Mozilla reveals Web app store plans

Mozilla has detailed plans for an "open web ecosystem" that will function across browsers.

Mozilla has released a trial product and technical specifications detailing its planned Web app store. The open source company “Mozilla” says it intends to make its store’s apps available for “any modern desktop or mobile browser,” quoting Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 6, Safari 5, and, of course, its own Firefox 3.6 as examples of “modern” browsers.



“The open Web is a great platform for rich applications,” Mozilla VP of Products, Jay Sullivan said in a blog post. “It would be even better if it had additional capabilities to ease discovery, acquisition, installation and use of apps, while also enabling monetization for developers.”

The post goes on to list parameters for developing apps for the store, including the use of established Web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and cross-browser compatibility, with an additional rule prohibiting users from being charged for porting an already purchased app on to multiple browsers. Mozilla also makes clear its intention to allow for both free and paid apps, and plans to restrict any third party from acting as a “gatekeeper” between developers and users.

Mozilla originally announced the app store plan back in May, around the same time Google was voicing intentions to release its own Chrome Web App Store, which is expected to be launched soon.

Best Google Chrome themes

Google’s Chrome browser has been rapidly expanding its user base and is known as one of the fastest browsers available. With a ton of Chrome users here in the office, we decided to put together a list of our favorite themes for Chrome. There are heaps of themes available, but we’ve narrowed down our favorites, and as you might expect a lot of them are quite nerdy. With our picks we tended to favor themes that changed the look drastically from the default Chrome theme, but there are many themes out there that provide more subtle changes.

If you want to check out all of the official Chrome themes as well as artists creations then visit Google’s theme gallery. There are also lots of great “unofficial” themes out there that are supported by Chrome, all you need to do is make sure the theme is in the .CRX format.

Click Here To Select Themes

Download Firefox 4 Beta 4

Mozilla development team has released the forth beta of its Firefox 4. Similar to previousversion, the latest release of the Firefox 4beta 4 is also built on Mozilla’s Gecko 2.0 Webplatform. The new release has been featured with FirefoxSync and Firefox Panorama for allow users to control their personal Web experience by syncing their data across devices and organize their tabs in order.

The Firefox 4 beta 4 includes the following new features and improvements:

• Firefox Sync – Makes bookmarks, history, Awesome Bar, passwords, form-fill data and open tabs accessible across multiple computers and mobile devices.


• Firefox Panorama (formerly known as Tab Candy) – Gives users a visual overview of all open tabs, allowing them to be sorted and grouped.


• Firefox 4 Beta 4 is available in 39 languages.


• An Experimental API – Provide more efficient Javascript animations.


• Supports HTML5 video “buffered” property.

The latest Firefox 4 beta 4 is now available for free download at Mozilla official site. Just head to the following URL to access official Firefox 4 beta 4 download:

Windows (English)- http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-4.0b4&os=win&lang=en-US

Linux (English) – http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-4.0b4&os=linux&lang=en-US

Mac OS X (English) – http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-4.0b4&os=osx&lang=en-US

Microsoft Russia shows apparent Internet Explorer 9 interface

Though Microsoft has released four previews of Internet Explorer 9 over the past six months, none of them included much of a user interface. The company was keeping that under wraps, with the first public unveiling happening in a few weeks, on September 15. But with an apparent mistake by one of Microsoft's Russian Web properties, it looks like the secret might be out: the site posted a screenshot that apparently shows the new browser UI, as noticed by Mary-Jo Foley at ZDNet.

Though the blog post has now been deleted, it's still currently available in the Bing cache. As well as the single screenshot, the site described five features of the new browser. Some of these are well-known—standards compliance, performance—but the site also described new user interface features.

The leaked screenshot

The machine translation of the page isn't entirely clear, but it suggests that the new browser will allow tabs to be torn off from the browser window (as already found in Chrome and Safari, for example), and that there will be some kind of provision for creating icons for specific sites, perhaps something similar to Chrome's application mode.

Most striking is the new interface that Internet Explorer 9 will apparently include. It has been pared down and simplified, with the multiple menu buttons of the Internet Explorer 8 toolbar condensed to a single menu. The tabs, address bar, and toolbar have all been condensed into a single row.

