user must download the extension file locally and then either install the extension by opening the addons dialog and clicking the install button or dragging the extension into the add ons dialog. We get too many complaints from users who click on the extension from within their browser (Firefox) and the extension ends up trying to load in Firefox.

To get around this problem they either want to implement a small browser in Thunderbird for getting extensions, or create a Thunderbird-specific MIME type. The browser would probably be the easiest to implement, but the MIME type would be a lot more effective.

By creating a custom MIME type for Thunderbird extensions a user would be able to click on an extension to install within any browser, and that file will immediately get associated with Thunderbird. When the user then tries to open the extension Thunderbird will popup to install it. This is all very similar to when you download an MP3 from your browser it will ask you if you want to open it with your default media player, and in this case it will ask if you want to open the extension in Thunderbird.

—Overview—

It looks like Thunderbird 3 is headed in the right direction, but it isn’t expected to be available until the first quarter of 2008. Since it is still about a year before it hits final form there will probably be features that get pulled, and more that get added. We’ll keep you up-to-date on anything we find out, but my fingers are crossed that we’ll see tabs in version 3!

Thunderbird 2 Review with Screenshots
View the extension I use in Thunderbird 2
Download Mozilla Thunderbird 2

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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