Thinking the World of Firefox 3

On Open Enterprise blog.

Time to Break Out the WINE

On Open Enterprise blog.

Firefox 3 Is Given to the World – Or Maybe Not

On Linux Journal.

Polishing the Firefox 3.0 Download Pledge

Pledging to download Firefox 3 tomorrow is clearly a totally pointless activity (yes, I've done it, anyway), and yet some interesting factoids can be gleaned from the relevant page.

For example, despite - or maybe because of - its dismal showing in overal installed base, the UK's pledges stand at a decent 54,000 currently. This compares fairly well with Germany (55,000), Italy (56,000) and France (69,000). The real surprise, for me at least, is Poland, currently on 90,000: impressive.

Where's Walt? On Firefox 3

Walt Mossberg wields much power in the US, so the following is significant:

My verdict is that Firefox 3.0 is the best Web browser out there right now, and that it tops the current versions of both IE and Safari in features, speed and security. It is easy to install and easy to use, even for a mainstream, non-technical user.

Digg, Dugg, Dugg

The perils of being Dugg:

At around 4am PST today, the last of the Firefox 3 Beta 1 release candidate builds appeared on our public FTP. This was mistakenly reported on Digg as the official release of the first Firefox 3 Beta. It’s extremely flattering to get this sort of attention, and we know that it’s motivated by the very best of intentions, but it does cause us three major problems:

1. The release candidate builds have not been thoroughly tested by our QA group,
2. we haven’t completed all the steps required for a beta release (see below), and
3. these builds aren’t being mirrored properly on our servers.

Perhaps they should give would-be downloaders a little coding test before giving them access to ensure that they are *really* serious hackers.... (Via Linux Journal.)

Firefox 3: the Great Paradise?

It's been hard to say until now, when Firefox 3 was more a hope than a project. But behold the Product Planning Doc for:

Firefox 3, code-named "Gran Paradiso", presently under development with an expected release in Q3 2007.

The salient bits of which are:

High-Level Feature Plan

The proposed major theme for Gran Paradiso is “improved information and content management”. This is the area that we’ll do the most innovation in. Gran Paradiso will continue to improve in areas where we’ve traditionally been strong in: security, usability, extensibility and customization, performance, web standards and compatibility.

Features for Gran Paradiso will fall into one of the following categories.

For Users

* Information Management includes Bookmarks, History, Content Handling, Content Editing, Printing and Microformats
* Security including Privacy, Phishing Protection, Addons and Password Management
* Usability/UI Improvements including Search, Tabbed Browsing, OS Integration & Accessibility
* Customization - ability to discover and manage addons
* Performance - how fast Firefox operates
* Localization - operating in non US English
* Installation & Auto-Update
* Support & Help

For Developers

* Web Standards & Compatibility (e.g. ACID2, CSS2.1, SVG via Gecko 1.9, EV certs, etc.)
* Web Developer Tools
* Extension Developer Tools

To say nothing of the cool name. (Via Read/WriteWeb.)

Mozilla Maketh Mucho Moolah

Free software is not something you associated with money rolling in, but Mozilla seems to be in this enviable position:

In 2005 the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation combined had revenue from all sources of $52.9M. $29.8M of this was associated with the Foundation (both before and after the creation of the Corporation). The bulk of this revenue was related to our search engine relationships, with the remainder coming from a combination of contributions, sales from the Mozilla store, interest income, and other sources. These figures compare with 2003 and 2004 revenues of $2.4M and $5.8M respectively, and reflect the tremendous growth in the popularity of Firefox after its launch in November 2004.

But, as I've just written elsewhere, Mozilla needs urgently to spend this money on a big task: making Firefox 3.0 really rock.