The screenshot does have a number of odd features, however. The styling of the back and forward buttons is reminiscent of the style used—and abandoned—during the Longhorn development process, with the back button larger than the forward button—a design also found in Firefox.

The buttons are also unusual in that the oversized back button appears to be truncated at the bottom, where it runs into the actual browser frame, which looks both ugly and inattentive. Also surprising is that Microsoft has, apparently, switched to using the same reload icon as found in Chrome, Firefox, et al.—a single clockwise circular arrow—instead of the paired arrows that it has been using since Internet Explorer 1.

The amount of space available to tabs seems extraordinarily small. It's possible that they overflow onto a second row to make more room, but as shown in the screenshot, they look extremely cramped. The decision not to show the webpage's title in the window title bar is also odd. Chrome doesn't show the page title in the title bar because it uses the title bar for tabs; Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox both duplicate the information, as it means that the full page title can be visible even when the tabs are small.

Also surprising is that the screenshot shows a single bar used for both page addresses and searches. Previously Microsoft has said that this design is a privacy flaw: it means that any Web address typed into the browser is sent to the chosen search engine to allow search-as-you-type. If the picture is accurate, it means that Microsoft has done a surprising about-turn on that privacy issue.

There's also a question of when this screenshot was taken. The taskbar clock is peculiarly obliterated, eliminating the obvious indicator, but the Bing page opened in the browser gives some contradictory clues. The Bing daily photo was used for Bing China back in January and Bing USA in August last year, and Bing changed the appearance of the menu on the left back in May, which suggests that the pictures are old. However, the recent searches can be no earlier than June, due to the mention of Kinect.

The incongruous Bing content could simply be a repercussion of the marketing team using mock-ups, but if the page content is mocked up, anything else could be too—to the extent that the entire browser window could be a mock-up or prototype.

If this is a taste of what's to come with Internet Explorer 9, it's certainly going to look simpler, with more room dedicated to Web content than browser chrome. But the graphical oddities and small space left for tabs give reason to be skeptical; the browser we see next month may not look like this after all.

Firefox 4.0 beta 4 redefines tab management with Panorama

When we talked about Firefox’s upcoming tab management feature it was still known by its code name TabCandy. Earlier available as an add-on for beta / nightly versions of Firefox, it has now been integrated into the Firefox to be available as a core feature in the final release. While remaining essentially the same, the feature will now be called Panorama, a much more acceptable name for a release feature.

Panorama allows you to easily group your tabs according to the tasks you are performing, or otherwise. With a simple rich drag-drop interface you can visually arrange your tabs in multiple spaces according to their purpose, and then focus on one group at a time. So if you have you can have your personal email, chat and social networking all in one group, and your work email and other work related tasks in another group. When you open a tab from a particular group, only tabs from that group are visible, and all other tabs are hidden away. You can even name tab groups.

Firefox Panorama: How To from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Firefox Panorama: How To from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

 Panorama is not the only feature to be upgraded from an add-on to a core feature. Firefox Sync (earlier known as Weave) is now also a par of Firefox. When you install Firefox 4 beta 4 you will instantly find a “Set up Sync...” option in the “Tools” menu (which is hidden by default, but easily accessed by pressing Alt). Firefox Sync lets you synchronize your bookmarks, saved passwords, and even your browsing history across multiple computers. All these details are synchronized to your Mozilla account where they are stored encrypted using a key of your choice (different from your password).

While Mozilla has been offering the Sync feature through an add-on from a long time, it is in Firefox 4 that this feature will come as part of the browser itself. Google Chrome and Opera also offer syncing abilities although not as powerful as Firefox, however with version 6, Google Chrome will also support syncing extensions, something which is not applicable to Opera and still not available in Sync.

These are probably the most visible changes in beta 4, but not the extent of the changes. Beta 4 also adds an experimental animation API and support for the buffered property in HTML5 video. You can get a more thorough list of new feature here.

You can download Firefox 4 from Mozilla Firefox beta website.

