A couple days ago I posted an entry about Mozilla’s new Fashion Your Firefox add-on promotional campaign. Among the apps listed was one that I nearly overlooked, but that now strikes me as indispensable. It’s called Thumbstrips, and it’s a product of Intuit Labs, an innovative new venture by the makers of Quickbooks, popular tax software for Windows and Mac.
I recently had the opportunity to talk with two Intuit staff members to talk about Thumbstrips, Fashion Your Firefox, developing for Mozilla, and Intuit Labs.
Tara Tarapata, Group Manager for the Intuit Innovation Lab, and Scott Williamson, Software Engineer and an early developer of Thumbstrips, both gave me the impression that Intuit is an organization staffed by passionate people who are trying to shake things up in software development.
Read the rest of this entry »
My Firefox is jam-packed with add-ons. I love them, I collect them, I use them.
I probably overindulge, in fact. Some people, however, are not using them to their full potential, or simply not using them at all. It makes sense if you just have a clean browser policy, but if you’re not aware of what’s available, then you could be missing out.
Mozilla’s new Fashion Your Firefox web application is designed to make add-ons more accessible, and easier to find and install.
Read the rest of this entry »
Last month Mozilla introduced Ubiquity, a keyboard interface for entering commands to your browser - I covered it on our sister site OStatic. One of the big features of this command line for the web is that it can be extended by anyone who cares to write a Ubiquity command - and the list of such commands has been growing. Among the things you can do that may be of web worker interest:
- Check whether a site is down
- Look up whois information, or ping a URL
- Save information to Instaper
- Create a Remember the Milk reminder
- Add pages to del.icio.us
- Grab info from microformats
Useful though these things are, one caution: in the current version, there are well-documented ways that a command author could smuggle malicious code into your machine. So make sure you understand the consequences if you start down the road of adding this functionality.
Cute. First Apple gave us Snow Leopard and now Mozilla gives us the Snow Owl…will snow* be the prefix for all experimental software products as we head into the next decade? Here’s to Snowrevenue and Snowhope!
Returning to Snowl, hot on the heels of Mozilla Lab’s call for participation in exploring the future of the browser, and the experimental Weave service, comes Mozilla’s efforts to move messaging beyond email and to the types of communication now commonplace across social networks, blogs and services such as Twitter.
Mozilla’s Myk Melez describes Snowl as a browser extension that helps users ‘follow and participate in online discussions’ and track all your conversations across various networks, services, protocols and messaging types.
Read the rest of this entry »
WWD’s Mike Gunderloy covered Mozilla’s Weave project back in December, noting its usefulness in synchronizing bookmarks between a user’s various installations of Firefox…essentially moving a Firefox user profile into the cloud.
Monday saw the release of a major update to Weave, bringing in several new features and, tellingly, locating Weave at a subdomain of Mozilla, named ‘services‘, implying that Weave will be the umbrella for a number of web-based service coming from Mozilla’s commercial arm. Also telling is the hackable and very social URL issued to a user on signup (in my case, http://services.mozilla.com/user/imran)
So what’s new?
Read the rest of this entry »
Mozilla announced that Firefox 3 was downloaded 8 million times on its first 24 hours, setting a world record for the most software downloads over that period.
The record came despite its downtime for about two hours after site visitors overloaded its server. At its peak, the server was said to be serving 17,000 downloads per minute. Mozilla’s CEO John Lilly has a blog post that will give you more figures about the first 24 hours.
Downloads came from various parts of the globe, led by the United States, Germany, Japan, Spain, and Britain. The previous version of Firefox was downloaded just 1.6 million times in the 24 hours after its launch.
Mozilla said that Guinness World Records is reviewing the world record attempt and may take a few days before confirmation.
Tommorow sees the long-awaited release of Clint Eastwood’s Firefox 3, the third movie in the popular series of Craig Thomas novels, including Firefox, Firefox Down and Winter Hawk.
As with most cinematic releases, the movie will be available as a Usenet file or BitTorrent, however Eastwood is celebrating the release by - get this - attempting to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours…finally Hollywood is learning to embrace DRM-free digital downloads and user-generated piracy! I wonder if Eastwood’s next movie Release Candidate will also be similarly released into the wild?
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much in the public domain abou…oh, um…I may have misunderstood some of the facts <gulps> of Om’s briefing…
M’kay…lemme start over…
I guess everyone’s aware (thanks Mike!) that tomorrow sees the long-awaited release of Mozilla’s Firefox 3, the third browser in the popular series of open source browsers, including (um) Firefox 1 and (ahem) Firefox 2?
Mozilla is celebrating the release by - get this - attempting to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. All you need to do to help contribute to the record is download Firefox 3 during tomorrow’s Download Day and pledging that you’ll do so at the official world record site.
So far 1,385,062 individuals have pledged to download our ubiquitous foxy friend, including 56,300 of my fellow Britons! Accompanying the launch and the record attempt are a global series of launch parties - check for local parties at Mozilla Party Central.
Most importantly - and I can’t stress this enough - Think In Russian!
Mozilla Foundation today announced the formation of a new subsidiary group titled Mozilla Messaging. The new group will be focused on taking Mozilla’s mail client Thunderbird to the next level of competitiveness against established mail clients, including Microsoft Outlook. David Ascher will head the new subsidiary that is not only aimed at email, but Internet communications, as stated on in his blog post announcing the new group.
Read the rest of this entry »
