All posts tagged ‘mozilla’

File Under: Browsers
Dec
27
2011

Why Google Continues to Fund Firefox

By

Just before the holiday weekend Mozilla announced that it had renewed its long-standing search revenue agreement with Google, which will reportedly net Mozilla $300 million a year (as part of a three-year contract). The renewed contract comprises the bulk of Mozilla’s funding and is unquestionably a good deal for Mozilla. What’s less immediately clear is why Google — which now has its own Chrome browser — would want to continue the deal.

Indeed, why fund the competition? M.G. Siegler speculates (based on AllThingsD’s report that there was a bidding war over Mozilla) that Google is willing to spend that kind of money just to keep Microsoft from starting a partnership with Mozilla.

That’s one theory. But it may well be that the truth is much more mundane. It may be that Mozilla is just one of a number of payouts that Google makes to help drive ad sales.

In fact, as Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler points out, Google pays out roughly 24 percent of its ad revenues to drive more traffic to its ads:

Not all traffic to Google ads is “organic” though. To help drive ad sales, Google pays for traffic to their ads. They paid out $2.21 billion, or 24% of their ad revenues in “Traffic Acquisition Costs”. That money goes to revenue shares with their AdSense partners and to “distribution partners” — presumably browser makers, PC OEMs, and mobile OEMs and operators.

As Dotzler goes on to point out Google pays out similar money to Opera and Apple, which both use Google as the default search engine in their respective browsers — again, driving eyeballs to Google ads. Dotzler’s point being that the Google-Mozilla deal is not a charitable arrangement, but a business deal built around driving eyeballs to Google ads. Firefox currently holds roughly 25 percent of the global browser market, which is certainly a healthy number of eyeballs..

Of course it’s possible that other factors may also influence Google’s decisions. Google Chrome developer Peter Kasting says that Google’s motivation for building Chrome is to “make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible.” That means, according to Kasting, that “it’s completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers.” In other words, funding Firefox helps to further the same goal that drove the company to build Chrome in the first place — advancing the web.

That would be somewhat easier to swallow if other parts of the Google machine didn’t build so many experiments that only work in Chrome.

Regardless of Google’s motivation for building Chrome, or for funding Mozilla, both moves have proved great news for users. And in the end the precise motivation behind the Google-Mozilla deal are something only tech writers really care about. Users care about speed and there’s no question that Chrome has helped spawned a renaissance among web browsers and helped put speed back on top of every browser makers’ to-do list (the drive to adopt HTML5 has also done wonders to improve the average user’s experience on the web).

For most users the Mozilla-Google deal just means that there will continue to be a number of browsers to choose from and a number of browsers to help keep pushing the web, and each other, forward.

Tags: , , ,
File Under: Browsers, Web Services
Aug
8
2011

Google, Mozilla Team Up to Create a Smarter, Action-Based Web

By

Google has announced a new set of APIs for its Chrome web browser, which are designed to connect applications and sites across the web. Web Intents, as Google is calling its new meta-website API, allows websites to pass data between each other — for example, to edit a photograph or share a URL with friends.

Developers at Mozilla have been working on a similar framework for Firefox, and now Google says it will work with Mozilla to develop a single API that works in both web browsers.

The Web Intents API was originally conceived by Paul Kinlan last year. Kinlan, who is a Chrome Developer Advocate at Google, borrowed the idea from the Android platform, which uses Android Intents to pass data between Android Apps.

So just what are Web Intents? Well, the easiest way to understand them is by example. Take the sometimes overwhelming proliferation of buttons on web pages that allow you to do something with the current page, whether it’s Like, Tweet, +1, Read Later, Add to Instapaper and so on. Rather than adding a dozen little badges to your site, Web Intents creates a bridge that connects your site to any website your visitor wants to use. Web Intents define an API for your site to use and another API for the receiving site to use. Plug them together and transferring data becomes a quick and easy process, both for users and developers.

That’s a huge step up from the situation today. Perhaps the biggest win is that Web Intents put your visitors in control — they can select which actions they’d like to perform and which external sites they’d like to handle those actions. Some might share your page on Facebook, others on Twitter, still others might save it to their Instapaper account and so on, all from the same three lines of code you added to your site.

That’s not, however, all that Web Intents can do. The broader goal of Web Intents is to provide a generic means of communication between websites for tasks as varied as editing photos, listening to music or shortening URLs.

The second half of the video below demonstrates Mozilla’s take on how Web Intents ("Web Activities" in Mozilla’s parlance) might work.

For some sample code and working examples, head over to the new WebIntents.org site and check out the examples (the image example is particularly good at showing off the potential power of Web Intents).

