Four years ago, when MozillaNews.org started the community suffered from a lack of sources for timely news. In that time, MozillaZine has become a powerhouse with news, forums, weblogs, the FeedHouse, and the wiki-based Knowledge Base. Also, we now have the RSS-aggregator Planet Mozilla for world-wide Mozilla related blogs, and even Gemal's Blogupdates. This past year, we here at MozillaNews have found out personal lives a lot busier, and we've had less time to devote to MozNews. We still love MozNews, but for now, we're putting it into hibernation mode. New comments are closed to prevent comment spam, but all the stories are still here, and we'll be back. Thanks for reading, folks.
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Now that NVu 1.0 has been officially released, we asked Daniel Glazman to take some time to give us another interview to book-end our first interview with him, early in NVu's development. He was gracious as always, and fast! Click our Read More link for unavoidable laws, plans for the future of NVu and Daniel, and even news about his company's upcoming release.
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Mozilla.org's very own Asa Dotzler caught everyone's second favorite browser, Opera, in another marketing mishap. He notblogged about Opera misunderstanding that coming in 88th in The 100 Best Products of 2005 as rated by PCWorld, behind the #1 product Firefox, the #12 product Maxthon (an IE-based browser), and without any other browser products in the list is not the equivalent of being "The Best Browser of 2005". They are one of the top 100 products of 2005, but is clearly the third best browser of the year. 
AOL has released Netscape 8 today, to average reviews. It still has the twin-engine design, and a few extra features form the beta such as the Trust Rating system. We'll take it for a spin over the next few days and post a review by 
The most recent security release to Firefox and Seamonkey have been released. Returning for an encore is our incredibly advanced Download Matrix©®™ for links to the Suite and Firefox. This is merely a security release for both products. TherRelevant security bulletins:
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We're starting to so some spring cleaning around here. One thing you can see right now is the Forums link in the menubar now points to MozillaZine's Forums. When MozillaNews.org started almost four years ago, the Mozilla community was a very different place. MozillaZine was a small site with few news updates, and there was no centralized community center except the newsgroups, which being hosted on the Netscape newsgroup servers weren't easily discoverable. We started up with the idea of forums to come soon after. The best made battle plans never survive contact with the enemy, and our forums were severely delayed. MoZine opened their forums, and it quickly became the place to be, as the kids say. With the recent reorganization over there, they're better than ever. So now we officially close our forums, and direct all forum goers to MozillaZine's Forums, an excellent community resource for chat and support. We'll have some more improvements coming soon, so stay tuned!
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In his blog post for today, May 2, 2005, Ben Goodger has given us a brief overview of the new "Changes for Extension Developers". He describes it as "almost a complete restructuring of the Extension system" and goes on to give some details about how it improves the situation for developers and for users. He also thanks Benjamin Smedberg and Darin Fisher for their feedback in a rather hefty patch.
Speaking of Ben Smedberg, MozillaNews.org wants to congratulate he and his wife on the birth of their daughter Claire Jane Smedberg, born back on April 27. Yes, Ben's wearing his Firefox polo shirt while holding his newborn. That's the way to do it, indoctrinate them when they're young! [3 Comments]
Firefox hit 49,000,000 downloads last night. Today, as we approach 50,000,000, SpreadFirefox is offering prizes for photographic proof of your most amazing spectacles to celebrate. To quote: 'We have a handful of unique prizes that you won't find anywhere else,
and we're asking you to do one simple thing to claim one: impress us.
As we drive toward 50 million downloads, do something so cool, so
unusual and so spectacular to spread Firefox that we can't help but scurry around the Mozilla Foundation to tell every one. Send a photo of your feat to fifty@spreadfirefox.com.' But you don't have long. The Infocraft Firefox Counter shows just over 800,000 downloads left at the time of this submission!
