The Mozilla Foundation has announced the first beta version of Firefox 4, the next generation of its cross-platform web browser.

Although there is some time before the final release of Firefox 4, the beta product is considered to be stable and safe enough for daily use.

Mozilla is aiming to sign up to 4 million users in an interactive process to shape the final release. Feedback opportunities are prominent in the user interface, with users encouraged to submit their thoughts to the developers.

The popular browser is undergoing many changes, both visible and under the hood. The Windows release has seen the most apparent refinements, with tabs moved above the address bar as well as a single Firefox button to replace the menu bar.

Universal changes include a Smart Location bar, updated add-ons manager, replacement of the bookmarks bar with a bookmarks button, support for high definition WebM video, extra privacy protection and crash protection against media plug ins.

For web developers, the main feature to embrace is the new HTML5 parser – which has full support for drag and drop, audio, video, file handling, and in-line SVG and MathML support.

Taking a leaf from the book of Chrome, the rendering of web pages is instantaneous and video sites such as YouTube load up in record time.

Source: Guardian newspaper

Mozilla said on Tuesday that it is halting work on the creation of Firefox for Windows Mobile.

“Given that Microsoft is staking their future in mobile on Windows Mobile 7 (not 6.5) and because we don’t know if or when Microsoft will release a native development kit, we are putting our Windows Mobile development on hold,” Stuart Parmenter, mobile team technical lead for Mozilla, said in a blog posting.

Mozilla had been working on a version of Firefox that would run on Windows Mobile 6, part of a years-long effort to bring its browser to Windows CE. As for the new Windows Phone 7 Series, Microsoft has thus far said that applications for that operating system have to be written in either Silverlight or XNA, rather than in native code.

ZDNet

Mozilla has pumped out the first beta of Thunderbird 3.1, aimed at ironing out problems caused by the switch to the Gecko 1.9.2 rendering engine.

Gecko 1.9.2 is the same rendering engine powering Firefox 3.6, and while the change should bring a raft of improvements including interface tweaks, bug fixes and memory management improvement, the Thunderbird team acknowledges there could be “possible problems caused by the changes in the underlying platform”.

Among these problems are broken add-ons, “crashes and bugs and potentially data loss in profiles,” according to the release notes.

The beta, codenamed Lanikai, is available for PC, Mac and Linux, with a second beta expected to be available in early April, followed by a release candidate at the beginning of May.

The final release of Thunderbird 3.1 is targeted for 1 June 2010

Source: PC Pro

Mozilla has been steadily moving towards its goal of releasing the first Firefox browser for mobile phones and, on Friday 29th January, released Firefox 1.0 for Nokia’s Maemo – previously code-named Fennec.

Firefox for the Maemo 5 platform has a few things that set it apart from other mobile browsers, in particular its third-party, customisable, browser extensions. Here’s the rest of the goodies from Mozilla’s blog:

• Awesome Bar – Go to your favorite sites in just a couple of keystrokes with intelligent and personalized searching.
• Weave Sync – Sync your Firefox tabs, history, bookmarks and passwords between your desktop and mobile device for a seamless browsing experience.
• Location-Aware Browsing – Get maps and information relevant to your location.
• Tabbed browsing – View open tabs as thumbnails to easily identify and select the Web page you’d like to go to next.
• Safe Browsing – Get an Instant Web Site ID and easily access and edit security settings.
• Available in more than 30 languages and counting.

Add-ons helped make Firefox the top browser alternative to Internet Explorer in the desktop space. To punctuate the importance of add-ons for Firefox’s mobile browser, Mozilla also released on Friday the general release of its bookmark and history-syncing extension, Weave Sync 1.0, for both desktop and mobile.

Nokia’s open-source, Linux-based Maemo operating system supports mobile Firefox on just two devices: the N900 and the N810, which is an internet tablet.

A last-minute decision to pull wholesale support for Adobe’s Flash plug-in from this latest build will cause problems for users who want to watch videos or view Web sites that rely heavily on Flash content.

As a workaround, Mozilla has released an add-on called YouTube enabler, that early adopters can install to view YouTube videos.

Mozilla is hoping to work out other solutions for those who are wary of optionally installing the Flash plug-in, but still want to see select Flash-based content.