For some more background on Web Intents, check out Paul Kinlan’s blog, particularly his overview post on the brief history of Web Intents. Tantek Çelik, the creator of microformats, also has a nice post on what he calls Web Actions (same thing, better name). Çelik breaks down the idea behind Web Intents and how they benefit not just developers, but users as well.

As Çelik writes, "web actions have the potential to change our very notions of what a web application is from a single site to loosely coupled interactions across multiple, distributed sites…. In that regard, web actions have the potential to become a building block for distributed web applications."

Image: Aidan Jones/CC/Flickr

See Also:

Tags: , , , ,
File Under: Browsers, Mobile, operating systems
Jul
26
2011

Mozilla Eyes Mobile OS Landscape With New Boot to Gecko Project

By

Mozilla has announced a new experimental project called Boot to Gecko (B2G) with the aim of developing an operating system that emphasizes standards-based Web technologies. The initial focus will be on delivering a software environment for handheld devices such as smartphones.

The current mobile landscape is heavily fragmented by the lack of interoperability between each of the siloed platforms. Mozilla says that B2G is motivated by a desire to demonstrate that the standards-based open Web has the potential to be a competitive alternative to the existing single-vendor application development stacks offered by the dominant mobile operating systems.

The project is still at the earliest stages of planning. Mozilla has some ideas about how it wants to proceed, but seemingly few concrete decisions have been made about where to start and what existing technologies to use. The project was announced now despite the lack of clarity so that contributors will be able to participate in the planning process.

Mozilla also intends to publish the source code as it is developed rather than waiting until it can release a mature product. These characteristics could make the development process a lot more open and inclusive than the practices that Google uses for its Android operating system.

Mozilla’s current tentative plan is to adopt a slim layer of existing code from the lower levels of the Android operating system for hardware enablement purposes and then build a completely custom user interface and application stack around Gecko, the Firefox HTML rendering engine. Android was chosen because it will theoretically offer compatibility with existing hardware, but Mozilla ultimately intends to use “as little of Android as possible.” It will not use Android’s Java-based environment and it will not support programming in native code.

A foundational goal of the B2G project is to explore and remedy areas where current Web standards are insufficient for building modern mobile applications. Instead of haphazardly grafting vendor-specific markup or extensions into the application runtime, Mozilla will seek to propose new standards to address the challenges that emerge during development. It wants the applications developed for B2G to eventually be able to run normally in any conventional standards-compliant Web browser (yes, that presumably rules out XUL).

Building an operating system seems like an excessive approach to fulfilling the stated goals of the B2G project. It would be simpler and much more straightforward to focus on building a standalone Web application runtime—like an open alternative to Adobe AIR—rather than building a complete operating system from the bottom up.

There are a lot of fundamental issues that make developing software with Web technologies less practical than using conventional user interface toolkits. HTML’s document-centric approach to layout and the lack of standardized mechanisms for binding programmatic data models to user interface views pose many challenges. It’s not really clear if Mozilla is interested in addressing those issues or will continue to leave that as an exercise for third-party JavaScript toolkits.

It seems like the areas where Mozilla is interested in pursuing new standards are basic platform integration and access to hardware. It wants to have uniform and predictable ways for Web applications to access a platform’s contact and messaging capabilities, geolocation functionality, cameras, and dialer.

Of course, Mozilla is also interested in tackling some the issues relating to security and privilege management that are implied by giving Web applications such deep access to underlying platform components. Those areas are, perhaps, where building the whole operating system becomes advantageous.

There are a number of existing products and open source software projects like Titanium, PhoneGap, Webian, Chrome OS, and webOS that cover some of the same ground. None, however, really have the same scope and focus as B2G. It’s possible that there are some opportunities for collaboration.

A code repository is hosted on GitHub, but doesn’t have anything yet besides a README file. For some additional information about the project (there aren’t many details yet) you can refer to the B2G wiki page.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

Tags:
File Under: Identity, Web Standards
Dec
23
2010

New Privacy Icons Aim to Save You From Yourself

By

A few of the proposed privacy icons

Mozilla has taken the lead among browser vendors to make a site’s privacy settings more explicitly visible. It’s doing so by proposing visual cues in the browser that indicate what level of privacy you’re currently browsing at, and what pieces of your personal data the site you’re currently visiting is sharing with the rest of the web.

Earlier this year, Mozilla’s head user experience designer Aza Raskin proposed creating a set of icons to denote the privacy policy of a website. Now, after getting feedback from a wide range of interested groups — from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to the Federal Trade Commission — Raskin has drawn up a new and improved icon set.

