Ilya Kozhevnikov

Browser Newsletter #6

February 17, 2008

The Future of Firefox: Chris Blizzard speaks at SCALE

At the Southern California Linux Expo, Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard gave a presentation on the future of Firefox. He discussed Mozilla’s long-term goals, demonstrated some of the impressive integration improvements that Firefox 3 will bring for Linux users, and also provided some insight into Mozilla’s recent efforts to bring Firefox to the mobile market.

K-Meleon

K-Meleon 1.1.4, an update to Gecko engine 1.8.1.12 was released.

Silverlight and the Rich Client Browser

[...] 10 years ago Microsoft made a first attempt to give developers a rich programming environment for the Web. It was in late 1990s when the ActiveX technology came along. All in all, ActiveX was a bit ahead of time and, more importantly, had serious flaws in key areas for Web applications, such as interoperability and security. Similar in the overall idea of being a browser plug-in, but cross-platform and with a better security model, Adobe Flash imposed itself as the de facto standard for rich interface over the Web. In September 2007, Microsoft released version 1.0 of an analogous product-Silverlight-which is clearly a competitor to Flash but with some good arrows in the quiver.

Formerly code-named WPF/Everywhere, Silverlight is a free browser plug-in that is currently available for the Windows and Mac platform under a variety of operating systems including Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2, Macintosh OS X 10.4.8 and newer versions for both Power PC-based and Intel-based hardware. Silverlight supports all major browsers available on these platforms such as Firefox, Netscape, Safari, Internet Explorer.

A deep look to Firefox 3 Beta 3

Tomorrow, Mozilla will release Firefox 3 Beta 3, the eleventh milestone in the longest development time for a Firefox revision since the initial Firefox 1.0 on 2004. The eight alphas and trio of betas (so far), if anything, are a reflection of the long list of enhancements it (Firefox) and the underlying Gecko rendering engine, are bringing along.

First look: Firefox 3 beta 3 polishes rough edges

Mozilla has announced the official release of the third Firefox 3 beta, which includes many user interface improvements and a handful of new features. Firefox 3 is rapidly approaching completion, and much of the work that remains to be done is primarily in the category of fit and finish. There will likely only be one more beta release after this one before Mozilla begins issuing final release candidates.

Microsoft Prepares to Unveil IE8 Features At MIX08

With a Firefox 3.0 release impending, Microsoft prepares to reveal its new firepower with a keynote on the status of IE8

MIX, an annual Microsoft-hosterd conference for web developers held each spring at the swank Venetian in Las Vegas, has often drawn exciting news. At the first MIX conference, held in ‘06 Dean Hachamovitch, leader of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team gave an exciting presentation of the future of the browser, which highlight the improvements found in IE7 that would help the browser regain competitiveness against a more full-featured Firefox browser. Internet Explorer 7 released several months later in October, and stayed very true to the form of Hachamovitch’s presentation, adding tabbed browsing, antiphishing and more.

Goodbye Netscape Navigator

We reflect on the Web browser’s short, sad history.

Twelve years ago, Netscape’s still-young (though already in its second version) Navigator Web browser took home its first Editors’ Choice award from PC Magazine. We said it “pushed the technology envelope in every direction, from embedded multimedia to advanced HTML.” It was all so quaint. And now it’s all so over.

Google iPhone usage shocks search giant

Google on Wednesday said it has seen 50 times more search requests coming from Apple iPhones than any other mobile handset — a revelation so astonishing that the company originally suspected it had made an error culling its own data.

WebKit-based browser comes to Windows Mobile

Torch Mobile has become the first company to release a Windows Mobile 6 web browser based on open-source WebKit browsing technology. The Iris Browser provides a powerful, standards-based experience on resource-constrained devices, with multiple windows and tabs, and “virtual mouse” functionality, according to the company.

WebKit is a lightweight mobile HTML rendering engine derived from the KHTML rendering engine maintained by the KDE project. Webkit has become best-known for its use behind the scenes in Windows, OS X, and iPhone versions of Apple’s Safari browser. It has also been used by Adobe, which based its AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) toolsuite on it. More recently, the WebKit engine has also been incorporated into Google’s Android software stack for Linux-based smartphones.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Browser Newsletter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.