Last week, Canonical finally showed the world how Ubuntu looks when running on a smartphone. And it looks good. The mobile version of the popular OS is fast, pleasant to the eye and features original design solutions not found anywhere else.
Mozilla has announced it is investing in Everything.me, a company that makes an application for smartphones which claims to dynamically match a user's needs with appropriate HTML5 content and applications. Everything.me already has an application in the Apple App Store for the iPhone and a Android application in beta.
The stable, supported, mainstream version of Firefox on Windows is a 32-bit application. Even if you use 64-bit Windows, if you use Firefox, you're using a 32-bit browser. The exception is if you're using the Nightly build of Firefox. This represents the latest, cutting-edge version of the browser, and it's available in two versions: a 32-bit one, and a 64-bit one.
Mozilla engineering manager Benjamin Smedberg has asked developers to stop nightly builds for Firefox versions optimized to run on 64-bit versions of Windows.
A developer thread posted on the Google Groups mozilla.dev.planning discussion board, titled "Turning off win64 builds" by Smedberg proposed the move.
Mozilla Firefox has—barely—dipped below 20 percent market share for the second time in six months, after an October that saw Microsoft Internet Explorer grow, Google Chrome fall, and mobile browsing account for 10 percent of all Web traffic for the first time ever.
Mozilla is introducing a new Social API in the latest beta version of Firefox, which provides the browser with the ability to integrate with social media sites. When enabled, the new social functions are displayed in a permanent sidebar alongside the usual page content. According to Firefox Engineering Director Jonathan Nightingale, the thinking behind the implementation of the feature was to "stop treating social like just another tab."
Mozilla has released a preview version of Firefox Metro for Windows 8, a version of the browser which runs both in Microsoft's "Metro" touch-friendly environment and on the classic Windows desktop. Mozilla has continued to use the term "Metro" to refer to the user interface even though Microsoft has ceased using that name.
If you've ever struggled with remembering your Facebook password, or felt uncomfortable using your Google ID to log in to a non-Google Web site, Mozilla has a solution for you -- one it calls Persona.
This first beta of Persona, which used to be called Mozilla's BrowserID project, is designed to compete with Web site login systems like the ones offered by Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Whether this open source alternative can hold its own against those other login heavy-hitters, though, is another story.
Mozilla has begun building a new technology called IonMonkey into Firefox to improve its JavaScript performance.
High JavaScript performance is essential in today's hotly competitive browser market, because JavaScript is the language behind complicated Web sites and Web apps such as Google Docs and Facebook. IonMonkey has now been packaged into the "nightly" version of Firefox 18 for hardcore developers; that version is scheduled to become the mainstream version of the browser early in 2013.
Mozilla released Firefox 15.0.1 last week in order to fix a bug that potentially exposed the websites visited by users while in "Private Browsing" mode.
The goal of the "Private Browsing" mode is to enable Firefox users to surf the web without leaving any traces of the visited websites behind.
