Ilya Kozhevnikov

Browser Newsletter #22

April 13, 2008

First look: Adobe AIR alpha unleashed for Linux

Adobe has announced today the public availability of an Adobe AIR alpha release for Linux. Although the alpha is not feature-complete, it is already capable of running some mainstream AIR applications and is robust enough to facilitate AIR development on the Linux platform. Adobe has also officially joined the Linux Foundation and plans to collaborate with the group in an effort to bring rich Internet application and Web 2.0 technologies to the open-source operating system.

Mozilla wants to put Firefox in the cloud and your pocket

At Mozilla’s headquarters in Mountain View last week, we talked to Mozilla Labs manager Chris Beard and Mozilla Mobile director Jay Sullivan about their plans to put Firefox in the cloud and in your pocket. With the guidance of Beard and Sullivan, the open-source browser is extending itself beyond the desktop and taking its first tentative steps into new frontiers.

Mozilla Labs is experimenting with several emerging technologies that fill important niches in the Firefox ecosystem. Among these are the Prism site-specific browser deployment tool and Weave, a web services integration framework that lets Firefox push local data into the cloud. Weave is still in early development, but the current version already provides support for automatic web-based synchronization and storage of bookmark and history data.

Firefox 3 Beta 5 twice as fast in the cloud: Mozilla

Firefox browser developer, Mozilla Foundation, says the beta latest version of its new browser is now twice as fast as the widely used Firefox 2. According to Mozilla, the performance improvements are most apparent when using cloud applications.

iPhone browser to be updated soon, adding CSS Transforms and Animations

Apple yesterday released the program for the 2008 WWDC Sessions and Labs. One lab, entitled Enhancing Your iPhone Web Application with CSS Transforms and Animations sticks out.

Adding rich, hardware-accelerated graphics to your web content is now as easy as writing a few lines of CSS and JavaScript. Using the latest web standards, you can scale, rotate, or skew HTML elements, position page components within three-dimensional space, provide smooth transitions, and create captivating animations.

Opera Mini 4.1 Mobile Phone Browser released

Opera has released the beta preview of Opera Mini, the latest version of the mobile phone browser, which is expected to work on almost every mobile phone. Opera claims that Mini 4.1 is a more convenient and productive solution for users.

Microsoft to make full-scale web browsing mobile this year

Microsoft said Tuesday it will soon release a version of its Internet Explorer web browser tailored to put surfing the web with mobile telephones on par with using desktop computers.

Silverlight Timetable: 2.0 Coming This Summer

Eagle-eyed ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley spotted a “rough timetable” for upcoming releases of Microsoft’s Flash-killer Silverlight [...]. The timetable pegs the full release for Silverlight 2.0 to come sometime over the summer. It comes via a FAQ posted on the MSDN blog of Microsoft blogger Ashish Thapliyal.

Below is the rough roadmap presented by Thapliyal. Though it is rather sparse, it indicates that the final release of Silverlight 2.0 should ship sometime over the summer if all goes according to plan.

Create Distraction-Free, Customized Webapps with Prism

Among all the projects available at the Mozilla Foundation, one little application, Prism (formerly known as WebRunner), hasn’t gotten much attention. Understandable, in a way, because Prism seems like just a stripped-down Firefox window in which to view web sites—which it is, but that can be a great thing. With the help of a few utilities, web applications in Prism can be just as convenient to launch and use as your standard-installation desktop programs. Let’s take a look at where Prism really works and how to get more out of it after the jump.

Designing for Add-on Performance

As we worked towards the recent release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, the IE team focused hard on performance. As part of our effort to improve IE, our investigations have revealed several add-on performance problems. In this post, I want to share some of the common themes that we have discovered.

Opera 9.27 released

Opera Software has released the latest version of their Opera web browser. This is mostly a security upgrade as they are still working on the upcoming Opera 9.50 web browser edition.

Companies struggle to remove Apple’s Safari browser

Companies struggle as Safari pops up on networks is the headline of a story from IDG News, which contains the amusing factoid that: “On Friday, patch management vendor Shavlik Technologies announced that it had updated its Shavlik NetChk Protect software to detect and remove Safari.”

Apple, you may recall, tried to deceive users into installing its browser by presenting it as a “default update” when it wasn’t already installed. This has given companies problems. Cody Wilson, a network administrator with Soy Capital Bank and Trust in Decatur, Illinois, told IDG: “I went into work the next day and I scanned my network, and my inventory software said I have Safari on 30 PCs,” he said.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still popular

Despite Microsoft being disliked by many of the professional users of the internet, it seems that Internet Explorer the web browsing software provided by Microsoft is still the most popular method of surfing the internet for many users in the UK.

At the moment Internet Explorer has around eighty per cent of the UK internet browser marketplace; this is compared with the very low fifteen per cent of user who prefer to use Mozilla’s Firefox.

The Complete Field Guide to Testing Firefox 3

If you’re sick of Firefox 2 eating up over a gigabyte of memory only to freeze up and crash, it may be time to move onto Firefox 3. The new version of our favorite browser has seen its fifth and final beta release, and Mozilla says its for testing purposes only. However, the Firefox 3 beta is leaner, meaner, faster, and just plain better than Firefox 2—and don’t tell Daddy Mozilla, but even at this early stage, we’ve found it to be stable enough for full-time use. There are a few ways you can start using Firefox 3 without blowing your browser setup to hell or losing your most important extensions. Here’s how.

