A narrative on the future of web browsers and web browsing

Archive for May, 2008

Mozilla Prism Update

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

We've been hard at work on Prism since the 0.9 release in March, and there is a bunch of fancy new features nearing completion. Once we've finished testing and tweaking the code, I'll make some preliminary builds available for folks to hammer on. Here's a run down of what's new, with ...

Browser Bits and Bobs for May 20, 2008

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

My ex-colleague Jan Odvarko writes about his fancy replacement for Firebug's system console. Atul Varma on why Firefox 3 is awesome (really awesome). A newsletter for Firefox extension developers called about:addons. The first public release of Moonlight, a Silverlight port for Linux. Ours is not the place to question why. And if you feel ...

Browser of the Week: Flock Impressions

Friday, May 16th, 2008

I've been using Flock all week, and I have to say that I'm pretty impressed. Flock is way out in front of the pack in driving innovation in the browser space (although Mozilla is catching up with their various Labs efforts). It's refreshing to see a vendor thinking big and ...

Browser Bits and Bobs for May 15, 2008

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

Opera Mini 4.1, with a number of bug fixes and tweaks, has been released. TechCrunch with an article on Mozilla's "stealth data project", which aims to collect statistics on web usage from Firefox's 170 million strong user base. Mozilla CEO John Lilly provides some clarification. Mozilla joins the LiMo Foundation, which develops ...

Browser Trends: Business Models

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

Commercial web applications must overcome a vexing business dilemma: how to make money in the face of so much free competition. This is a symptom of the VC-fueled internet economy that has prevailed since the dot com days. Venture capital firms provide companies with money based on some woolly half-baked ...

Browser Bits and Bobs for May 12, 2008

Monday, May 12th, 2008

WebKit announces a new mailing list for reporting security vulnerabilities. Deb Richardson elucidates the new Firefox site identification button. Besides the practical merit of this feature, it is a fascinating study in communicating potentially confusing information to end users. Dion Almaer with a hack to duplicate the way Firefox lets you jump ...

Browser of the Week: Flock

Monday, May 12th, 2008

I'll be using the Flock 1.1 this week as part of my occasional Browser of the Week series, posting my thoughts and impressions on Friday. Please leave a comment if there are particular features of Flock that I absolutely positively must put through their paces. I'm definitely planning to try ...

The Trouble with Google Docs (And How to Fix It)

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

I've been obsessing recently with configuring my home office software environment just so. Since I went all Apple, all the time, I'm able to benefit from a lot of goodies that are built into OS X (notably iTunes). And developing on Mozilla means that I can do pretty much everything ...

Browser Bits and Bobs for May 7, 2008

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

Microsoft ships XP Service Pack 3 with continued support for Internet Explorer 6. Firefox wins favorite browser in the LinuxJournal Readers' Choice Awards with 86% of votes cast. John Resig implements a complete HTML parser entirely in JavaScript. Multiple interfaces are provided including SAX and a DOM builder. Amazing. Flock wins a Webby ...

Memo to Microsoft: Buy Adobe, Not Yahoo

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

If nothing else, Microsoft's prolonged attempt to acquire Yahoo has added some zest to the tech news echo chamber. The ongoing saga has provided seemingly endless fodder for mainstream news outlets and blogs to speculate about the financial merits of the deal, the strategic implications for Microsoft and Yahoo's allergic ...