Browsersphere

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.”

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.

I’ve been using Firefox 3 Beta 2 at work, and today I received notification that the next beta, Firefox 3 Beta 3, was available as an automatic update.  After the single-click update process, I launched the new version and noticed something strange:

The browser started up at that exact size.  Bizarre.

Anyhow, if you’ve been using the previous beta, the theme changes, which I’ve covered here previously, are likely to jump out at you.  If you’ve been using the Minefield builds, then probably not.

For more information on this new beta release, head on over to the Release Notes, or if you want to download the release and give it a try for yourself, you can do that too.

There have been two new releases of the Camino browser this month.  First, back on the 5th, Camino 1.5.4 was announced.  Then, on the 11th, Camino 1.6 Alpha 1 was released.  The former was essentially a security release and the latter includes “improved tabbed browsing, better AppleScript support, and built-in software update for release builds.”  Head on over to the Camino preview site if you’re looking to try out the alpha.

In case you didn’t catch it already, the first beta release of Firefox 3 is now available to download.  Head on over to the beta releases page to get your copy, but remember that even beta builds aren’t recommended for those with weak stomachs

A couple of articles were written recently discussing the relative silence from the Internet Explorer team regarding the next version of the web browser, Internet Explorer 8.

Internet Explorer 8 Buried and Asphyxiated in Microsoft Utero takes the approach that Internet Explorer is losing ground to Mozilla’s Firefox 3.0, and that being silent about the future of IE8 isn’t helping things.

A Seattle P.I. article on the subject focuses entirely on the Internet Explorer team and how their silence has started to alienate web developers dependent on development-related news to make sure their websites will continue to work in Internet Explorer with the next release, whenever it may happen.

I’m a little surprised to see that the Internet Explorer team isn’t a little more sensitive to the whole going AWOL thing, given that they all but vanished from the face of the earth for several years before finally deciding to work on Internet Explorer 7.

It’s also a shame that they haven’t really made an effort to become more transparent now that IE7 is out in the wild and getting so much feedback from the web development community.  The Seattle P.I article says “it’s not like an open-source project, where features are determined in a largely transparent process.”  But why not?  I remember before IE7 was released, the Internet Explorer team was soliciting feedback from everybody about the types of CSS support they would be adding and what major bugs they’d be fixing.  Even if they can’t reveal the big features in an open forum at this juncture, it seems like they could throw a bone or two in developers’ direction by discussing things like CSS support that are well-known, well documented, and waiting to be implemented by anyone and any team that so chooses to implement them.

Anyway, given that the Internet Explorer team has decided to remain tight-lipped about its next browser release, we can put IE8 in the “vaporware” category, somewhere in between Duke Nukem Forever and the Phantom.

Opera Mini 4 was released on Wednesday to much fanfare.  Well, I don’t know about the fanfare part, it just sounds cool when I say it that way.  I’m downloading it on my phone as we speak, and you should check it out, too.  Here’s some links regarding the release:

• The power of the Web with Opera Mini 4
• Opera Mini 4 is out
• Opera Mini translated into over 50 languages; 15 more to come later this month
• Web developer resources for Opera Mini 4

One thing I’m a bit curious about is why when I go to operamini.com in my phone’s default web browser, the first download option I’m presented with is Opera Mini 3.1.2.  Seems like they’d be pushing version 4 by default at this point.

Nevertheless, the new release is now installed on my phone and looks pretty similar to the beta releases I’ve been using.  I’ll doubtless post more on the new version once I’ve had a chance to use it in some real life situations.

If you have any feedback on the new release, please leave a comment and let us know your thoughts.

Camino 1.5.3 was released last week.  You can read more about the release over at Camino. Blog.

According to the Opera Desktop Team, a new alpha build of Opera 9.5 was made available on Friday.  Among the new features and fixes:

• Fixed an ordered list bug
•  Users can now select an external View Source editor
• APNG 1.0 support added for use in web pages and skins
• Notification improvements
• Stability and rendering engine fixes
• Fixed Internet Explorer bookmark import

The new build is available to download for Windows, Mac and Linux.

TechRepublic presents Dinosaur Sightings: A visual history of Internet Explorer from 1 to 7. Check it out, and take a trip down memory lane.