Browsersphere

The following is a picture of the cake the IE team sent over to the Mozilla folks when they shipped Firefox 3:

And the following is a mashup of the IE logo and the acid code (presumably from the Acid3 test?) via Twitter:

Tags: Acid3, Branding, Firefox 3, IE, Mozilla, Photos, Twitter

Amazingly enough, Twitter was available for long enough today to allow the mozillafirefox Twitter account to relay the fact that Mozilla is having some server troubles due to anticipation of the release of Firefox 3, which was set to become available at 10am Pacific time this morning:

The outpouring of interest and enthusiasm around Firefox 3 has been overwhelming (literally!).  Our servers are currently feeling the burn and should be back to normal shortly.  Download day will officially commence once the site goes live.  The 24 hours period will be clocked from that moment.  Thanks for your continued support.

The “Download Day” mentioned refers to the Firefox team’s attempt at setting a Guiness World Record for the most software downloads in a 24-hour period.  More information on the effort is available over at The Register.

I noticed that the server at GetFirefox.com was already having some issues a couple hours before the official, planned kick-off, so it sounds like things have only gotten worse since then.  Even if the Firefox team does manage to get their servers back online, one has to wonder whether the bandwidth will be such that the 24-hour period will accurately reflect the number of downloads that were intended by the browser’s broad user base.

I’ll likely be posting more on this later in the day, so stay tuned.

Tags: Bandwidth, Downloads, Firefox, Mozilla, Records, Releases, Servers, Statistics, Twitter

Last time around, I didn’t get any feedback on the format of these “Around the Browsersphere” posts, so I’ll give a slightly more organized approach a try and we’ll see how it goes.

Camino

• Camino 1.6, which features a customizable toolbar search field, software update capabilities, a scrolling tab bar, etc., was released on the 17th.

Firefox

• Fuzzbot is a Firefox extention that is “useful for detecting embedded semantic information in web pages and performing actions on that semantic data” (via Microformats).
• Firefox Mastery discusses changing the fonts in Firefox.
• Asa Dotzler attempts to clear up some confusion around add-on installations and required logins.
• Chris Beard gives an update on what’s going on at Mozilla Labs.
• Popular extension Adblock Plus is now compatible with the Firefox 3 betas.
• Deb Richardson gave an excellent overview of bookmarks in Firefox 3 (and did a little damage once her post showed up on Digg).
• Find out how you can help beta test the new Mozilla.com redesign.
• Daniel Glazman figured out how to avoid extension version compatability in Firefox.
• Take a look at the Firefox 3 t-shirt design contest winner.
• Firefox’s market share continues to rise in Europe.
• Paul Kim discusses marketing plans as the release of Firefox 3 nears.
• Robert O’Callahan on the turned-off-by-default ActiveX hosting support in Firefox.
• Firefox was apparently spotted in outer space.

Flock

• Flock is apparently delivering on promises.

Internet Explorer

• IEBlog gives some tips on improving performance in Internet Explorer add-ons.
• Read up on HTML and DOM standards compliance in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1.

Konqueror

• Some improvements are being made to the error pages in Konqueror.

Maxthon

• Read up on the Maxthon Downloader.
• There’s a new IRC channel for Maxthon enthusiasts.
• Some felt there was perhaps some foul play involved when Maxthon won a Webware 100 award, but the Maxthon Blog certainly didn’t think so.
• One user’s in-depth tale of a switch from Maxthon to Firefox.

Mozilla

• You can download some really old Mozilla versions from the Mozilla Archive.
• Mozilla celebrated its 10th birthday last month (more here and here).

Opera and Opera Mini

• Opera was the first to 106 in the Acid3 test
• A version of Opera Mini has been created to work on Google’s Android platform.
• Indexing and searching in Opera 9.5 explained.
• With Daniel Goldman moving on to bigger and better things, the Opera Watch team is changing.
• David Storey has shed a little more light on Opera Dragonfly.