Firefox 4 beta 4 adds hardware acceleration

Mozilla hopes to release its fourth beta of Firefox 4 on Monday, adding hardware-accelerated graphics for some Windows users but leaving it turned off by default.

Also coming is a major user interface change called tab sets, formerly known as tab candy.

Hardware acceleration, coming to all the major browsers in various forms, is designed to shift some tasks from a computer's main processor to its graphics processor. One way Firefox is tackling the technology is by using Windows' Direct2D interface, which can speed up the display of text and graphics on newer versions of Windows.

Mozilla planners had hoped to enable Direct2D in the fourth beta, but decided caution was appropriate. "b4 won't have D2D on by default after all; just not quite ready to send it to that many users. soon!" tweeted Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering.

The Firefox 4 beta 4 code is frozen for finalization, putting the "release target as next Monday, Aug. 23," according to Mozilla meeting notes.

Firefox 4 is designed to be faster and better so Mozilla's browser can compete better as Google Chrome matures and as Microsoft's Internet Explorer reverses its usage-share slide and gets a major overhaul. Faster display is crucial in the performance race.

Faster browsers can enliven use of the Web, not just for loading sites but also for using Web applications or otherwise interacting. Mozilla and Microsoft have been in a bit of a competition to add support for the feature, which made a splashy debut in "platform preview" versions of Internet Explorer 9.

Even though Direct2D rendering won't be activated by default, Mozilla hopes people will test it. Here are Mozilla's instructions for enabling Direct2D in Firefox by changing settings accessed by typing "about:config" into the address bar:

To turn on Direct2D: Go in to about:config and set mozilla.widget.render-mode to 6, andgfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled to true.

To turn off Direct2D, once it is on by default, set mozilla.widget.render-mode to 0.

To check whether you are running with Direct2D, go to about:support [in the address bar] and look at the bottom.

Speed isn't the only factor, of course. As people spend more time in browsers, though, it gets harder to manage all the different tasks running simultaneously. For this reason Mozilla developed tab candy. It will appear in Firefox 4 beta 4 with the less tasty but more descriptive "tab sets" name.

Tab sets let people group tabs into bunches and move them around for what Mozilla hopes will be easier management than just using multiple browser windows, each with a linear strip of tabs across the top.

Another change that already arrived in Firefox 4 beta 3 is a feature called "switch to tab," which can move a person to an open tab when they start typing it into the address bar. It makes it easier to locate specific Web pages amid the tab clutter, but makes it harder to open duplicate pages of the same site.

A third tab change that's already in the Firefox betas is app tabs, which let people shrink a regular tab into a narrow icon to the left of the tab strip. It saves real estate in the tab strip and helps organize tabs by task.

The next version, Firefox 4 beta 5, is scheduled to be the last with any new browser features, according to Mozilla planning notes that mention that "feature freeze."

"There's a lot of things to go in it," the notes say. Mozilla programmers hope to freeze the code at the end of August, a step that shifts developer attention to fixing necessary bugs rather than adding anything new.

Google Chrome Web Store Coming in October

Google has announced that the Google Chrome Web Store will likely launch in October, aimed at providing a marketplace for HTML5 Web-based apps.

At this week’s Game Developer Conference in Germany, Google announced that it expects to have its Chrome Web Store up and running by October. The announcement is significant for two reasons. The first is that, unlikely native applications for devices like Android phones or an iPad, Google expects to be able to develop a market for applications written purely using standard HTML5 technologies. Second, the timing of the Chrome Store launch is probably an indicator of when Google expects tablets based on its own Chrome operating system to start hitting the market.

Google’s Chrome Web Store will serve as a marketplace for browser-based applications; these Web-based apps will be build using standard Web-based tools like HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, meaning that, in theory, there’s nothing to restrict them to Chrome: any sufficiently advanced browser should be able to use apps from the Chrome store. Chrome users will get the added benefit of being able to install simple shortcuts to their favorite apps. Web Store users will also be able to read app reviews, submit their own ratings, and see how their friends have rated items.

All transactions will be handled by Google Checkout, Google’s rival to PayPal for online payments. Google also announced it plans to make very little money from Chrome Web Store app sales: Google plans to pocket a 5 percent processing fee on each sale, meaning 95 percent of the proceeds would go to the app’s developer or publisher.

