All posts tagged ‘firefox’

File Under: Browsers, Social, Web Services
Oct
12
2012

Mozilla Wants to Put Social Networks in the Browser

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Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired

With Firefox 16 out the door — and yes, it has been updated to fix the security vulnerability we wrote about yesterday — Mozilla has begun turning its attention to Firefox 17, which just arrived in the Beta channel.

If you’d like to test Firefox 17, head over to the Firefox channels page and grab a copy.

Firefox 17 introduces the first bit of Mozilla’s plan to bring the social web into the web browser. Firefox 17 lays the groundwork for Mozilla’s new Social API. There’s nothing to see right now, but under the hood Firefox 17 is getting ready to move your social web interactions from individual websites into a sidebar within Firefox.

Among Mozilla’s plans for the new Social API are a notification system, a way to share or recommend content and a dedicated sidebar for news feeds, chat and other aspects of social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Here’s how Mozilla describes its social API:

Much like the OpenSearch standard, the Social API enables developers to integrate social services into the browser in a way that is meaningful and helpful to users. As services integrate with Firefox via the Social API sidebar, it will be easy for you to keep up with friends and family anywhere you go on the Web without having to open a new Web page or switch between tabs. You can stay connected to your favorite social network even while you are surfing the Web, watching a video or playing a game.

If that sounds familiar, well, it should. The “social” web browser Flock offered most of the features Mozilla has planned for the Firefox Social API, but failed to ever find much of an audience and has since been shut down acquired by Zynga and shutdown (while the current Flock website seems to hint that it might return, we wouldn’t recommend holding your breath).

Mozilla is planning to start its own social experimentation with Facebook. The two companies are working to bring Facebook Messenger (Facebook’s chat and SMS app) into Firefox via the new Social API. Look for Facebook Messenger to arrive in Firefox 17 as updates roll out in the coming weeks.

If social network integration isn’t your bag, fear not, Firefox does have a few changes aimed at web developers, most notably the new Markup Panel in the developer tools.

Previously the Markup Panel only allowed you to edit HTML attribute values, but now you can double-click pretty much anywhere in the panel and change just about any bit of HTML you’d like. That means it’s possible to edit pages on the fly in the browser and then copy and paste your changes back to your actual HTML files or templates. For more details on the other new developer tools in Firefox 17, see our earlier write-up of the Aurora channel release.

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File Under: Browsers
Oct
11
2012

Mozilla Pulls Firefox 16 Due to Security Flaw [Updated]

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Firefox logo[Update: Mozilla has released Firefox 16.0.1, which fixes the security flaw described below. The latest version of Firefox is available from the Mozilla downloads page.]

Just a day after releasing Firefox 16, Mozilla has pulled the update due to a serious security vulnerability.

Mozilla’s Director of Security Assurance, Michael Coates, writes on the Mozilla Security Blog that the company is “working on a fix” and plans to ship an updated version of Firefox 16 “tomorrow”, which would be October 11. At the time of writing the Firefox download page is still offering Firefox 15.

The vulnerability could allow a malicious site to “potentially determine which websites users have visited and have access to the URL or URL parameters.” While Coates says that there is “no indication that this vulnerability is currently being exploited in the wild,” he does suggest downgrading to Firefox 15 as a precaution.

Firefox 15 is unaffected but it’s unclear if the same exploit is present in the later versions of Firefox currently in the Beta, Aurora and Nightly Channels. Of course those are all pre-release versions where bugs and vulnerabilities are expected the crop up.

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File Under: Browsers
Oct
9
2012

Firefox 16 Offers New Tools for Web Developers

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Mozilla has released Firefox 16, which gives web developers several cool new tools for building and debugging websites.

Current Firefox users will get the update the next time Firefox restarts. If you’d like to take Firefox 16 for a spin you can grab it from the Mozilla downloads page.

This release is short on new features for the ordinary users, but Firefox 16 does show web developers some love with the new Developer Toolbar and its “command line” tool.

The Developer Toolbar is really just a faster, easier way to get to the common web developer tools like the Inspector and Console. To use the new toolbar just hit the keyboard shortcut Shift-F2 and the Developer Toolbar will appear as a thin, dark gray strip along the bottom of the page.

The real star of the Developer Toolbar is the new command line tool, which you’ll find on the left side of the toolbar where there’s now a shell-style prompt. Mozilla refers to this as a “Graphical Command Line Interface,” an oxymoron that actually makes sense when you see it in action (check out the video above).

To use the command line, just hit the shortcut (Shift-F2) and then type your commands. For example, you can inspect an element on the current page by typing Shift-F2 and then “inspect H1″. Hit return and Firefox will open the Inspector Panel and highlight the <h1> for you. You can do something similar to search your markup by id; just type “inspect #name” and hit return.

Like recent releases of Opera, Firefox is dropping its vendor prefix (-moz-) from a number of stable CSS features, including animations, transitions, transforms and others.

