Hasta La Gadget!

After a healthy alpha (and pre-alpha) period, Mozilla is taking the mobile version of Firefox 4 to beta on Android and Maemo this week, promising improvements in stability, performance, and functionality. Actually, this represents a shift in branding for Maemo, where Firefox 1.1 has already been gold for some time — but odds are good you’re going to want to upgrade in any event, since this new version nets you the so-called Layers framework that aims to improve scrolling and zooming responsiveness. As you might expect, you get built-in Firefox Sync — basically making this a superset of Firefox Home — and support for HTML5. Makes that ol’ N900 look a little shinier, doesn’t it? Follow the break for Mozilla’s announcement video.

Continue reading Firefox 4 for mobile goes beta on Android and Maemo

Firefox 4 for mobile goes beta on Android and Maemo originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Oct 2010 21:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I really want to like Billy May’s ambitious concept for a browser-centric, open-web-standards-based phone

But it’s hopelessly unfettered from what’s actually buildable, usable or marketable.

Mozilla Labs has highlighted the phone, which May called Project Seabird, in its “Concept Series,” a showcase for community-created visions of the web’s future.

May, who is a talented industrial designer, has crammed a lot of interesting ideas into his two-and-a-half-minute video:

• a pop-out Bluetooth headset that doubles as an infrared pointer
• dual pico projectors that can project both a full-size display as well as a virtual keyboard
• wireless charging
• a standard mini USB connector
• a 3.5mm audio jack
• enough processing power to render 3-D spacescapes in real time or display YouTube videos at full resolution.

Because there are two pico projectors, May imagines that one could be used to display a keyboard while the other displays a larger screen. Or, you could place the phone on your desk and have one projector display the left half of an ergonomic split keyboard, while the other projector displays the right half.

Based on the icons May’s painted into his impressive video, it’s running some version of Windows and the browser is Firefox, of course.

The trouble is that current pico projectors fall short in both brightness and clarity: You need to use them in a darkened room, like the one May’s rendering takes place in. Virtual keyboards of the type shown in the video are difficult if not impossible to use. And if netbook processors like the Intel Atom series can barely handle Windows, just imagine how sluggish it will be running on an ARM-based cellphone CPU.

One thing’s for sure: The open-source browser community is going to love this phone.

Those of us in the reality-based community, however, are shaking our heads in disbelief.

Image credit: Billy May

See Also:

• Beautiful Concept Phone for HTC Should Be Built
• Windows Phone 7 Series Tablet Concept
• Concept Phone Mashup: Blackberry vs Optimus Maximus
• Squeeze, Grip and Tilt to Control Synaptics’ Concept Phone …
• Concept Specs Add 50º to Your Angle of View

Hat tip: Webmonkey

Expect to see some changes to Boxee when its $199 D-Link-built Box ships in November, as Lead Apps Developer / Community evangelist Rob Spectre tells NewTeeVee that among them will be a new Webkit based browser. The current Mozilla based browser is clearly useful for some quick & unblocked Hulu viewing, but still doesn’t render many sites properly. According to Spectre, HTML5 “absolutely should be the future for the browsers you use on your TV,” with competition from Google TV we can see why he’d say that, and it should be ready to stream video from even more sites that don’t build Boxee apps. The desktop versions of the software will get the new browser in version 1.0 after the Boxee Box is released, so make sure your comparison charts are appropriately updated.

Boxee’s new browser is built on Webkit and HTML5 ready originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Sep 2010 09:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on September 20, 2007 by CyberNet.

We weren’t exactly sure whether the next milestone in the Firefox 3 pre-release lifecycle was going to be an Alpha or a Beta, but we know now. Mozilla just released Firefox 3 Alpha 8 as another developer preview, and judging by the current state I would say that they will be ready to start the Beta builds soon.

According to the release notes here are all of the new features since Firefox 3 Alpha 7:

• Basic and unpolished UI for starring and tagging pages has been added, as well as a richer Location Bar autocomplete algorithm that matches against page title. Here are possible mockups of upcoming features.
• Prompt for remembering passwords is no longer a modal dialog
• Built in malware protection (which you can test here)
• Basic and unpolished UI for indicating richer website identity information has been added
• A new Applications preference panel for configuring handlers for various content types has replaced the Download Actions dialog and the Feeds preference panel
  
• All Firefox add-ons must now use a secure method for auto-updating
• Firefox now quits properly (instead of just being killed) when Windows is shut down or restarted
• You can also see the full list of all bugs fixed since Gran Paradiso Alpha 7

So the next milestone still hasn’t been classified as an Alpha or Beta build, but it should be released either way around the end of October. Despite having a lot of work to do on the Bookmark Organizer I still think that they can get all of the groundwork laid so that they can begin the Beta process. As always we’ll keep you informed of the new feature as they become available in the nightly builds.

Download Firefox 3 Alpha 8:
Microsoft Windows 2000 or later
Mac OS X 10.4 or later
Linux

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on October 23, 2007 by CyberNet.

Mozilla was rolling in the green last year when they announced their 2005 revenue of $52.9 million, but in 2006 they were up 26%! Yep, their 2006 revenue totaled more than $66.8 million. As Larry Dignan points out Mozilla gets over 85% of it’s revenue from Google.

Expenses? Yes, there were definitely some of those. In fact they totaled $19.7 million! Mozilla’s 90 employees, not surprisingly, were the biggest expense consuming roughly 70% of the money the corporation spent (that’s almost $14 million). In case you’re wondering, that equates to an average salary of $153,000 for each of their employees.

Mozilla was able to pocket a lot of the money which is good for future development. Mitchell Baker, Mozilla’s CEO, said that “in 2007 we expect our expenses to be significantly higher as we have continued to hire and fund more people and develop additional programs.” There’s no doubt that the expenses will be higher for 2007 since they broke Thunderbird off into its own organization, and gave it $3 million in seed money.

It’s hard to believe that back in 2003 Mozilla’s revenue was just $2.4 million and in 2004 it was $5.8 million. They have definitely come a long ways! Congratulations to the team as I’m sure they will be busting out the bubbly tonight.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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