● 12.20.13

● Links 20/12/2013: Mozilla and Firefox/Thunderbird

Posted in News Roundup at 3:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

• With half a billion users on desktop and another 50 million on Android, Firefox still holds its own in the browser wars, especially as privacy concerns become front-of-mind for normal consumers.

• Today, December 10, Softpedia is happy to report that the final packages of the Mozilla Firefox 26.0 web browser are now available for download for all supported platforms, including Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X, ahead of the official announcement.

• While Google Chrome and other modern web-browsers — even modern versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer — support separate processes between the user-interface and other rendering tasks, notably missing from the threading party has been Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla developers, however, have been working towards a multi-process Firefox.

• There have been some interesting developments surrounding Mozilla’s Firefox OS platform and smartphones built on it. Alcatel had already delivered its popular OneTouch Fire phone based on the mobile operating system in countries ranging from Germany to Hungary and Poland. Now, the OneTouch Fire is going on sale at low prices in Italy via Telecom Italia. Meanwhile, Geeksphone has been discussing a high-end Firefox OS phone called Revolution that will purportedly run both Mozilla’s platform and Android (though users will need to choose one platform).

• Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox browser and operating system, is organizing a contest for creating games. They have teamed up with Goo Technologies for Mozilla and Goo’s Game Creator Challenge to engage ‘budding’ game creators.

• A Rust language front-end is under development for the GNU Compiler Collection. Rust is Mozilla’s programming language under development that’s similar to C/++ and aims to be a safe, concurrent practical language.

• Up to now all of the work around the Rust compiler has been implemented atop LLVM, but now GCC developer Philip Herron has decided to work on a Rust compiler front-end for the Free Software Foundation’s compiler.

• Mozilla’s dependence on search engine revenue raises questions about its effectiveness as a champion of the free, open Web

• Mozilla, the open-source Web browser group behind Firefox, doesn’t appear to have much to do with Google until you look at the bottom line. There, you’ll find that 90 percent of Mozilla’s revenue comes from Google.

• Mozilla is about more than just web browsers

• Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker argues that the mobile- and data-centric Web faces new threats to its flexibility and openness.

• At long last, Mozilla has rolled out a massive UI update to Firefox that makes it look almost exactly like Chrome. Dubbed Australis, this is the biggest ever change to Firefox’s user interface, with much improved streamlining and customization, and the unification of Mozilla’s design language across the desktop, smartphone, and Firefox’s myriad other form factors. Australis will debut in Firefox 28, which just hit the Nightly (alpha testing) channel; if everything goes to plan, the new-look Firefox should be ready for mass consumption at the start of 2014.

• Back in August, in a post titled “The Success of Firefox OS Will Depend on the Success of Apps For It,” I made the case that Mozilla needs to drum up a lot of developer interest in its Firefox OS mobile platform in order to seed a healthy app ecosystem. And, sure enough, Mozilla has been steadily holding developer days in various locations and has even offered incentives for app development.

• Now, in a new post online, Rick Fant, Mozilla Vice President of Firefox Marketplace, says: “We are excited by the developer interest in the short time since we’ve opened the Firefox Marketplace and are impressed by the creativity and innovation inspired by Mozilla-pioneered WebAPIs.” Mozilla is pointing to thousands of available apps in the Marketplace.

• In a rare occurrence, Mozilla developers release an out-of-band update that patches five security flaws in Firefox 25.0.1.

• I’ve always been a big fan of Mozilla’s email client, Thunderbird, even when it was unfashionable to admit it. Because, for the last few years, the view amongst those “in the know” was that email was dead, that nobody used it, and that even if they did, Web-based systems like Gmail meant that Thunderbird and its ilk were dinosaurs.

• Canonical announced a couple of days ago, December 11, that the recently released Mozilla Thunderbird 24.2.0 email client landed in the Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu 12.10, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.

• Officially released by Mozilla on December 10, 2013, the Mozilla Thunderbird 24.2.0 email client is a bugfix release that solves an issue where long email messages that had multiple signatures might no longer be readable, and fixes a problem where users were not able to edit account settings in various non-standard configurations of local folder setups, as well as several security issues.

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