Apple Safari for iPhone most popular mobile browser in USA

Irish researcher StatCounter has stated in a research paper that Apple Safari has now become the most popular mobile web browser in use in the US market.

Apple Safari comes loaded in both Apple iPhone and Apple iPod Touch devices. It is capable of displaying web pages like they do on desktops.

Second position goes to browsers in Symbian OS which is found on Nokia mobile devices. Surprisingly, Microsoft Windows Mobile and Internet Explorer for mobile devices is missing from the top spot.

Globally, Symbian OS dominates Apple Safari but they remain in the top two places.

Tree is entering lockdown for Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1

As discussed at today’s Firefox 3 / Gecko 1.9 meeting, as of 11:59pm PDT tonight, the tree entered a lockdown period in preparation for delivering Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1.

We’ll be using the same process that has been used for the past betas. The blocker lists will be driven to zero, and only patches with explicit approval will be allowed to land in order to more tightly control potential for regressions. After taking the final blocker, we will likely enter a short bake period before handing over to build.

Why We Need Web Apps on the Desktop

Yesterday on this blog Sarah Perez wondered how important is offline access for web apps? Her conclusion was that offline access is important now, but not as important as it once was. And that with the increasing ubiquity of Internet access, it is growing less important every day. I won’t dispute that, but there is an important distinction to be made between offline access to web apps (as Google Gears provides) and desktop access to web apps (as Mozilla’s Prism and Adobe’s AIR provide). The latter is a very important step in the evolution of web apps.

There are two main reasons for why desktop access for web apps is important: * It will actually help make web apps more popular. * Running a ton of apps in the browser at once is a pain.

about:mozilla - Firefox 3 Beta 5, SUMO Day, Thunderbird Bugdays, Labs updates, and more

Firefox 3 Beta 5 is now available for download, and you should read the Release Notes and Known Issues before installing. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3.

The Acid Tests are a series of “web standards compliance” tests put out by the Web Standards Project. The most recent of these is Acid3, which tests JavaScript, DOM, and SVG compliance (amongst other things). David Baron, prominent Mozilla developer and member of the W3C CSS working group, has blogged his opinions about the Acid3 test, how he thinks the test should be used as a measure of the various browsers, and what Mozilla’s strategy is as to completing the tests. You can read more at David’s blog.

Chris Beard, head of Mozilla Labs, has posted a short update about what’s going on over in the laboratory. Last week saw the launch of major updates for a number of Labs projects, including Weave and Personas. They have also introduced the new Test Pilot project, aimed at strengthening the user testing framework and community around Labs projects. Additionally, Chris has been interviewed a few times recently, resulting in two articles that are worth checking out: Firefox 4 will push out the edges of the browser, and Mozilla wants to put a Firefox in the cloud and in your pocket. For more details, check out Chris’ blog post.

IE April Security is Now Available

The IE Cumulative Security Update for April 2008 is now available via Windows Update. Alternatively, you can receive this and all other Microsoft updates via the new Microsoft Update. I encourage you to upgrade to Microsoft Update if you haven’t already to ensure that you receive the latest updates for all Microsoft products.

This update addresses 1 remote code execution vulnerabilities. This security update addresses this vulnerability by modifying the way Internet Explorer handles HTML and validates data. For detailed information on the contents of this update, please see the following documentation [...]

IE Automatic Component Activation Now Available

The IE Automatic Component Activation (IE ACA) update is now available as part of the April 2008 Internet Explorer Cumulative Update. The “click to activate” behavior, formerly required for ActiveX controls embedded in some webpages, is now permanently removed from Internet Explorer. For detailed information on IE ACA, see our blog post from last November announcing this update.

IE8 Security Part I: DEP/NX Memory Protection

Internet Explorer 8 security features target three major sources of security exploits: social engineering, Web server, and browser-based vulnerabilities. This post will cover IE8 Data Execution Prevention (DEP), a feature that mitigates browser-based vulnerabilities.

Browser Newsletter #22

First look: Adobe AIR alpha unleashed for Linux

Mozilla wants to put Firefox in the cloud and your pocket

Firefox 3 Beta 5 twice as fast in the cloud: Mozilla

iPhone browser to be updated soon, adding CSS Transforms and Animations

Opera Mini 4.1 Mobile Phone Browser released

Microsoft to make full-scale web browsing mobile this year

Silverlight Timetable: 2.0 Coming This Summer

Create Distraction-Free, Customized Webapps with Prism

Designing for Add-on Performance

Opera 9.27 released

Companies struggle to remove Apple’s Safari browser

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still popular

The Complete Field Guide to Testing Firefox 3

Apple Safari for iPhone most popular mobile browser in USA

Tree is entering lockdown for Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1

Why We Need Web Apps on the Desktop

about:mozilla - Firefox 3 Beta 5, SUMO Day, Thunderbird Bugdays, Labs updates, and more

IE April Security is Now Available

IE Automatic Component Activation Now Available

IE8 Security Part I: DEP/NX Memory Protection

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