FreeSoftNews

As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update
process, Thunderbird 2.0.0.16 is now available for Windows, Mac, and
Linux for free download from http://getthunderbird.com.

We strongly recommend that all Thunderbird users upgrade to this
latest release. If you already have Thunderbird 2.x, you will receive
an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update
can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from
the Help menu starting now.

• Read more: Thunderbird 2.0.0.16 available for download

Mozilla Tuesday set Friday as the ship date for the first preview edition of Firefox 3.1, the fast-track update it hopes to polish off by late this year or early in 2009.

In a meeting Tuesday, Mozilla developers and managers nailed down details of Firefox 3.1, including the release date for the first alpha. Previously, Mozilla had tentatively scheduled the alpha for sometime this month.

“Still on track for Friday release,” said the notes posted online after the morning meeting.

Read more at Linux World

As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update
process, Firefox 3.0.1 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux
for free download from http://getfirefox.com/.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest
release. If you already have Firefox 3.0, you will receive an
automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can
also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the
Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox
3.0.1 Release Notes at:

http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/3.0.1/releasenotes/

Note: All Firefox 2.0.0.x users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox
3.0.1 by downloading it from http://getfirefox.com/.

(follow-up: mozilla.dev.planning / dev-planning@lists.mozilla.org)

As announced before, tab switching is getting a dramatic update for Firefox 3.1 in both visual and behavior.

Press Ctrl + Tab (or Shift + Ctrl + Tab) and you are presented with tab thumbnails and titles with the most recently visited ones first so you can more easily determine which tab you want to go, have the one you most probably want to go closer, and as a result get to it faster. Hold Ctrl pressed and keep pressing Tab to see the thumbnails smoothly scroll to the left while the status bar displays the tab web address.

Read more at Mozilla Links

As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update
process, Firefox 2.0.0.16 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux
for free download from http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-older.html.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest
release. If you already have Firefox 2.x, you will receive an
automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can
also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the
Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox
2.0.0.16 Release Notes at:

http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/2.0.0.16/releasenotes/

Note: Firefox 2.0.0.x will be maintained with security and stability
updates until mid-December, 2008. All users are encouraged to upgrade
to Firefox 3.

(follow-up: mozilla.dev.planning / dev-planning@lists.mozilla.org)

The Mozilla Foundation plans to develop a better model for gauging the security of its Firefox web browser. In contrast to Microsoft, the number of officially provided security updates is not to be the sole parameter used. According to the method in which Microsoft measures security, an absence of patches would equate to a high degree of security. The Microsoft approach is further illustrated by its claim that Vista is still more secure than other operating systems. In contrast to this approach, the Mozilla Foundation wants its evaluation to include a variety of factors involved in the development process and the techniques and tools used in it. The sequence of the process from the time a security vulnerability is reported until a patch is distributed is also to be analysed.

Read more at heise online

They did it — Mozilla now holds the world record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours, according to Jamie Panas, press and marketing assistant at Guinness World Records.

Download Day 2008, designated by the Mozilla Foundation on June 17 in celebration of its 10th anniversary, saw the release of Firefox 3, the free Web browser for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. An intensive marketing campaign to set the first Guinness World Record of its kind, for the most software downloaded in one day, resulted in more than 8 million copies downloaded in one day, according to Mozilla.

Read more at Linux.com

I recently searched through the mozilla thunderbird extensions website and found 4 extensions that I didn’t know about that actually prove to be quite useful. I use Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 on Foresight Linux and have tested all of these extensions and verified that they work on that environment. Hopefully, they’ll help someone craft a more enjoyable email experience

Read more at Yet Another Linux Blog

On the back of the release last week of Firefox 3.0, Mozilla’s open-source browser gained market share at the expense of rivals Internet Explorer (IE) and Safari, Net Applications said Monday.

Firefox’s share ended the week at 19.17 per cent, said Vince Vizzaccaro, the Web metrics firm’s executive vice president of marketing. That’s up 0.76 per cent from the 18.41 per cent it posted for May.

Read more at LinuxWorld

To kick off the final version of its newest Web browser, Firefox 3, Mozilla created a lot of hoopla about its goal to set a new world record for the most copies of an application downloaded in a single 24-hour period. That really wasn’t very difficult, because there was no official record for that before — Mozilla was apparently the first outfit to call it in to Guinness. Anyway, Mozilla named the date and told the world to set its collective alarm clock for 10 a.m. Pacific time on Tuesday.
Read more at LinuxInsider

The official Mozilla Blog reports that there were over eight million downloads of Mozilla Firefox 3 in the twenty-four hours after release, despite the widespread server availability problems. The Spread Firefox Download Day 2008 page has an interactive map showing the numbers of downloads in different countries and Mozilla Corporation CEO John Lilly has a weblog post with more statistics from Firefox 3’s first twenty-four hours.

