mozilla

Mozilla's browser-based smartphone operating system has grown up a notch, winning over partners such as Sprint and ZTE and picking up the marketing-friendly name of Firefox OS.

In addition, Mozilla has announced several partners, a necessity for making a bunch of software into something people actually use: only a very small number of people have the skills and interest to install a mobile-phone OS.

Carrier Telefonica and chipmaker Qualcomm already were partners that emerged when Mozilla announced B2G at Mobile World Congress earlier this year. They'd said to expect phones by the end of 2012 then, but now … Read more

The first major update to Firefox for Android (download) since January has arrived, and it brings with it a new interface, some new features, and a new approach to Android for Mozilla.

The company released the first stable version of Firefox for Android at the same time that it overhauled Firefox for PCs, back in March 2011. Barely six months after that, the company decided that the original Firefox for Android just wasn't good enough. With a responsiveness rarely seen by large organizations, Mozilla changed course and began to work on a different Android browser.

"In the fall … Read more

Making it easier than ever to make your own simple Web page to spread the memes of your dreams, Mozilla has introduced Thimble, touted as "ridiculously simple" for making Web sites.

Taking on the likes of Wordpress, Thimble is targeted at basically anyone interested in creating and sharing their own Web pages and other projects in as fast as a few minutes.

The difference here is that Thimble isn't really a blog-type page creator, but rather maybe more like the AOL-owned About.Me splash page maker for those Internet users with a little HTML and CSS knowledge. … Read more

Today we're shooting cowboys in the living room and bringing game shows to our tablets:

A leaked PDF document hints at what Microsoft could have in store for the next version of Xbox. If the 56-page document is true, the Xbox 720 has a planned release for 2013 and will play Blu-ray movies, 3D videos and it would work with special glasses for augmented reality gaming. The document also suggests the next version of the Kinect will track four people at once, have improved voice recognition and it could be split into two units on both sides of the … Read more

Mozilla is developing a new Web browser to challenge Safari on Apple's iPad.

The organization behind the Firefox desktop Web browser is working on a new mobile browser called "Junior," according to a video presentation (see below) delivered by company's Product Design Strategy team on Thursday. Junior is "an iPad browser that makes browsing more fun, more ergonomic and re-thinks browser user experience from the ground up," the company said on an intro page to the presentation.

"We wanted to make something entirely new. We wanted to look into how we could reinvent … Read more

When the next version of Firefox hits the streets in Russia, Google -- and not Russia's own Yandex -- will be the default search engine.

That's according to The Next Web, which speculates that though Yandex enjoys a 60 percent share of Russia's search market compared with Google's approximately 26.5 percent, Google may be leveraging its support of Firefox maker Mozilla to convince the company to give it top billing in Firefox version 14.

Google and Firefox struck a three-year deal in December that set Google as the default Firefox search engine outside Russia. Financial … Read more

Mozilla has updated both Firefox beta and Firefox Aurora with new features today, with small but notable security changes landing in the former and preliminary native PDF support hitting the latter.

The developer's build of the browser, Firefox 15 Aurora (download for Windows, for Mac, and for Linux,) now comes with preliminary native support for PDFs. This is a feature that arrived some time ago in Google Chrome, and helped that browser respond to large document handling faster than the competition.

This version of Firefox also supports the next version of SPDY, better developer tools, improved HTML5 support, and … Read more

The bottom line: Firefox 13 is a worthy expression of Mozilla's ideals. The browser is competitively fast, sports a new minimalist look, and includes some excellently executed features. Unfortunately, that describes most of Firefox's competition, too.

Please note that the First Look video below is still applicable to Firefox 13, as is this Firefox How To collection, even though it features Firefox 4.

Review: For those of you who spent last year away from the Internet, it's the year that Firefox went from annual major-point updates to a Chrome-style quick-release cycle. How quick? A new major version … Read more

A number of improvements that Mozilla has built into today's new Firefox release find the browser playing catch-up, treading water, and forging ahead all at the same time.

If it sounds like a near-impossible juggling act to you, you're not alone.

Firefox 13 (download for Windows | Mac | Linux) comes with feature changes and tweaks under the hood. The new features include a redesigned New Tab page that shows you thumbnails of your frequently-visited sites, often dubbed Speed Dial in honor of Opera's take on the feature. Firefox is the last of the major browsers to get some … Read more