Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
We've known Mozilla had big plans for the mobile space for a while now. But we were a bit disappointed when Mozilla announced their first major Mobile offering back in August. Joey is basically just a web clipping service that lets you save web content using your desktop Firefox browser and access it from any old mobile browser. We were hoping to see a mobile version of Firefox.
Well, sometimes dreams do come true. Mozilla's Mike Schroepfer writes on his blog that work is underway to create a version of Firefox for mobile phones. There aren't a ton of details yet, but here's what we can tell you:
Mozilla is adding mobile devices to the list of "first-class" development platforms
Mobile Firefox will be able to run Firefox extensions on mobile devices and allow third party development via XUL
Mozilla is expanding its team of mobile contributors
Mozilla hasn't picked the target platforms yet. So there's no word whether you'll be able to run Firefox on Palm, Windows Mobile, or Symbian devices. Considering the iPhone is still officially a locked device, we doubt you'll see an official version for iPhone anytime soon, but that doesn't mean some industrious open source hacker won't find a way to run Mobile Firefox on the iPhone.
Need a good web page authoring tool but don't feel like pulling out the pocket book? Up until recently we would have recommended the excellent free application Nvu. But development on the open source tool has been pretty much stagnant.
Enter KompoZer, a new web page creator based on Nvu's code. The only reason the application has a new name is because it has a new developer and the Nvu name was trademarked by Linspire and the original developer.
So what can KompoZer do?
A WYSIWYG editor, much like DreamWeaver
Built on Gecko, Mozilla's layout engine
Integrated FTP file management
Jump between WYSIWYG editor and HTML tabs
Support for forms, tables, and templates
Linux, Windows, and Mac support
Version 0.7.10 looks an awful lot like Nvu, but with the addition of undo and redo buttons.
Do you find yourself frequently searching a site, and annoyed that you can't search it directly from Firefox's search box like you can with Google, Yahoo and the other default search providers? It turns out there's a way to add the ability to simply add a search provider to the Firefox search box with the click of a mouse. You just need the Add to Search Bar Firefox Add-On, pointed out by Lifehacker.
Using the extension is as simple as right-clicking in the search box on the page that you'd like to add to Firefox, and choosing "Add to Search Bar..." from the context menu. As soon as you've done that, the new search provider will show up in Firefox ready to be used.
We first heard that Mozilla might be ready to spin off Thunderbird as a separate corporation back in July. At the time, all we knew is that Mozilla wanted to focus on Firefox and allow Thunderbird to shed its overlooked stepsister status and get the attention it deserved.
Well, it turns out that Mozilla has pretty big plans for the little e-mail client. The goal is pretty much to make Thunderbird an Outlook killer much the same way Firefox has become something of an Internet Explorer killer.
Mozilla has announced that ActiveState CTO David Ascher will head up the new company. The new organization will be a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation and will receive $3 million in seed funding from Mozilla to get started.
The new company will continue to support Thunderbird, but will also continue to build out its product and encourage a "robust developer ecosystem" to encourage open source involvement in the project. What would be most interesting is if Mozilla released a Thunderbird server that could compete with Microsoft's Exchange Server head-on.
We luv our Firefox extensions and here's another one - Deligoo. (Yes, it is a perplexing name but it's a mash of Google Custom Search and Delicious). Deligoo searches your del.icio.us bookmarks and with its help you can find the necessary page according to any phrase or word which it contains.
This is the perfect solution to those frustrating searches where you know you bookmarked an incredibly interesting and useful web page, but you can't recall the page itself. Now, all you have to do is reference what the page was about (if you remember) and Deligoo will search it out for you. Another nice touch, is you can search other del.icio.us users' tags, and possibly get way more information than you need.
Patience is a virtue and you will need patience when using Deligoo as it takes - a - long - time - to - load - your - search because it has to recreate your search engine every time you use it. When you download Deligoo and restart Firefox or Internet Explorer, a button appears on your toolbar, which when clicked, takes you back to the search page. If you're real particular about your screen's real estate and not a die-hard del.icio.us user, than bookmarking Deligoo would work just as well.
In less than three years, Mozilla's Firefox has amassed 400 million downloads. The whole shift towards using the Firefox web browser was sparked in November 2004 by a Spread Firefox campaign in which tens of thousands of users spawned 25 million downloads. The buttons and banners placed on websites took only a year to grab 100 million downloads, and a year later 200 million.
Now, three years, an award for most recognized brand and 400 million downloads later, Firefox is helping people surf the web better, faster and with a friendlier experience. If you want to be part of the next 400 million users to download the virus and spyware free browser, you too can add some Firefox love to your blog or website.
On its way to becoming a popular development platform in its own right, Firefox is attracting developers who are busy creating extensions using third party API's.
ProgrammableWeb has put together a list of 12 Firefox mashups that use API's in order to help the productivity of users. The mashups range from sharing intriguing content on digg, delicious and facebook to uploading files to Flickr, Picasa, YouTube and Box.net accounts. Who needs to use standalone applications and timely website based uploaders after integrating these Firefox extensions?
If you were born before 1980, odds are you've used the Eudora email client at one point or another. While Outlook, Thunderbird, and online email services like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail get all the attention these days, once upon a time Eudora was the bomb.
Well, digg up the parachute pants, because Eudora is back, this time as a Mozilla project. The new Eudora is based on the open-source Thunderbird email client, but has the familiar look and feel of Eudora.