You can download Firefox 1.0 for Maemo here, and read more details in Mozilla’s blog post.

Source: CNET

Firefox 3.6 is the dream Internet browser you’ve always been looking for.

It displays an elegant simplicity and makes your web experience better, much faster and thoroughly enjoyable.

Firefox currently accounts for about 25% of all browsers used worldwide, according to the most recent data from Web metrics company NetApplications.com. With a quarter of the browser market, Firefox is a distant second to IE’s 63%, but enjoys a huge cushion over the current No. 3 browser, Chrome, which has a 5% share.

Performance

Firefox 3.6 is about 15% faster than its predecessor, Firefox 3.5. And with JavaScript that’s more than three times as fast as Firefox 3 and 20% faster than Firefox 3.5, you’ll easily be able to see the improvement in overall speed.

Persona’s

New in Firefox 3.6 are Personas. These are easy-to-install themes that help you personalise the overall look and feel of your browser.

There are thousands of Personas to choose from, with more added every day. You can even create your own and share it with others.

Visit the Personas gallery and start looking for designs that fit your style.

Security

Firefox 3.6 also includes many built-in security-related features, such as the best-of-breed anti-phishing protection, making it the most secure browser on the market today.

This upgraded Phishing Protection takes Firefox’s security to a new level, helping to safeguard your financial information and protect you from identity theft.

Additional security features include Malware protection and enhancements to the password manager. There is also far greater security for add-ons and downloads.

To keep Firefox current with any security fixes, the browser is designed to check for updates automatically and pops up a box on your desktop to inform you when these are available for download.

Usability

Firefox 3.6 has many core features such as sessions restore, built in spell checking, integrated search, pop-up blocker, clear private data and automated ‘behind the scenes’ updates.

The browser interface looks a lot like Firefox 3.5 but there are a few additional add ons that can make your Firefox browser look unique, especially the new Persona’s.

The placement of the main navigation buttons has not changed, they are still on the left.

A company logo will appear before the URL (if ones available from the website you visit).

Immediately after the URL and just before the RSS icon is the Star icon. Click it once to store the page’s URL as a bookmark; click it twice to assign the bookmark to a new or existing folder. You can also give it tags: short keywords to help when searching through your bookmarks.

When you type a URL a blue tick appears at the end of the address bar. If you click this it will take you to the address you’ve typed.

The drop down list after the new Star icon is a list of recently accessed pages.

The Smart Location Bar

The Smart Location Bar was first introduced in Firefox 3. It is also known as the ‘Awesome Bar’.

As you type in a URL, the Smart Location Bar searches through your history and bookmarks and presents a drop-down list of recently accessed pages with that same keyword. It works even if you already know the URL.

Built in Web Search

For searches across the entire Web, a box at the top right provides a shortcut to Google and a drop down menu listing 9 other sites, including Yahoo!, Live Search, Amazon, eBay, Answers.com and Wikipedia.

RSS Support

Firefox 3.6 also supports a built-in RSS (Really Simple Syndication) newsreader to fetch updates from websites that publish their content using this standard.

Firefox gives you full control over Web feeds, showing you a preview and letting you choose how you want to subscribe.

Find Bar

In the file menu click edit – find and a “Find” bar appears at the bottom of Firefox’s window which lets you search for words on a page without blocking your view of the page itself.

As you type a query, the first matching item is highlighted in green. “Find Next” and “Find Previous” buttons jump to other matches, and the “Highlight” button paints all of them in purple.

Customising Firefox 3.6

Web addicts can customize Firefox3.6 with browser extensions that add functions, themes and persona’s that alter the browsers look and feel. To customize Firefox even more type about:config into the address bar and you’ll see hundreds of preferences to tweak! But be careful what you change as you could accidentally prevent Firefox from starting up.

Downloading programs, files and images

The Download Manager lets you easily start, stop and resume downloads.

Downloading Firefox 3.6

With greatly improved performance, really useful features and first class security Firefox 3.6 stands out as one of the best internet browser available today.

Firefox 3.6 is free to download and is available on a variety of operating systems : Windows, Mac and Linux. There are also a wide variety of localised language versions to choose from.

If you haven’t already tried Firefox, what are you waiting for?