“News of my Demise has been Greatly Exaggerated”…

And after a short hiatus, I have returned to posting! Having been away as devs are for development reasons over different platforms – Firefox, N900 and finally MeeGo and the confirmed Nokia N9 with MeeGo Harmattan 1.2 (Maemo viewers will know that Harmattan was also the code name for Maemo 6.0)

Firefox 4.0 and 5.0 have come and been released including the new Do-Not-Track feature as ell as the regular goodies under the hood for web developers.

I shall also return to regular weekly postings under this blog.

Happy Xmas 2010!

Happy Xmas to one and all! We’ve seen a lot this year – the formation of MeeGo, the direction of a new Firefox for the mobile (Android/Maemo) platform and a new Firefox!

Lets hope 2011 will be an even bigger year for open source, the hardworking guys over at Mozilla and Nokia.

Happy Christmas and have a great new year!

Silent Updates to Appear in Firefox 4.0

Mozilla is set to add silent updates circa Firefox 4.0 however, the updates will only be available on the Win32 platform and only effect minor updates such as 4.0.1, 4.0.2 etc… without user interaction. The user will STILL be notified on major version changes such as 4.0 – 5.0 etc…

Most updates, including all security updates, will be downloaded and installed automatically without asking the user or requiring a confirmation, said Alex Faaborg, a principal designer on Firefox.

“We’ll only be using the major update dialog box for changes like [version] 4 to 4.5 or 5,” Faaborg said in a late July message on the“mozilla.dev.apps.firefox” forum. “Unfortunately users will still see the updating progress bar on load, but this is an implementation issue as opposed to a [user interface] one; ideally the update could be applied in the background.”

It comes after a report from two security researchers at Google compiled a report (PDF link) on software security and stability which also went to praise Mozilla for their update mechanism being the best of the browsers prior to the arrival of Google and it’s Chromium project (Chrome browser).

Silent updates seem to be making more and more of an appearance into software these days, Adobe now uses silent updates in its PDF reader software but the user MUST enable it.

[Source]

MeeGo’s Impact

MeeGo (the conversion of the Maemo project as well as Moblin into a open source OS for mobile device not just MID’s) Has certainly come a long way in the space of what could be termed a few short months. In reality, it was longer but still worth it!

I look forward to what MeeGo promises to be: a lightweight, efficient, workable OS designed for the mobile platform and not encumbered with patents that others have had issues with.

The addition of Mobile Firefox (AKA Fennec) 1.1 being released also promises more in terms of what the mobile web can offer and soon offer web designers/developers as well as the future of content on the mobile platform.

The Big Catchup…

After a short spell away, the news reumes!

We’ve seen the Chromium project (from Google) makes leaps and bounds in the last year going from version 1 to 5 in less than 2 years! We’ve seen several offshoot projects using the Chromium base such as ChromePlus and SRWare’s Iron.

From Nokia, we’ve seen Maemo version 5.0 get launched on the new N900 mobile Internet device, there’s also the new Meego project encompassing Maemo, Nokia, Intel and Moblin.

Mozilla has released Firefox 3.6.2 to address a security vulnerability and has discontinued support for the Windows Mobile platform (Maemo still supported).

This year looks to be exciting.

BREAKING NEWS: MS to open source Windows

That’s right, Microsoft are going to open source Windows while also donating money to the Linux Foundation for additional funding.

Chief Software Architect at Microsoft Ray Ozzie said “It was a clear decision we had to take. We’ve been fond supporters of Linux ever since the late *nix days and big admirers of Linux Torvalds.”

This open source effort also includes steps to open up the IE code base as well. Speaking at a tech demo CEO, Steve Balmer said “We are making a concerted effort to make IE9 more standards complaint within W3C guidelines and adopt the WebKit rendering engine.”

Good news for all

2010 hits…and Firefox 3.6 on the Horizon!

Happy New Year to one and all, yes I haven’t been on that much due to independent projects and the like taking up my time but rest assured, it’s a new year, a new start and a new browser on the horizon.

July 17th 2008 saw Firefox 3.0 branch hit, the first Firefox focused on search. 3.5 AKA 3.1 then came along in July 2009 and 3.6 is on the horizon with improved HTML5 capabilities including the much much debated now removed audio/video support from the official W3C HTML5 spec pending codec arguments.

We shall look forward to what the new year brings and new Mozilla developments, including; a new mobile browser (Fennec), new Thunderbird (3.0 branch) and a new launch of Prism.

Maemo 5.0 AKA Nokia N900 is go!

I’m back! After a busy time away I’m back in the flesh.

And when I say busy, I MEAN busy. We’ve the odd one or two things happen then but it’s official! The Nokia N900 containing the new Maemo 5.0 AKA Fremantle OS is now official and on the way to release.

The new MID (Mobile Internet Device) will be part cellphone and part MID. In the US, I believe the carrier will be T-Mobile however, I am unsure of the others within other territories.

What about Mozilla? The new N900 will come with a Mozilla-based browser as with the previous incarnations like the N800 and the N810 models. Will it be a new browser? I cannot say as I have not tested it yet.

And speaking of Mozilla, a new version of Fennec the mobile browser AKA mobile Firefox for the mobile device device (MID’s, cellphones) platform has released version 1.0 beta 4. Congrats!

Arora: A Light, Cross-Platform Web Browser

The web browser market got more competition today, Arora – initially a project based on the QTWebKit framework and then carried on as a seperate project using the WebKit rendering engine (ala Google Chrome/Chromium).

The browser itself is cross-platform thanks in part to the Qt framework it’s based on.

Arora

The browser itself:

“…features a minimalistic and lightweight interface, including tab management, simple history, a bookmarks system and global user CSS.”

Essentially this makes it ideal for those that just want a browser for a browser and not much else however, the project is open source so more features could be coming to it as seeing as it’s based on the WebKit rendering engine as opposed to Firefox’s Gecko, it fits with it’s other cousins such as Chrome/Iron.

[via DLS]

Arora: A light-weight, cross-platform web browser based on WebKit.

Make Firefox 3.0 or 3.5 look like Firefox 3.7

A good writeup from DLS if you remember the mockups from MozillaWiki on the new Firefox 3.7 interface (note: they are mockups AND subject to change depending on demand).

For those that want to try and theme their Firefox 3.0 or 3.5 installation to look like the aforementioned mockups then DLS has you covered with their post on the subject here.

For the run down, the steps are:

You’ll need to grab a couple things to pull off the transformation:

• Personal Menu – One of my favorite add-ons. Needed to combine the bookmark and tools icons.
• All Glass – To add Vista / Windows 7 Aero Glass effects to the toolbars
• Stylish – To apply the provided UserStyle which tweaks inactive tab text
• The theme .JAR, from DeviantArt (of course)

The end result is pretty faithful to the mockup. Pull the switcheroo and confuse your pals – tell them you got your hands on an early pre-alpha (Make it more convincing with a quick Titlebar Tweak)!

[via @leemathews/@DownloadSquad/Tweaking with Vishal]

Make Firefox 3 or 3.5 look like the Firefox 3.7 new theme mockup.