The idea behind Raskin’s proposal is that the browser is the most logical place to display identity and privacy information to the user as they click around on the social web. The end goal is to produce a set for warnings similar to the way that Firefox (and other browsers) currently handle phishing attack warnings, using visual icons and simple language to explain what you’re getting into when you load a page with a different level of privacy or security.

For the active social web user, keeping track of which bits of your data are public and which are private on different sites is a chore. Some websites share your photos, status updates, your list of friends, who you’re following and other data default. Some share nothing. The rest are somewhere in the middle.

Part of the problem is the privacy policies themselves. They are complex, mind-numbingly long legal documents. We routinely ignore them, breezing past them by clicking “I agree.” Once clicked, your rights are compromised, and you may not be able to fully restore them.

A set of icons in the browser, to quickly and easily allow users to know what will happen to their data, means that users don’t need a law degree to know what’s happening to their images, status updates and other data.

The big difference between privacy icons and the phishing warnings your browser already offers, is that these icons are targeted at the websites themselves. The biggest counter-argument to Raskin’s proposal is that there’s nothing stopping a site from displaying these icons and then doing the opposite.

Raskin’s solution is to make the privacy icons supersede the written privacy policy. “When you add a Privacy Icon to your privacy policy,” writes Raskin, “it says the equivalent of ‘No matter what the rest of this privacy policy says, the following is true and preempts anything else in this document…’”

In other words, sites using the icons maliciously would face legal consequences. Of course differences in international laws mean enforcing such violations would be complex.

Still, as Raskin points out, privacy policies are fast becoming a selling point for many sites. Nearly every site we’ve tested lately has some sort of large, obvious banner that proudly proclaims the site will never share your data. Those are the kinds of sites, says Raskin, that would adopt privacy icons.

But it’s still unlikely any site would ever adopt the negative icons. If you’re sharing everything users give you with anyone who pays for it, you probably don’t want to advertise that. So the privacy icons actually become most useful when they aren’t present. Of course, as Raskin writes, “people don’t generally don’t notice an absence; just a presence.”

The solution to that problem is to make the privacy icons machine readable. The workflow would be something like this: You visit a website and decide to sign up. When Firefox encounters the sign-up form, it looks for the privacy icon. If it finds it, Firefox displays it. If Firefox doesn’t see an icon it warns you that your information may be shared using the negative icon. Either way, you know where you stand.

For now the privacy icons, good idea though they may be, are a long way from reality. Raskin calls the current mockups an “alpha” release and since Raskin is leaving Mozilla, the future of the project is unclear. If you’d like to get involved, head over the Mozilla Drumbeat Privacy Icons project page.

See Also:

Tags: , , ,
File Under: Browsers
Dec
22
2010

Firefox 4 Beta 8 Arrives With Faster Graphics, Better Sync

By

Mozilla has dropped the eighth beta release of Firefox 4. Originally intended as a quick update to fix some issues on beta 7, Firefox 4 beta 8 actually brings over 1,400 bug fixes, some improvements to the new add-ons interface, better syncing and more hardware accelerated WebGL support. There’s also a beta update for Android and Maemo mobile phones, which we’ll look at later.

If you’d like to take Beta 8 for spin on your desktop, head over to the Mozilla beta downloads page. It’s been a very long development cycle for Firefox 4 — the final version is still a couple of months out, since once the betas are done, Firefox 4 moves into the release candidate stage. However, the enhancements being made over versions 3.5 and 3.6 are substantial, and these releases are stable enough to use in day-to-day browsing, so it’s not like we’re waiting a long time for nothing. We can reap the rewards well before the official release date.

The improvements to Firefox’s new sync feature — which syncs bookmarks, browsing history, user preferences and open tabs between both desktop and mobile versions of Firefox — make signing up and starting sync easier for new users. Most of us use multiple screens every day — one or two computers, and at least one smartphone with a web browser — keeping it all in sync is increasingly difficult. That’s where Firefox’s sync tools come in and the streamlined sync interface makes it even easier to pick up where you left off, no matter what device you’re using.

The sync updates in Firefox 4 beta 8 coincide with similar improvements in Firefox Mobile 4 beta 3 for the Android and Maemo mobile platforms.

Firefox 4 beta 8 now supports WebGL on more graphics cards across both Mac and Windows operating systems. WebGL bridges the gap between HTML5 tools like the new Canvas tag and OpenGL, an OS-native graphics engine, to speed up HTML5 web apps and animations. If you’d like to see the new WebGL support in action, grab Firefox beta 8 and head over to the Flight of the Navigator demo page, or check out the release notes page which has a video of the demo.