The Chrome Web Store will support free apps and games, but will not initially support in-app purchases, so someone looking to give away (say) a free reader application and then charge for premium content wouldn’t be able to use that business model in the Chrome Web Store.

Google’s presentation at GDC, of course, focused on browser-based games, but there’s nothing about the Chrome Web Store that’s restricted to games. However, since Chrome tablets and netbooks are widely expected to be aimed at content consumers rather than hardcore computing enthusiasts, a focus on games and digital content isn’t surprising.

Download Firesay to Make Voice Command on Firefox Browser

Speech recognition technology is no longer a new technology and it is quite commonly used in devices such ascomputers and mobile phones to empower users to interact with and control their machines by voice. Ever wonder how wonderful this experience will be if this technology is applied in a browser? Users could just surf the web by voice; for instance, they just need to say “Search Google Mydigitallife” to search for the term “Mydigitallife” using the Google search engine. Firesay is a free browser add-on to Firefox that allows users to communicate with the browser via voice commands.



With a microphone or webcam, Firefox users can add Firesay plug-in to their browser to experience a new, more natural, intuitive and efficient way to command and control the browser. Instead of typing, users can use their voice to do search queries, go to the sites they want to visit, open/close tabs or browsers, etc. The speech recognition approach will generally save time and enhance the browsing experience tremendously.



The developer has highlighted that the current Firesay version is only supported on Windows 7 and does not work on Linux, Mac, or Windows XP. Besides, thisapplication is quite sensitive to surrounding voice and it is not optimized to work in areas with high-background noise. At this current stage, Firesay only supports a few simple voice commands, e.g. “Search Google”, “Open Facebook”, etc. This application needs more improvement to make it more handy and useful.

Internet Explorer 9 Beta launching September 15th, might enter a beauty pageant

Once again, the whispers were true. Microsoft has proudly announced on this fine day that September 15th will mark the official launch of the Internet Explorer 9 Beta, but details beyond that are scant. We do know that the Big M will hold a gala in San Francisco to celebrate "The Beauty of the Web," and once it hits the tubes, you'll need either Vista or Windows 7 to use it (sorry, XP loyalists). 'Course, it remains to be seen if IE can catch up to Chrome and Firefox in the technical department, but at least you can start preparing your existing squeeze for somewhat of a letdown next month. Let 'em down easy, okay?

Google Chrome 6.0.472.22 Beta

Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.

One box for everything

Type in the address bar and get suggestions for both search and web pages.

Thumbnails of your top sites

Access your favorite pages instantly with lightning speed from any new tab.

Incognito mode

Don't want pages you visit to show up in your web history? Choose incognito mode for private browsing.

Safe browsing

Google Chrome warns you if you're about to visit a suspected phishing, malware or otherwise unsafe website.

For information about alpha and developer builds, check out the Chrome dev channel here.

DOWNLOAD NOW

Mozilla's Contacts add-on now available for Thunderbird

Earlier this year Mozilla unveiled a new add-on for Firefox which made is possible for you to access your contacts list aggregated from all your services in the browser. Contact’s didn’t really seem like a  very good fit for the browser though, but the add-on was useful nonetheless as it made is very simple to browse your contacts and view details aggregated from multiple sources.

Now Mozilla has released a version of the add-on for their email client, Thunderbird (check out our review of the latest version here), and it seems like a much more suitable fit. The add-on will work with contacts from your Thunderbird Address Book, Native Address Books (for Mac), Facebook, GMail, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Yahoo!, and Twitter. Once you install the add-on you can connect to all these services and it will start pulling in your contacts and even merge contacts with the same email address or full name.

Instead of simply importing web contacts, the Contact add-on makes the Thunderbird     address-book more web capable. When you view the Contacts profile of any person in your address-book, it will pull in data from all these configures services and display it in one place. The add-on also has an alternative view for managing your contacts than the Thunderbird address-book.

The Contacts add-on can be downloaded from its Mozilla Labs page or the Thunderbird add-ons directory. The add-on is still in its early stages, so if you do intend to use it, we recommend you be very careful and keep a backup of your Thunderbird address-book.

