A new video gives a first glimpse at Mozilla’s radical plans for the mobile version of Firefox.

Like Apple’s mobile version of Safari, Firefox Mobile concentrates on full web browsing. However, the manner in which users navigate the web is entirely different.

Firefox Mobile works on touch controls, with users scrolling around by dragging their finger across the screen, in a similar fashion to the iPhone browser.

However, none of the normal browser controls – back, forward, reload etc – are visible within the browser window. To locate these controls the user has to drag the page to the left, where the buttons are found in the margin to the side of the web page, and the URL bar fades into view. “By using horizontal panning to access the controls, we avoid the iPhone’s problem of needing to go to the very top of the page to enter

URLs,” says Aza Raskin, the son of interface expert Jef Raskin, who was recently hired by Mozilla to work on the project.

Take a look at Raskin’s video demonstration of the Firefox Mobile concept. www.vimeo.com

Source: PC Pro

Mozilla has unveiled Release Candidate 1 for Firefox 3, as the June release of the popular open-source browser creeps closer.

Mozilla claims the latest itineration contains around 14,000 updates, though the one most people are liable to notice is the page rendering, now handled by the Gecko 1.9 Engine which puts a significant spring in Firefox’s step when loading web pages.

Other notable features include improved JavaScript rendering, which Mozilla claims will double the speed of script-heavy pages such as Gmail.

Source: PC Pro

The fifth and final beta version of Firefox 3 was released on Wednesday, ahead of the updated browser’s final release in June.

The new beta includes more than 750 changes from its predecessor, according to Mozilla, the maker of Firefox. The company has claimed that security, stability and web compatibility have been improved, and suggested that Firefox 3, which is based on the new Gecko 1.9 web-rendering platform, will be the fastest-ever version of the browser.

It also appears that one of the most significant issues with Firefox in recent times, its heavy memory leakage, has been fixed. The memory footprint is now also smaller than that of competing browsers, such as Safari and Internet Explorer.

Source: ZDNet

Firefox continued to make ground on Internet Explorer in 2007, even threatening to overtake Microsoft’s dominance in several European countries.

Figures released by Xiti Monitor reveal that Firefox is close to toppling Internet Explorer in countries such as Finland, where it enjoys a 45% market share, as well as Poland, Slovenia and Hungary where it also enjoys market share between 40% and 42%. In Western Europe, Germany leads the way with a 34% share.

While Firefox continues to grow, the figures reveal that Internet Explorer is still by far the dominant browser holding a 66.1% share of the worldwide market, as opposed to Firefox’s 28%, which still represents a new high for the open-source browser.

Of the remaining browsers, Opera fares best with a 3.3% share, while Safari trails with only 2%.

Source: PC Pro

Have just read a great review of the soon to be launched Firefox 3. This is available from Computer World and mentions five key improvements – easier downloads, an enhanced address bar, easier bookmarking, a much improved bookmark organizer and better memory management.

At QBS PC Help we love Firefox and promote it heavily to all our customers and friends, so this new version will be tried and tested once its on general release.

Look out for our own review of Firefox 3 in 2008!

Source: Computer World

Firefox currently has a staggering 125 million global users, according to figures released by a Mozilla executive.

The figure comes courtesy of John Lilly, Mozilla’s Chief Operating Officer, who arrives at the result by analysing the statistical data collected through the browser’s update service.

As explained on Lilly’s blog, Firefox pings the update servers every day to check for patches and new versions, and by counting those pings he says it is possible for Mozilla to make a rough guess at how many instances of the browser are running.

He labels these Active Daily Users (ADU), and says that taken as an average over seven days, the number of ADUs has skyrocketed from 23 million in October 2006 to 48 million in November.

Source: PC Pro