The latest beta isn’t just faster with HTML5 graphics either. Although Mozilla hasn’t released any precise speed figures, in our testing, the start up time was faster than beta 7 and general browsing felt snappier as well.

The new Firefox Add-ons page

Firefox 4 beta 8 refines the main add-ons page (which is now a page, rather than a separate window, a nice improvement). The URL bar has been removed for the add-ons page, and the button design has been revamped. Although the new, slicker-looking buttons do make the interface a bit nicer, add-ons are still variously referred to as “extensions” and “add-ons.” You can see which “extensions” you have installed, but then you “Get Add-ons.” Firefox veterans aren’t likely to even notice the difference, but it could be confusing for new users.

The list of bug fixes for this release is extensive, but Mozilla’s nightly builds have already been renamed to beta 9, which means we’ll see at least one more, possibly two more beta releases before Firefox 4 arrives in final form. Mozilla hasn’t set an official release date for Firefox 4 yet, but it’s expect to arrive sometime in early 2011.

See Also:

Tags: , ,
File Under: Browsers, HTML5, JavaScript
Nov
29
2010

Building a GameBoy Emulator in HTML5 and JavaScript

By

Like Flash before it, HTML5 is where programmers are turning to experiment, and nothing seems to make developers experiment quite like the desire to recreate the classic video games.

We’ve already seen Pac-Man, Astroids and Conway’s Game of Life come to the browser in standards-friendly forms, and now Nintendo’s classic GameBoy platform is getting similar treatment.

The Mozilla Labs gaming blog has a guest post by developer and gamer Imran Nazar, who is hard at work building a GameBoy emulator using JavaScript. As Nazar points out, “HTML5 now offers the Canvas element for easily controlling a two-dimensional graphical display.” Couple that with the improved JavaScript speeds in modern browsers and you have the perfect platform for an emulator.

Nintendo’s GameBoy was the first portable gaming system most of us ever encountered, so the nostalgia factor is high. But the real point of this experiment is to help your understand the processes behind the scenes — how emulators work and how JavaScript can be used to build them.

The emulator isn’t quite finished yet, but Nazar has a great series of posts on his blog covering the various aspects of what he’s done. Not only is it a fascinating look at how emulators work, it also gives some great insight into what JavaScript is capable of doing. You can see the latest version of the emulator on Nazar’s latest post.

If you’re not interested in how it works and just want to get your nostalgia fix by playing some GameBoy games, check out this earlier emulator from programmer Pedro Ladaria.

See Also:

Tags: , , ,
File Under: Browsers
Nov
10
2010

New Beta Release Gives Firefox a Shot of Jäger

By

A new beta version of the next Firefox browser has arrived.

Mozilla released Firefox 4 Beta 7 on Wednesday. Unlike the last couple beta releases which mostly just tidied things up, this release is a substantial step forward. Most notably, it includes a new JavaScript engine called JägerMonkey that give the browser a performance boost on script-heavy sites.

It has better support for web graphics and fonts, and it has been deemed complete enough for add-on developers to begin porting over their creations from older versions of Firefox.

If you’re a beta tester already, you’ll see an automatic update today or Thursday. If you’d like to download beta 7 for Windows, Mac or Linux, you can do so from Mozilla’s beta site.

Wednesday’s release comes on the heels of the recent announcement that Firefox 4 won’t be ready until early 2011. Mozilla’s release dates have always been somewhat loose, but the last update was over a month and a half ago, and we were originally expecting the browser to arrive some time between October or January. Now, it looks like Firefox 4′s release date could stretch out as far as the second quarter of next year. It’s a blow to fans of the open source browser, especially since Firefox is seeing increased competition from Chrome, which shifted to an accelerated release schedule earlier this year, and from Internet Explorer 9, which entered a public beta phase in September.

The silver lining here is that it’s looking like Firefox 4 will be much different than 3.6, the current version, and that the update will be worth the wait. Also, the beta releases have been remarkably stable, and, with very few exceptions, are capable enough for every day use.

For the full list of what’s new, check out the release notes. Here’s what has us the most excited.

The enhancement sure to make the biggest splash is Firefox’s new JägerMonkey just-in-time JavaScript compiler. Complicated, JavaScript-heavy sites like Facebook and web apps like Gmail will be more nimble, and you should see a big speed increase on games and demos that previously only impressed those running Chrome or Safari. JägerMonkey is new code that works in tandem with the same TraceMonkey JavaScript code that powered previous versions of Firefox (love the naming convention, by the way) and you can read more about the change on Mozilla engineer David Mandelin’s blog.