Eudora 8.0.0 beta includes Eudora's toolbar icons, keyboard shortcuts, and menu structure, among other things.
You can easily import mailboxes and messages from Eudora or from Thunderbird. There's also an option to import filters from Eudora, although this won't work with every filter as Thunderbird doesn't use the same structure as Eudora.
Mozilla is jumping on the 'back to school' bandwagon to ensure that students get the most out of their online experience with a new "Firefox Campus Edition" download.
Announced last week, the Campus Edition of Firefox comes bundled with a few extras including:
FoxyTunes - allows you to control almost all media players, find videos, CD covers, videos, band bios all within Firefox.
StumbleUpon - browse the web and find websites, videos, images all based on your interests.
Zotero - collects, manages and cites research sources from within Firefox.
All these tools help students with productivity and mostly allow them to engage more with their favorite web browser. Check out the Firefox Campus Edition download here, and get set to get those computers ready. And hey, if you are already in school, download away and get on with the rest of your semester with Mozilla's help.
As August draws to a close, the young uns are getting ready to head back to school. And you know what that means. Lots and lots of displays at the local drug store featuring pencils, 3 ring binders and headphones.
Well, Mozilla isn't trying to sell you anything with their upcoming Campus Edition of Firefox. It's just as free as any other version of the web browser. But it comes with a few handy add-ons that might be useful for students, such as Zotero, StumbleUpon, and Foxytunes.
Wait, now that we think about it, Zotero's the only one of the three that's actually targeted specifically toward students, since it provides tools for researching and writing papers. We'll wait to see what other add-ons Firefox bundles with its campus edition before passing judgment, but it looks like you might as well just download and install Firefox 2.0.0.6 and install the appropriate add-ons yourself.
Back in May Mozilla dropped some hints about a new mobile web application called Joey. It's not a mobile version of Firefox, but rather a way to use your desktop to send web information to your mobile phone. Still not clear on exactly what Joey is and how it works? The Mozilla team working on Project Joey have put together a handy little video explanation.
Joey is still in beta, but it looks like Mozilla is opening up the door to anyone who wants to test the application.
We're not sure there's a huge demand for this type of service. In a nutshell, Joey lets you watch a video or read information on your PC, and then read exactly the same information on your mobile phone. Perhaps if you're trying to send yourself driving directions or reminders this is handy, but there are a hundred simpler ways to do that without wasting data minutes on your phone.
And while it's nice to be able to watch web videos on your phone, we're not sure why you'd only want to watch videos you've already seen. Sure, you can turn to your friend and say "check out this video of Mentos and Diet Coke, it's on my phone!" But we're not sure they'll be particularly impressed with your 2006 technology and knowledge of viral videos.
Mozilla Links has posted details and a few screenshots of how Firefox 3's new download manager will look and function. In general, users will gain more control over their downloads, actions such as opening a file have been changed from text links to icons to comply with the rest of Firefox's design paradigm of buttons for actions, words for website links. Users will also be able to click an (i) icon on completed downloads to view details such as the website the download came from, the location of the downloaded file on local computer and when the download finished. Chronic downloaders will also appreciate a new search box, and an option to show the download manager in the status bar or sidebar is also being considered.
Overall these look like some strong features for a much-needed upgrade to the download manager, but we would still like to see a little more innovation here. For example: the download manager in Camino, a Mac OS X browser that uses the same Gecko rendering engine as Firefox, can not only clear the download manager's list of files, but also move those files to the trash. And what about actual download file management features, such as moving files to specified folders or importing into apps based on file type (ZIP, audio, video, etc.)?
If you're itching to try out these new features, Mozilla Links says this new download manager should be available in tonight's nightly build.
Most of the changes include bug fixes and under the hood tweaks. But here are a few things you might notice:
The location bar autocomplete menu shows favicons for previously entered addresses.
Firefox will retain a history of recently visited sites for 180 days instead of 9.
Support for Mac OS X 10.3 has been removed.
There's support for full page zoom of images, text, and layout, but you'll need to install an extension to take advantage of Firefox's new zoom options, as there's no controls built into the program yet.
As you can tell from the Alpha label, the latest release is still far from ready for prime time. We wouldn't recommend using the latest build as your primary browser yet, but if you want to see what Firefox 3 might look like, go ahead and compile a portable build.
The problem is that Firefox "did not percent-encode spaces and double-quotes in URIs handed off to external programs." Essentially that means that hackers could create web sites that would launch arbitrary code on your computers when visited with the Firefox browser.
Odds are you'll get the update through Firefox's auto-update feature. But if your browser hasn't prompted you to download Firefox 2.0.0.6 yet, you can grab it from the Firefox homepage.
This is a neat trick. If you're one of those bleeding edge people who want to try out Firefox 3 while it's still undergoing major changes, but don't want the hassle involved in installing, uninstalling, and repeating daily, this script could be a major time saver.
The nifty script downloads the nightly build and installs it as a portable configuration, allowing you to keep the use of your trusty mainline Firefox, and still play around with the nightly build like the cool kids.
We've known Mozilla had big plans for the mobile space for a while now. But we were a bit disappointed when Mozilla announced their first major Mobile offering back in August. Joey is basically just a web clipping service that lets you save web content using your desktop Firefox browser and access it from any old mobile browser. We were hoping to see a mobile version of Firefox.
This is a neat trick. If you're one of those bleeding edge people who want to try out Firefox 3 while it's still undergoing major changes, but don't want the hassle involved in installing, uninstalling, and repeating daily, 