Safari

• Non-Safari users were none too pleased about some of Apple’s recent software update techniques (more links to evidence at Asa Dotzler’s blog).
• It looks like HTML5’s client-side database storage may be coming to Safari and the iPhone.
• Safari 3 was compared to Firefox 3 (from a Mac user’s perspective) over at Daring Fireball.
• WebKit hackers will be busy in this year’s Summer of Code.
• PayPal says they won’t be blocking Safari users from accessing their site.
• Some Safari-related stats would be better served more carefully worded

SeaMonkey

• Some SeaMonkey contributors recently got together for a Hack’n'Cook.

Minor Players

• There is a whole bunch of minor players (and the major ones, too) listed in “A wealth of browsers.”
• GreenBrowser is “lightest on resources” of the IE clones, according to one forum post.
• Interesting abstract about a tactile web browser for the visually disabled.
• Interested in a little web browser history trivia?

Tags: Add-ons, Beta, Camino, Digg, Extensions, Firefox, Flock, Internet Explorer, iPhone, Konqueror, Mac, Market Share, Maxthon, Microformats, Minor Players, Mozilla, Opera, Opera Mini, Releases, Safari, SeaMonkey, Stats, Web Standards, WebKit

With at least a couple more Firefox 3 betas on the way, the release of IE8 Beta 1 and the official release of the Acid3 test, there’s a lot going on in the browsersphere these days.  Let’s jump right into it…

• First off, it’s now March, so Netscape Navigator is officially dead (but do you really believe that?).
• The Opera Desktop Team has released what they are calling a Plugin Milestone Build.
• I think this guy may be more into web browsers than I am.
• Mozilla’s been getting some fan mail.
• Opera has made the switch back to Google for search in Opera Mini and Opera Mobile (see a screenshot of the new Opera Mini start page).  There’s more on this over at TechCrunch as well.
• Sebastiaan de With (remember him?) thinks that the Firefox 3 interface is going nowhere.
• A forum post pointed me toward another minor player called Acoo Browser, which is another browser built on Trident.
• CyberNet claims that Avant Browser 11 will be the best version of the browser yet.
• Ben Moore seems to have mixed feelings about some of the changes made between Maxthon v1 and v2.
• sKatterBrainZ claims that “there’s nothing in Safari that is truly innovative or unique to the world of web browsing.”
• Somewhat contradictory to that, Ian Hixie, the author of the Acid3 test, seems pretty impressed with how quickly the Safari/WebKit team has responded to the issues uncovered by Acid3 (I’ve covered this here as well).
• Ian Clifton had some interesting points to make about the Internet Explorer team’s original stance on standards support in the forthcoming IE8.
• microformatique points out that the IE team has used the hAtom microformat to implement their WebSlices feature.
• CyberNet says the SpaceTime 3D Browser is “mostly for fun” and shows off a video demo of the interesting browser.
• Firefox 3 Beta 3 has replaced Firefox 2 as the default browser in Alpha 6 of Ubuntu Hardy Heron.
• Opera Mini users browsed over 1.8 million web pages back in January.
• Kevin Yank says that table-based layouts will be “the next big thing” (via Simon Willison).
• Daniel Glazman wrote a CSS3 Selector test suite and posted the results for Firefox 3.0b4pre (Minefield), Safari 3.0.4 for Windows, Opera 9.23 and Internet Explorer 7.  He was impressed to see that the latest builds of Opera pass all of his tests.
• Opera Twitters (via Opera Watch).
• Myk Melez talks about what it’s like to sheriff for Mozilla.
• Opera Mini users can now zoom images.
• Mitchell Baker has posted about the Mozilla Steering Committee.
• Jesse Ruderman created a Greasemonkey script for those who spend a lot of time looking at the Firefox tinderbox.
• Opera’s Charles McCathieNevile, Mozilla’s Brendan Eich and Microsoft’s Chris Wilson will square off at SXSW tomorrow in a panel called “Browser Wars: Deja Vu All Over Again?”
• It doesn’t look like many CSS3 features have made their way into IE8 yet.
• Konqueror 4 for Windows has been reviewed.
• Someone decided to show off how they made a web browser with Visual Basic 2008 in under three minutes on YouTube.
• Okiwi is a free web browser for the Nintendo DS.
• An online poll asking what the greatest web browser ever is has some interesting options from which to choose.
• A C|Net podcast covers, among other things, BMWs that feature full-blown in-dash web browsers.
• Dan Gayle digs Lynx.
• Auto Web Browser “will consult the search engines from a user defined list, download the pages to your computer, filter and analyze them and then it will automatically surf further, downloading other potentially interesting pages using the links from the meaningful part of the relevant documents.”
• The Off By One Web Browser “may be the world’s smallest and fastest web browser with full HTML 3.2 support.”
• The WorldWideWeb browser (which was later renamed Nexus) turned 17 years old last month.
• You can view your Firefox web browser history visually with ThumbStrip.
• Firefox, Flock, Internet Explorer, Maxthon, Opera and Safari are nominated in the Browsing category of the Webware 100.
• Anne van Kesteren covers some of the “evil” things about IE8.