Continue Reading “New Beta Release Gives Firefox a Shot of Jäger” »

Tags: , , ,
File Under: Browsers
Oct
27
2010

Firefox 4 Pushed Back to Early 2011

By

Mozilla’s next big browser update is running a bit behind schedule.

Firefox 4′s estimated release date has officially been pushed back to early 2011. The browser’s release schedule, which is posted on a public wiki, has been updated to show some new dates: beta 7 in early November, then three more betas before the end of the year, with the release candidate due early next year.

We were originally expecting Firefox 4 to be finalized by now, in late October, when the schedule was first laid out several months ago. But Mozilla’s release dates are always moving targets, so we were expecting things to change. But not this much. Now, the wait for Firefox 4 looks like it could stretch out to three more months, which is sure to upset those eagerly awaiting an update.

The good news is that the current beta is very stable (at least in our testing) and has enough polish to make it safe for day-to-day use. If you’re feeling a little bit rock and roll, we’d recommend downloading the latest Firefox 4 beta. The new features like the updated user interface, expanded support for new standards like HTML5 and CSS 3, plus a much-improved JavaScript execution engine make it worth the very small risk of a crash.

See also:

Tags: , , ,
File Under: Browsers
Oct
26
2010

The Battle for Choice on the Web Isn’t Over

By

A thoughtful essay by Stuart Turton at PC Pro argues that Mozilla, having already completed the shake-up in the browser world it set out to achieve, needs a new direction:

Like the catalyst in a science experiment, I’m beginning to wonder if Firefox’s greatest contribution to browsers is not its continued existence, but that it existed at all. Put another way: Mozilla has won all its battles, is it time the company picked a new war?

Turton goes on the suggest that Mozilla apply the Firefox model to develop a desktop office suite to rival MS Office, but I’m not convinced that’s a good idea. How many of you use Thunderbird instead of Gmail or Yahoo Mail?

Since we’re playing armchair quarterback here, I’d argue that Mozilla hasn’t come close to winning all its battles. There’s still a great deal of work to be done in the “choice” department on the web: the choice of open web technologies or proprietary technologies for video, audio and games; the choice of where to store your personal data on the web (and how the browser handles that decision); the choice of whether you get your apps from a store run by a corporation, or through an open, cross-browser platform with no Central Scrutinizer.

In other words, the “choice is good” fight isn’t over, it’s just about different stuff now. If Mozilla is going to change direction about how it promotes its philosophy, these are the places to concentrate. And it seems to me like the company is already doing so.

Of course, these issues are of little importance to the general public, many of whom are mostly concerned that pages load quickly, and that YouTube, Facebook and Gmail deliver the goods day in and day out. For all the browser vendors, that’s an ongoing competition with no finish line.

See also:

Tags: ,
File Under: Browsers, Web Apps
Oct
19
2010

Mozilla Shows Off Plans for an Open Web App Store

By

Mozilla LabsMozilla has released more details about its soon-to-arrive Open Web Applications platform.

There are two key components: a directory where users can browse available web apps, and a new dashboard that will be baked into the browser interface, where users can install and manage their favorite apps.

The company published some technical documentation for developers so they can get to work retrofitting their apps with the code necessary to make them work with the new dashboard.

We first heard mumblings from Mozilla about this “Open app store” for the web back in May, only one day after Google announced its own app store for its Chrome browser and web-based Chrome OS. Google’s store is expected to make its full debut soon. The apps in Google’s store will be optimized for Chrome and may not work in other browsers, but Mozilla’s approach will list apps that work on “any modern browser with support for basic HTML technologies” — including mobile browsers. Mozilla says it will let each browser vendor dictate how it presents the app dashboards and management features.

So, app stores for web apps?

It doesn’t make much sense when coupled with what we’ve seen of “traditional” app stores — the ones popular in the mobile world, like those for Apple, Android and BlackBerry devices. But unlike those app stores, which actually involve downloading a package and installing it for offline use, a web app store is simply a directory of apps that are hosted on web servers.

In Mozilla’s model, users browse the app listings, where everything is categorized and rated. Developers can also host their own apps. Users click “install” on the ones they want, and those apps are added to a dashboard inside their browser.

It’s been mocked up for Firefox, and it looks something like this:


In the dashboard, you can manage how apps access your personal information, or uninstall them. Users don’t have to use the dashboard. They also have the option of saving a link on their desktop or mobile home screen for a single-click launch.

Continue Reading “Mozilla Shows Off Plans for an Open Web App Store” »

Tags: , , ,
« OLDER POSTS