Epic Web Browser - the first free browser with an Indian origin!

A Bangalore based company by name Hidden Reflex has reportedly announced the launch of its first browser "Epic", which intends to make the Indians all over the world proud.

Epic, is presumably the first completely Indian made web browser based on the Mozilla platform, and is apparently bundled with a rich assortment of India centric features. Before we take a sneak peek at the details of the browser, it would make sense to have a background introduction about the company.

The company was purportedly founded by the former U.S. based Engineer by name Alok Bhardwaj, way back in 2007. However, the company has reportedly based in Bangalore and rapidly expanding its workforce from a mere three member team to a sizable bunch of people, focusing on various products. Among them, the first one, Epic, has reportedly been launched and another one said to be still in the making.

Epic is said to hold a lot of promise with its bright background colours and highly customizable features, including about 1,500 themes readily available & compatible with the browser. The browser is also said to incorporate a host of widget-like sidebar features that include: Twitter,Facebook and other social networking services. However, the downside is that, it presumably allows you to open only one widget per window.

The icing on the cake is the presence of built-in anti-virus software within Epic, that is an industry first for any browser. Epic is also said to support about a dozen Indian languages and incorporate an India content sidebar that consolidates news headlines, TV to live cricket commentary and many such exciting features. It also reportedly features a wide-array of productivity applications including a free word processor, video sidebar and my Computer Browser.

The Epic browser is presently available for free download from the following link:

http://www.epicbrowser.com/

Opera Mini 5.1 sneaks into the market

Opera has reportedly announced the release of the latest version of its immensely popular mobile web browser - the Opera Mini. Opera Mini, happens to be the most widely used mobile browser in the world, with over 61 million users worldwide. According to Opera's own estimation, it is functional in about 3,000 mobile models across the globe.

The latest version of the browser - Opera Mini 5.1 sneaks into the market just a few months after Opera Mobile 5 major release. The new version is claimed to further enhance the browsing experience on mobiles with limited memory, that frequently throw "out-of-memory" messages whilst browsing. The update is said to include a new optimized browser skin which allows multiple pages to be open at the same time, quicker scrolling through pages, and an overall enhanced browsing performance. Opera has reportedly recommended this version of the browser for Nokia S40 based mobile phones with limited memory, such as the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic, Nokia 6300 and Nokia 2700 handsets. This version is also said to be optimized for screens with a small screen size, such as the Sony Ericsson K550i and Sony Ericsson W810i.

Users of high-end devices and smartphones are not required to update to this version, as it would serve no purpose. Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software, has reportedly stated, "The goal with Opera Mini is to make the Web available to anyone, anywhere, regardless of where they come from or the handset they have."

You could download the latest version of Opera from your native mobile browser by visiting the site: http://m.opera.com and the interesting part is that, Opera is expected to automatically select the optimized version for your phone

Opera 10.60 brings the latest and greatest Opera to Window, Linux and Mac

Opera 10.50 was possibly the most groundbreaking release of the browser in recent history, with massive upgrades to its JavaScript and rendering engine, standards support, and a new design. It made the otherwise major v10 seem light-years behind. The most disappointing thing about the 10.50 release was perhaps that Linux and Mac users were left out.

While 10.50 never managed to reach stable status on Linux, and came to Mac much after the 10.50 release for Windows, with Opera 10.60, Opera Software is bringing the versions of Opera for all platforms to sync.

Of course, that is just a minor part of Opea 10.60. After the immense boost of performance that came with Opera 10.50, the latest 10.60 further boosts its performance by up to 50% according to Opera Software. The standard SunSpider test revealed that Opera 10.60’s performance is at par with that of Chrome 6’s latest dev version. It is also twice as fast as the latest Firefox 4 build, and almost thrice as fast as Firefox’s latest stable version 3.6.6. While the SunSpider test alone isn’t enough to gauge the performance of all aspects of the browser, there is a pattern here.