Amazingly enough, there’s a lot more to post about, but that should hold you over for a little bit.  I’m interested in hearing if Browsersphere visitors are more interested in somewhat random links like this or if it would be preferable to have the links broken down by the web browser to which they correspond.  If you have any thoughts on that, please leave a comment.

Tags: Acid3, Add-ons, Avant, Beta, CSS, Extensions, Firefox, Flock, Internet Explorer, Konqueror, Linux, Lynx, Maxthon, Microformats, Minor Players, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, Opera Mini, Safari, Trident, Ubuntu, Video, Web Standards, YouTube

Asa Dotzler attempts to address the issue of when Firefox 3 will ship in a blog entry over at For the Record titled When It’s Ready.  He borrows heavily from feedback from Mike Beltzner, and the following could be seen as the main takeaway from the post:

When our quality, usability and performance are solid enough to be called Firefox 3 (as judged by everyone involved in making it) we’ll ship it.

For the record (sorry, couldn’t resist), For the Record is, according to its inaugural post,”a Mozilla community program for discovering, cataloging, and responding to what’s being said about Mozilla online.”

Tags: Beta, Firefox, Mozilla, Releases

Believe it or not it’s been over three months since the last edition of Around the Browsersphere, so we’re long overdue.  Let’s get to it…

• Mozilla turned ten last month.
• Camino 1.5.5, a maintenance release, was made available a couple weeks ago, and Camino 1.6 Beta 2 was released a couple weeks before that.
• Add-on developers need to get their butts in gear and start updating their extensions to work with Firefox 3, primarily because the browser will be out in a couple months and secondarily because I don’t like using the Minefield builds without my favorite extensions
• The Firefox Extension Guru’s Blog points out that over 600 million Firefox add-ons have been downloaded, and that in anticipation of the release of Firefox 3, addons.mozilla.org is being redesigned.
• The Opera Desktop Team has been experimenting with document.all cloaking and is giving users more control over tab-related behavior (more on that here) in the latest builds.
• SeaMonkey 1.1.8 was released earlier this month.
• The Safari team has added support for the new W3C Selectors API and appears to be busy chipping away at bugs related to the Acid3 test.
• The WebKit team has been spending some time focused on SVG performance improvements and a native, Cairo-based Windows port of the rendering engine.
• The forthcoming Opera Mobile 9.5 (not 9.0) is twice as fast as Opera Mobile 8.65 and four times faster than Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile.  Screenshots and videos of the new release have been appearing quite a bit.
• Alex Faaborg has provided a second glimpse at the icons to be used in Firefox 3 (you can see the full sheet of icons here).  Apparently the throbber is still up in the air.
• Firefox has about:config, now Opera Mini has opera:config.
• Glubble is a parental controls suite for the Firefox browser (via Asa Dotzler).
• Will IE8 really pass the Acid2 test?
• Cross-window messaging is coming to Firefox 3 (via Simon Willison).
• VnTutor has a list of 10 hidden features of Konqueror.
• The creator of KHTML, Lars Knoll, has been promoted to VP of engineering at Trolltech.
• Everyone has a pet feature.
• Take a look at Maxthon’s split-view feature in action.

Tags: Add-ons, Camino, Extensions, Firefox, Internet Explorer, KHTML, Konqueror, Maxthon, Mozilla, Opera, Opera Mini, Previews, Releases, Safari, SeaMonkey, Web Standards, WebKit

Anyone who has downloaded Firefox nightly builds is likely familiar with the Minefield moniker that replaces “Firefox” wherever that application title is used in a typical Firefox build.

