Mozilla

Mozilla Labs: In our first Prospector experiment, Speak Words, we helped Firefox learn what words you might want to type into the Awesome Bar. We have taken that idea to help you find words in your open tab in our latest experiment. Finding a word in Firefox has always been easy because Firefox will move you to the new word formed by your last keystroke. This means you do not need to type out a word then click a search button to try finding a word that you might have misspelled. Firefox will let you know immediately if the new letter you pressed does not form a word that is on the page. ...

Mozilla Labs has been working hard on browser-based audio and video — not just for playback, but also for recording. Labs’ newest creation, called Rainbow, lets developers access your hardware’s video and audio recording capabilities with a few lines of JavaScript. The files created are all in open-source formats, including Theora, Vorbis and Ogg (support for WebM and other formats are planned in the product’s roadmap). Once media is captured, files can be accessed via the DOM with HTML5 File APIs. ...

Firefox is slipping in its development schedule; Mozilla says it won’t be able to release version 4.0 this year, and will have to delay the final version until early next year. “Completing this work is taking longer than initial estimates indicated as we track down regressions and sources of instability,” the company said in a statement. “As part of our commitment to beta users, we will not ship software before it is ready.” ...

Mozilla Labs: The “Chromeless” project experiments with the idea of removing the current browser user interface and replacing it with a flexible platform which allows for the creation of new browser UI using standard Web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Introduction Have you ever had an idea to improve the user interface of your browser? Have you ever actually gone and tried to make that idea a reality? If you have, you would have probably used technologies like XUL and XPCOM. Much of the user interface (browser chrome) of Firefox is implemented in XUL, which uses a lot of Web-based technologies such as the DOM and JavaScript. Firefox is put together in a way that seasoned developers are able implement features with amazing efficiency, but at the same time, the browser interface in XUL represents a barrier for potential contributors. What if the parts of the browser that are most interesting to contributors were implemented in standard Web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript? What kinds of wild-eyed experimentation would we see if a new conception of browser UI could be prototyped in about the same time it takes to write a web page? ...

Firefox 3.6.11 and Firefox 3.5.14 are now available as free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://firefox.com. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Firefox 3.6.11. The update fixes 40 security and stability bugs, including 5 critical security vulnerabilities. Firefox 3.6.11: http://firefox.com Firefox 3.5.14: http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-older.html We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to these latest releases. If you already have Firefox, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This updates can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu. ...

A quick and powerful upgrade for your Firefox shortcut mastery: Move Tabs. It’s a simple and useful Firefox extension developed by Jêrome Reybert that allows you to move the current tab to the left, right, the beginnign or the end of the tab bar by simply pressing Ctrl + Shift + PageUp, PageDown,Home and End respectively. Really simple. Get Move Tabs at Mozilla Add-ons. Credit to ‘Mozilla Links’

Thunderbird 3.1.5 and Thunderbird 3.0.9 updates are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download from www.GetThunderbird.com. These releases make several improvements to Thunderbird’s performance, stability, and security. There are also several fixes to improve the user interface and add-ons experience. Thunderbird 3.1.5: http://getthunderbird.com/ Thunderbird 3.0.9: http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/all-older.html We strongly recommend that all Thunderbird users upgrade to these releases. If you already have Thunderbird 3.1 or 3.0, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. You can also manually fetch this update by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu. ...

Firefox’s JavaScript engine, Spidermonkey (including the Tracemonkey and Jaegermonkey JITs) is now faster than Webkit’s JSCore on both Sunspider and V8. Great work, team! Also, on the Sunspider benchmark, Mozilla is only about 1/100th of a second behind Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine (about 3.5%). Oh, and there’s Kraken, where we’re still solidly in the lead.

Welcome to our first release of the new Mozilla about:support add-on. about:support was developed by Siddharth Agarwal with design input from Bryan Clark and testing by Roland Tanglao about:support is based on Firefox’s about:support code, hence the name. It has been modified for Thunderbird to include email account specific information along with the normal preferences and add-ons. You can access about:support from the Help Menu: Help -> Troubleshooting Information which opens a new tab containing all your troubleshooting information including the Thunderbird specific IMAP, POP, and SMTP settings. The account information is often difficult for users to gather and deliver during the Thunderbird troubleshooting process. With the about:support add-on, the troubleshooting information is presented to the user such that it can be copied to the clipboard and pasted into a Thunderbird support forum like Get Satisfaction or emailed directly to others. ...

Google released version 6.0.472.59 of its Chrome web browser. It fixes 10 security vulnerabilities; 1 is only affecting Mac OS X and critical, 6 are rated “high” in their severity. As usual, the update should get delivered and installed automatically – but it doesn’t hurt to check via the “Info about Chrome” option in the “settings” menu whether the new version is already installed. The Mozilla developers pulled the update to Firefox 3.6.9 due to some stability issues some users experienced. Now Firefox 3.6.10 is available which fixes the security vulnerabilities like 3.6.9 and also the instabilities. It is available via “Help” – “Check for Updates” and should be installed ASAP, too. ...