Opera 10.60 also comes with better support for upcoming standards, including Geolocation, and it is the first stable browser to support WebM media. Other standard features include AppCache, for offline applications and Web Workers. There are a few more tweaks to the Opera UI and features which improve the browser overall. The Opera menu being one of them. Opera 10.50 included a huge rectangular button for exploring all menu options, this has now been replaced with a much more appropriate looking button labelled “Menu”. Additionally, Opera features such as the download tab, history tab etc. now display icons instead of tab previews. Another subtle change is the inclusion of Bing as a search engine in the browser – although Google is still the default. Another subtle enhancement in Opera 10.60 is the support for search suggestions from websites such as Wikipedia.

Another thing Opera users may notice when they use Opera 10.60 is that it no longer shows tab previews in the Windows 7 taskbar. While the feature has its utility, for many power users it is simply an annoyance, since the whole point of browser tabs was to not clutter the taskbar. Those who still want to turn it on needn’t worry. The option is still there.Opera 10.60 also brings new security features in the form of an “AVG-supported anti-fraud systems and phishing protection”. This is coupled with live feeds which carry information educating users of current scams, and potential malware.

Opera 10.60 further evolves Opera towards a perfect browser. Chrome and now Firefox have adopted an out of process model for plugins, and this is one of the few things missing from this browser which gets better with each iteration.

Here comes the first build of Firefox 4!

We have finally, a build of what is to become Firefox 4!

Those who live in the Nightly realm of Mozilla’s Minefield, will notice that the latest update is Minefield4b2. While this is essentially the same as the Firefox 3.7a6 line of code which was building on Gecko 1.9.3 this line was to some day become Firefox 4, and that day is today.

Since the nightly line has already been labeled 4b2 for working on the second beta, you can expect that Firefox 4 beta 1 will be released soon, officially. If you don’t want to wait, you can get a build of Firefox 4 beta 1 (although probably not the final beta 1!) from here (Windows build, 32-bit Mac build, 64-bit Mac build, 32-bit Linux build, 64-bit Linux build).

Beta 1 will be a very early look at Firefox 4, and will feature few of the brilliant features that will be found in the final release. However it will come with the UI:

And the new add-on manager:

Firefox 4 also comes with Windows 7 taskbar integration, with support for jumplists and tab previews. Which unlike most other browsers can be turned off.

As you may have notices, with Firefox 4, the browser has gone for a tabs-on-top approach. Here is a rather onvincing arugement favoring this change. As always this can be changed from tabs on top to tabs on bottom if desired.

Opera 10.60 Beta Released and HTML5 features explained

Opera is well-known for their Mobile browsers, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile. Lately, Opera has been working hard on their desktop browser and is currently claiming to be the fastest browser on the planet, courtesy of its new Carakan Javascript Engine.

The Opera Desktop Team has been coming out with one or more builds every week for testing and has finally released Opera 10.60 Beta today. This new release mostly focuses on WebM, Geolocation, Web Workers, Offline Web Applications and Cross-Document Messaging update.

WebM is an open source video format designed to provide royalty free high quality video compression in an open format for use with HTML5 video. Simply put, with the help of this, the browsers that support this capability can play videos without the use of any plugins like Adobe Flash. The project's development is sponsored by Google. Currently, Opera and Firefox support the Ogg Theora video codec, while Apple Safari supports the H.264 codec. Google Chromesupports both, while Microsoft have announced support for H.264 in IE9. This is already supported in Firefox Nightly builds and Google Chrome.

Geolocation refers to the use of scripts within the browser to determine where the particular user is. Web Applications will use this feature of the browsers, which can lead to countless advantages. For example, a Web service could provide you with information about the nearest hospital, with turn-by-turn route navigation info or maybe a web application can tell you about all the cool meetups happening in your area in the coming days, along with exact locations. The browsers that support Geolocation determine user locations based on a combination of data from users' wifi access points and users' IP addresses. Of course, the users have a choice of whether they wish to reveal such information with the sites they visit, as shown below.

 

Web Workers provide a simple means for web content to run scripts in background threads. This allows for long-running scripts that are not interrupted by scripts that respond to clicks or other user interactions, and allows long tasks to be executed without yielding to keep the page responsive.

Users wanting to try out Opera 10.6 Beta can download it from Opera's site.