For a complete changelog of everything new in Firefox 16, have a look at the release notes.

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File Under: Browsers
Oct
5
2012

Mozilla Takes on Windows 8 With ‘Firefox Metro Preview’

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Mozilla looks to claim a square on the Windows 8 start screen with Firefox Metro. Image: Screenshot/Scott Gilbertson.

Mozilla has released a preview version of Firefox built for Windows 8′s touch-friendly interface. Despite Microsoft recently disavowing the term Metro, Mozilla is calling its hybrid version of Firefox, “Firefox Metro Preview.”

You can grab a copy of the new preview release from Mozilla’s Nightly downloads page (.exe link). Run the installer and you’ll have a traditional desktop app named Nightly. Open that up and make Nightly your default browser. Once you do you’ll be able to open the Windows Store version of Firefox from the Windows 8 start screen.

Bear in mind that this is a very experimental release — it’s a nightly build, after all. In my testing (using a Samsung Series 7 tablet) this early form of Firefox Metro proved too rough around the edges to use for much more than exploring the new Metro interface.

The preview does however manage to offer a glimpse of what’s in store for anyone planning to pick up a Windows 8 tablet. Unlike Chrome for Windows 8, which more or less looks just like the desktop version of Chrome, Mozilla has embraced the Windows 8 design aesthetic. The Firefox Metro bookmarks page features a blocky, candy-colored list of links reminiscent of the Windows 8 start page. Other UI touches like the rounded corners and primary colored elements are all part of the Australis interface, which Firefox Product Manager Asa Dotzler calls “streamlined, modern, and beautiful.”

Firefox Metro’s Windows 8-style bookmarks list. Image: Screenshot/Scott Gilbertson.

The default user interface in Firefox Metro has almost no chrome. There’s a URL bar along the top of the window which includes a plus button for new tabs, but otherwise the interface elements are hidden away. Swipe up from the bottom and you’ll find a toolbar for adding bookmarks, pinning sites to the Windows 8 start screen or viewing recent downloads. Swipe down from the top of the screen and you’ll reveal the tab bar. (There’s also an option to always show the tab bar.) Tap the screen and both will disappear offering a fullscreen browsing mode well suited to tablets.

Firefox Metro tab bar. Image: Screenshot/Scott Gilbertson.

The integration with Windows 8 goes beyond just the visual elements with support for Metro’s touch and swipe gestures. Firefox Metro also uses the Windows 8 “charm bar” — the universal sidebar where you’ll find Firefox’s preferences, privacy settings, permissions and other administrative tools. There are quite a few tablet-specific settings as well like an option to control how text formatting is handled on zoom.

Familiar features from Firefox on the desktop have been carried over, including Firefox Sync and support for the Do Not Track privacy header. Unfortunately I couldn’t get Sync to work. Like I said earlier, this release is rough around the edges.

The rough nature of this preview release didn’t stop our friends at Ars Technica from putting Firefox Metro Preview through some benchmarks; check out Jon Brodkin’s post for details on how this nightly build stands up against the other two Metro-ready browsers, IE 10 and Chrome.

While there’s still much to be done before Firefox Metro is ready for prime time — Mozilla currently hopes to ship a final version when Firefox 18 arrives at the beginning of 2013 — this build gives curious users a look at what to expect. But at the moment both IE 10 and Chrome are stabler, more usable browsers for Metro. And keep in mind that while Firefox Metro will work on x86 tablets, nothing has changed with regard to third-party web browsers on Windows RT — tablets based using Win RT and Arm processors will still exist in an IE-only world.

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File Under: Browsers
Sep
24
2012

Happy Birthday, Firefox: The Little Web Browser That Could Turns 10

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Phoenix Logo. Image: Wikimedia.

It was 10 years ago this week that a proto-Firefox crawled out of the Mozilla code swamp and first appeared on the web.

Version 0.1 of what was then known as Phoenix was released Sept. 23, 2002. Don’t believe us? See for yourself: you can still grab a copy from Mozilla’s server.

Mozilla has the release notes available as well, which tout Phoenix’s “customizable toolbar” and “reasonable default settings.” The FAQ is well worth a read, with gems like this one:

You said this is a lean, lightweight browser, but it’s 8MB! I laugh at your silly lies!

Take it easy, sport. Phoenix has many files that override those in Mozilla, but it also has a new set of files. These files render a ton of files in Mozilla unnecessary, but we haven’t yet stopped packaging the old files. It also still contains the modern theme and all the composer UI. In short, we haven’t done any work yet to minimize the size, but we expect to be able to hit 6MB with a little work.

Remember when a couple MBs of disk space mattered? Simpler times, those.

Opera may deserve more credit for pushing the boundaries of what a web browser can be, but it’s hard to imagine what the web would look like today without Firefox. We suspect it would be a dark, proprietary place, one best not contemplated for too long.

So happy birthday, Firefox, and thanks for all the open source fish.

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