Once the exact figure has been determined and verified by Mozilla’s own judges and officials from Guinness World Records, Firefox 3 will be declared the holder of the world record for the most software downloads in twenty-four hours (since the record doesn’t exist yet, there’s no real doubt that it will be awarded to Firefox 3). The Download Day FAQ has more details about the specifics of the record attempt.

Read more at mozillaZine

The final release of Firefox 3 is now available for download at http://www.getfirefox.com
- at this time Firefox 3 is available as a download only. Firefox 2
users will be offered an update to Firefox 3 at some time in the future.

You can find out more about what’s new in Firefox 3 in the the “What’s
New” section of the release notes at:

http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/3.0/releasenotes

Anyone can download the Firefox 3 Release Candidate builds for
Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in over 45 different languages from:

http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-rc.html

Developers should also read the Firefox 3 for Developers article at
the Mozilla Developer Center:

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Firefox_3_for_developers

cheers,
mike

In honor of today’s Firefox 3 release, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team gave a cake to Mozilla. The tasty treat, which prominently displays IE’s blue “e” icon, just arrived here at Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View.

The cake congratulates Mozilla on shipping Firefox 3 and expresses love from the IE team. Microsoft’s IE developers also sent a cake to Mozilla in 2006 following the release of Firefox 2, so this is clearly becoming a tradition.

Read more at ars Technica

Mozilla Firefox 3 has been released. Available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 46 different localisations, Firefox 3 is the most major Mozilla browser release since the launch of Firefox 2 in October 2006 and represents the culmination of over three years work (development on Firefox 3 began before even Firefox 1.5 came out). According to the press release announcing Firefox 3, the new version has over 15,000 improvements.

Firefox 3 can be downloaded from the redesigned Firefox product page or the Firefox 3.0 directory on releases.mozilla.org (it’s not yet being offered to Firefox 2 users via the software update system). More information can be found in the Firefox 3 Release Notes.

Read more at mozillaZine

It has been a wild first decade for Mozilla. Despite having had a staff of fewer than 100 for most of its existence, the grassroots organization managed to break Microsoft’s lock on the Web browser market. If not for Mozilla’s popular Firefox browser, Microsoft’s software might have come to dominate the Internet the way it does computers. It’s an achievement that demonstrates how an open standards software project guided by an unusual mix of social and business principles can have a huge impact on the technology industry.

Read more at Linux Insider

As Firefox 3 approaches its grand debut this next Tuesday, for Mozilla developers it means the end of a development cycle and the start of another. Firefox 3.next is the tentative name for the next relatively minor update to the Firefox 3 branch, which is most likely to become Firefox 3.1.

A very early draft of planned features reveals that as expected, this release will be mainly about landing stuff that didn’t make it on time for the Firefox 3, along with the usual performance, stability and security bug fixes.

Visual tab switching and tab searching/filtering were both tried for Firefox 3, abandoned for other more critical features, and are being considered for 3.1. Ctrl+Tab, a extension developed by Dao Gottwald implements both of them displaying a thumbnail of the opened tabs when pressing Ctrl + Tab to switch tabs.

Read more at Mozilla Links

Mozilla has been announcing Release Candidates for Firefox 3 consistently for the past month. In fact, Firefox 3 RC 3 was just released earlier today. One could guess that the time for an official release was right around the corner, but we wouldn’t have guessed it’d be this soon. Only hours after RC3, and after 34 months of development, the company has announced that Firefox 3 will be officially released next Tuesday, June 17th.

Read more at Read Write Web

Mozilla developers decided today to spin a third Firefox 3 release candidate to ensure the next major update will meet users’ stability expectations.

This time, the showstopper was identified and reported last week on Mac OS X versions of Firefox 3 RC 2. The bug causes Firefox to hangwhen loading the plugin database in some special conditions on Mac OS X 10.5.3, the latest Mac OS X update released on May 28. I was unlucky enough to hit it so I, for one, appreciate the attention to this bug that is also present in Firefox 2.0.0.14.

Read more at MozillaLinks

Mike Beltzner has created a screencast introducing some of the new features in the forthcoming Mozilla Firefox 3. The overview, which is in Adobe Flash SWF format and lasts three minutes and forty-six seconds, covers the new Location bar autocomplete functionality (dubbed the “awesomebar” by its fans), one-click bookmarking using the new star button, bookmark tags, the site identity button (personified by Larry the passport officer), malware protection, improvements to the file download user interface and the built-in Add-ons browser.

Read more at mozillaZine

The Mozilla project has a long and distinguished history of holding global distributed parties to celebrate major events in the project’s life, including at the South Pole.

I’m pleased to say that we are doing this again - mozillaparty.com is now open for business, for booking parties to celebrate the release of Firefox 3 and also Mozilla’s 10th anniversary. There are 183 at the time of writing; last time, we got up to 389, so it would be good to have even more than that.

Read more at Gervase Markham Blog