Mozilla, famous for Firefox, has released Prism 1.0 beta to the public.
The application which is yet to see mainstream media attention, allows users to turn some websites into downloadable applications which they can use on their computer when they are offline.
Prism works on Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms.
More information plus a download link can be found on the Mozila Prism website.
With Windows 7 Release Candidate just out the door, it seems the operating system is already raising complaints from Mozilla and Opera over the continued bundling of Internet Explorer.
“Our initial review suggests this is a blatant use of the Windows operating system to change the market dynamics of browser usage,” said Mozilla Chairperson, Mitchell Baker.
This is despite the fact that Internet Explorer 8 is now an optional component in Windows 7.
Microsoft still has a month to address the anti-competitive complaints bought against it by the European Union.
The Google Chrome team has created a slew of new videos to promote their browser.
You can watch each and everyone of them from the Google Chrome YouTube channel. The 11 featured videos are all new, with 42 videos now in the channel.
A new project has been started by Mozilla with the aim of splitting up Firefox over several processes, with one process for the user interface, and one process for each open tab.
This is similar to both Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer 8, which both use multiple processes. The advantage of this is that if one tab crashes, it only closes one tab, rather than all open tabs, increasing the general stability of the browser.
The multi-process approach also allows the browser to take use of multiple CPU cores which are increasingly becoming the standard.
At this stage, it doesn’t seem like we will see a full release of this technology in Firefox for at least a year. More information on the project can be found in the Mozilla Links blog.
With the recent release of Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft is now seeking suggestions and feedback from users about what they would like to see in Internet Explorer 9.
“Hi Everyone!
We have added a new feedback form on Connect designed specifically to handle improvements for the next version of Internet Explorer. This includes not just feature requests, but all types of feedback including issues that currently exist in IE. Please continue to rate the submissions since we will look at the top rated reports first.Please be patient with the resolution of the reports you submit as we are in the research phase for the next version of IE. To shed some light on the status of your submissions, we’ll use a new field, Review Status, which will indicate whether we have reviewed the issue or not.
Please see the Connect site for more information.
The IE Team.”
Feedback can currently be left on the Connect website by anyone who was testing IE8.
After the recent row between developers of the AdBlock Plus and NoScript add-ons for Firefox, Mozilla is considering creating an add-on policy. Mozilla’s proposal follows.
Changes to default home page and search preferences, as well as settings of other installed add-ons, must be related to the core functionality of the add-on. If this relation can be established, you must adhere to the following requirements when making changes to these settings:
- The add-on description must clearly state what changes the add-on makes.
- All changes must be ‘opt-in’, meaning the user must take non-default action to enact the change.
- Uninstalling the add-on restores the user’s original settings if they were changed.
These are minimum requirements and not a guarantee that your add-on will be approved.
NoScripts developer has already agreed to this policy and has released an update to its extension.
Both Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome have continued their upward trends through April, increasing their market share. Firefox increased it’s share to 22.5%, up half a percent on last month, while Google Chrome was up around a quarter of a percent to 1.4% share.
Internet Explorer on the other hand continued to bleed users, slumping for another month. Despite the release of Internet Explorer 8, the browser lost almost three quarters of a percent to finish of the month with 66.1% market share.
Both Apple’s Safari and Opera stayed steady for the month, with 8.2% and 0.7% market shares respectively.
More detailed results can be seen using Market Share by Net Applications.
A war has broken out between two of Firefox’s most used plug-ins, AdBlock Plus and NoScript, with both scripts trying to out do each other by disabling the others features.
The war started as a result of AdBlock Plus blocking ads in NoScript’s change log window. The change log window is displayed every time NoScript is updated, which as of late has been rather frequent, and is NoScript’s only source of income.
AdBlock is of course doing what it does best, blocking ads, regardless of the source. The AdBlock blog has a full list of events as they see the current situation.
April 28, 2009 marks Opera’s 15th birthday, with the browser launched way back in 1994. Way before many people jumped on the Internet.
To celebrate, Opera has added a few extra pages to their site, including a comic on how it al began.
Posts from Opera’s CEO, Jon Tetzchner and Opera’s Software CTO Håkon Wium Lie also mark the occasion.
You can check out what all the hype is about on the Opera website. Congratulation Opera!
Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 (formerly known as Firefox 3.1) and is available in over 70 languages.
This beta includes a faster TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, enhancements to private browsing, and location aware browsing.
For a full list of changes you can read the release notes.
Existing beta users should have the upload pushed out to them, and new testers can download the latest beta from Mozilla.