The BBC has just done an article on Firefox which is great but, as always has bought up the Google-Mozilla link. Google has a search engine plugin which, when some uses it, generates money by search advertising.
Mozilla also have search deals with Yahoo! as well which I see no mention of. However, they did cover Netscape, Microsoft’s little tiff with the United States DoJ about anti-competitive behavior.
Still they do include a video of Mozilla Europe President Tristan Nitot which is worth the read alone.
Mozilla’s mobile platform developer DougT has added a patch to a bug which would add an attribute to the MouseEvent property which would expose the amount of pressure applied to the touchscreen of an Internet enabled device, in this case, the Nokia N810.
As you can see in the video below, the screen reacts and displays pressure from both the stylus and finger pressure. The applications for this can be used for scrolling or on a display device etc…..
Adobe the famous owners of PDF, Macromedia suite, Flash and basically everything web design has now dropped their licensing fee’s in a bid to open up Flash to the mobile computing platform. One would assume this means both cellphones and Internet tablets etc…
The Open Screen Initiative AKA the Open Screen Project already has some high level backers including Nokia, Motorola, ARM, Samsung and LG along with Intel and Cisco systems. Also included is content partners such as the BBC, MTV and NBC. Flash by Adobe’s estimates has a install base of 98%, something even that Microsoft would be envious of given it’s 90% install base of all net connected PC’s.
There is also a broader aim with a view to expanding on Adobe’s AIR platform which faces competition from Microsoft’s Silverlight.
However the problem with both these platforms like Flash is that they are proprietary systems with vendor lock-in possibilities.
Back in 2006, Adobe gave the Mozilla Project access to its ActionScript JIT runtime engine (part of the Flash player and consequently part of Firefox 4.0) on the Tamarin Project contributing over 135,000 lines of code to the project itself.
But the only real viable options to keep the platform itself open is both the Gnash and the Prism projects (along with the Mobile project) which would allow for porting of the ActionScript engine itself to the Linux platform along with other open source implementations for local viewing of video files on the Internet on the mobile platform. This would allow for an open platform and would avoid the problem with vendor lock-in with open standards being employed and allowing for a richer user experience without the problem of not being to view the web itself without having some sort of Adobe product installed. Already we have seen open Operating Systems (GNU/Linux), open hardware architectures (the PC) and now we are seeing open mobile platforms (Maemo).
March 31 1998 for those of you that remember back that far is the date that the Mozilla Project launched officially. As Mitchell points out:
Today is a special day.
March 31, 1998 is the date that Mozilla was officially
launched. It’s the date the first Mozilla code became
publicly available under the terms of an official open source license
and a governing body for the project — the Mozilla Organization
— began its public work. It’s always been known
in Mozilla parlance as “3/31.” We’ll be
celebrating Mozilla’s 10 year anniversary throughout 2008
. Today I want to look at our first ten years, and a bit at
the next ten years.
Ten years ago a radical idea took shape. The idea was that an
open source community could create choice and innovation in key
Internet technologies where large, commercial vendors could
not. This idea took shape as the Mozilla project.
Oh an they mentioned him too.10 years ago, Mozilla.org kicked off, the MPL was incepted (currently at version 1.1), and the code base was opened up.
As an ex-Netscape (Mozilla Application Suite) user, I can honestly say that the past 10 years have definitely kicked ass. Happy 10th Birthday Mozilla, heres to another 10!
The latest release of beta of Firefox 3.0 has been released - Beta 4 the latest iteration of the open-source browser includes significant improvements relating to memory management and site security including better protection against JSON leaks including:
[Improved in Beta 4!] New Download Manager: the revised download manager makes it much easier to locate downloaded files, and you can see and search on the name of the website where a file came from. Your active downloads and time remaining are always shown in the status bar as your files download.
[Improved in Beta 4!] Full page zoom: from the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images, or optionally only the text size. Your settings will be remembered whenever you return to the site.
Full information is available from the beta 4 release notes.
For everyone who wants a browser to use on the move, on your USB memory devices, network storage areas, restricted environments etc…. I recommend FirefoxPortable from John Haller and co. at PortableApps.
For everyone else who wants something more on the “Web 2.0″ side of things, there’s PocketFlock, an updated version of the old PortableFlock version (0.4 - 0.9).
Flock for those of you unaware is an open-source browser based on the Firefox browser with emphasis on social networking and Web 2.0
It fits right on your USB stick/pen/device at only 12.5MB and if you’re feeling adventurous, you can even try out the new PocketFlock 1.1b (12.1MB) with WebMail and Picasa integration.
Finally!!! The TV studios are getting the idea! After writing about it back in January, the NRK’s - Norwegian broadcaster - project has been a HUGE success in Norway with a population of 4.5 million - they have had 80,000 downloads of their TV series “Nordkalotten 365″ was put online in Hi-Def (MPEG-4) episodes and distributed via the P2P BitTorrent protocol.
As reported on the Miro (GetDemocracy player) blog:
“The initiative has been a huge success on every front —
viewers love the super high-resolution picture and most people have
reported incredibly short download times (given the file sizes).
Furthermore, viewers have been downloading the episodes en-masse
(around 80,000 times in the past 3 weeks). To top it all off, NRK
hasn’t broken the bank to deliver the goods; in fact, they
haven’t even broken a sweat.
To-date, NRK has paid a total of $350 for storage and delivery of
the entire series. This information was disclosed to me by project
manager Eirik Solheim; he also estimated that the bandwidth bill would
have been roughly $8,000, had NRK chosen a more traditional delivery
method.”
Hmm, if only there was a media client that could handle BitTorrent, media playback and RSS. Oh wait! There is! Miro.
Slowly but surely, the TV studios are getting the idea that P2P helps them as well as the users in the end. The studios save money by offsetting the distribution costs and the users help spread the content. It’s a win-win situation!
Miro itself is based on the open-source Mozilla/XULRunner framework and it’s development carried out the Participatory Culture Foundation who the Mozilla Corporation has a member in John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla Corporation.
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Posted by Howard