I have been testing the latest Minefield builds the past couple of nights, and tonight I was notified of an update and subsequently downloaded it.  In the new version, which is identified by the following user agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b3pre) Gecko/2008012804 Minefield/3.0b3pre

…the new Firefox theme icons have started to appear.  These changes were recently alluded to in a post by Alex Faaborg.  As of the latest build, the reload, stop and home icons have been updated.  The back and forward navigation buttons have yet to change, presumably because work is still being done on the new Keyhole design and functionality.

The icons that have changed look exactly as presented at Alex’s blog.  Unfortunately, I have to say that I’m not a fan of the change.  Perhaps once the Keyhole changes are in place things will flow a little better, but the new icons have a bit of a “childish” feel to them that I just don’t like.  However, having once been a Firefox theme developer, I know all too well that everyone has their own, often very strong, opinions one way or another about the various Firefox themes.

Given that, what do you think of the change?  Furthermore, what do you think of the new Keyhole approach?  If you haven’t had a chance to see them in action, give one of the latest nightly builds a try.  Minefield is stablizing at the moment since Mozilla is getting close to releasing a third beta of Firefox 3.

Tags: Beta, Development, Firefox, Mozilla, Previews, Themes and Skins

As usual, web browsers are getting plenty of coverage over on Digg.  Let’s take a look at some of the hot topics over the past month.

• GStreamer brings HTML5 video support to GTK/WebKit - The GTK port of the WebKit HTML rendering engine has gained support for the HTML5 video element.
• First look: Firefox 3 beta 2 officially released - ars technica takes a look at the latest Firefox beta.
• Internet Explorer 8 passes ACID2 test! - An internal Microsoft build of the browser to be called IE8 passed the Acid2 test.
• Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 Is A Win For Linux - FOSSwire drools over the GTK support in the latest Firefox beta.
• Mozilla Announces Weave - “This project will be known as Weave and it will focus on finding ways to enhance the Firefox user experience, increase user control over personal information, and provide new opportunities for developers to build innovative online experiences.”
• Firefox 3 Beta 2 in Ubuntu 7.10 - How to get the latest, bleeding edge version of Firefox on Ubuntu without waiting for it to be distributed to you.
• Hands on with Mozilla Weave: Personalize your own cloud - links to ars technica’s take on the ambitious new project from Mozilla.
• 5 Things You’ll Love About Firefox 3 - links to ComputerWorld’s take on the latest Firefox beta.
• Sad Milestone: AOL To Discontinue Netscape Browser Development - “sad” being a very, very relative term.
• NEW! Firefox Live Support Chat! - “fill in the fields and you will be answered in less then 20 seconds.”
• How to surf the web even if Internet Explorer is disabled - “how to use the Help function from basic Windows programs to surf the internets.”
• Barclays says no to Firefox - Barclays displays yet another sad example of misinformed browser sniffing.
• Chris Mills on “Why Opera?” - Opera’s developer relationship manager on why designers and developers should consider choosing Opera.
• Mozilla Gets a New CEO ahead of Firefox 3 - Meet John Lilly - “Mozilla COO John Lilly will take over the CEO position and plans to make a strong Firefox 3 release his top priority.”

Tags: Digg, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, WebKit

I created a rather lengthy post over at my personal blog tonight titled How to Contribute to Firefox.  Rather than cross-post it here, I figured I’d at least share the link, since it’s probably relevant to a lot of the readers here (or at least I hope it is).

Tags: Add-ons, Bugs, Development, Elsewhere, Extensions, Firefox, Informational, Merchandise, Mozilla, Themes and Skins

I ran across two lists of Firefox alternatives tonight, the first of which is War of the Web Browsers: The Underdogs.  It covers Avant, Flock and Opera, while Download Dispatch, Weekend Edition covers those plus Maxthon and a browser I hadn’t yet heard of: Slim Browser.

Mozilla needn’t be too worried, though.  As this Digg post points out, Firefox still tops Google’s list.

Tags: Avant, Digg, Firefox, Flock, Google, Maxthon, Minor Players, Mozilla, Opera