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When Opera 8 released on April 21, Opera's CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner announced he'd swim from Norway to America, with only one layover in Iceland for a cup of his mom's hot chocolate. Well, they did it. One million, fifty-thousand downloads later, he jumped into the freezing waters off of Oslo. The more healthy competition there is for Microsoft's Internet Explorer the better for web users everywhere, and we wish Jon the best of luck swimming across the unforgivingly cold North Atlantic. If someone wants to buy me a round trip ticket to Iceland to interview Jon on his rest, I'll be glad to bring back a cup of hot chocolate for you.
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The people have spoken, and the Evil Empire has listened! In the IEBlog, the good men and women of the IE crew have heard the collective voices of web developers screaming for PNG alpha transparency support, and it will be included in IE7's first beta release. IE users will finally see the graphics at MozillaNews.org as they're meant to be seen. ;)
Also coming is numerous CSS bug fixes "so that web developers have a consistent set of functionality on which they can rely." Actually, web developers have had this for years with Mozilla, Firefox, and Opera. It's that now the (current) majority users will have it, making it easier to deploy and making web developers lives easier. It's a great thing to see IE playing catch-up again.
The first beta of IE7 is due out this summer.
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Robert O'Callahan has posted what he calls a "Glimpse Of The Future". And from the post, that's exactly what it is.
"One of the big initiatives in 1.9 will be an overhaul of our graphics infrastructure. We're planning to rip out a lot of our existing graphics code and base everything on Cairo. This will give us modern 2D graphics capabilities (such as filling, stroking and clipping to paths, general affine transforms, and ubiquitious support for alpha transparency) and also, via Glitz, acceleration using 3D graphics hardware. It will also mean we can use a single rendering pipeline for HTML/CSS, canvas and SVG, so that SVG effects can be applied to HTML content."Read the entire post for details and prototype screenshots. Congratulations to Robert, Vladimir Vukićević and Stuart Parmenter for some incredible groundwork. It's nowhere near done yet, but this is an exciting development. [8 Comments]
Former Windows Magazine editor Fred Langa in his weekly "Langa Letter" column for InformationWeek discusses The Pros and Cons of Firefox. The article has what seems to be Fred's stock in trade, good information mixed in with bad information. In the article below, I'll make some observations and responses to Fred's article. Click the "Read More" link for the full article. [Read More] [21 Comments]
Incremental updates to Firefox and the Mozilla Suite have gone gold and are released. Below is our spiffy Download Matrix©®™ for links to the Suite and Firefox. Firefox has several security updates and an improved Update process. The Suite has a few security updates as well. Read the Release Notes for full details.
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Mike Connor let loose the news in this blog post that he's now working on Firefox full time under a contract with the Mozilla Foundation.
On a related note, today I start working full-time on Firefox, working under a contract with the Mozilla Foundation. So all of those “I’ll get to it around mid-April” comments really were accurate. I really did mean “I’ll get to it around mid-April” which is now. Expect the bugspam to start rsn, I need to catch up on bugmail first (the last week sucked).Great news for Mike, and the entire Firefox community. Congratulations! [9 Comments]
Everyone's favorite redundantly redundant tech news site News.com.com22 has a new article up entitled Start-up wants to improve on Firefox. Round Two, formerly Mozsource (formerly E-Flo), is looking to launch a suite of Firefox enhancements sometime in the next month or so. I think it's a sign that you've arrived when businesses spring up to support your OSS project, and this proves that Firefox is definitely a force to contend with.
Updated: Removed references to Blake Ross. Blake Ross is not affiliated with Round Two. I apologize for the mix up. We do look forward to what Blake has up his sleeve, though. [Read More] [10 Comments]
Robin Monks wrote in to remind us:
Mozilla's recently revived weekly Bugday will be expanded this week due to the planned auto-resolve of unconfirmed bugs. Mozilla bugday will be 48hrs this week (from the normal 24hrs) and will start Tuesday, April 5th at 2PM Atlantic. Everyone is welcome!That's right; It's twice the Bugday fun this week with a double helping of triaging! For those of you not in New Brunswick (Canada, not New Jersey), that's 1PM EST, 10AM PST, your time may vary. [16 Comments]
Ok ok, we lied. Google is not buying the Mozilla Foundation. It's an April Fools Day joke. Have a great spring, everyone.
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