Written on 19th May 2009
1 COMMENT Srikanth AD, Web Designer, Search Engine Optimizer and Google Devotee
The Mozilla Labs Design Challenge Summer ’09 is looking for creative solutions to reinvent browser tabs.
These days 20+ parallel sessions on a browser are quite common. The browser is more of an operating system than a data display application. And tabs don’t work well if you use them with heterogeneous information.
But, looking at the brighter side, this solves the problem of having multiple browser application windows which usually clutter the task bar. However, having tabs across the top of the application window doesn’t make that much sense, especially as the number of open pages increases.
The Question
Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?
To participate in the design challenge you need to create a mockup of your proposed solution. A mockup can be anything from a wireframe, a drawing or a polished graphic. You also need to create a video explaining your idea(s), presenting the mockup and showing how your idea works.
To get you started, to inspire your thinking and to give you a faster insight, check out this presentation on visualizing browser tabs by TabViz
To check out further details on the design challenge click here.
Written on 7th May 2009
6 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
One of the most exciting developments of Google Chrome, and more recently IE 8, is its multiprocessing technology allowing for each tab to include its own running processes.
Mozilla, according to its Wiki, is also moving in the same direction and looking to separate tabs into their own system processes. The move aims to “prvide better application UI responsiveness” and improve overall stability.
For the average tech head who generally tends to have 10+ tabs open at any one time, this is great news. It should mean less crashes, and as in Chrome, if there are any you should still have access to you other tabs to keep on doing what you were doing without the entire browser crashing.
Sadly, it’s going to be a while before we get our hands on a final version, probably not till 2010, but a “bootstrap” implementation that works with a single tab (not sessions support, no secure connections, either on Linux or Windows, unlikely to even based on Firefox) could be available by July.
The project, is coordinated by long time Mozillian, Benjamin Smedberg; and also integrated by Joe Drew, Jason Duell, Ben Turner, and Boris Zbarsky in the core team.
Written on 23rd January 2009
3 COMMENTS Srikanth AD, Web Designer, Search Engine Optimizer and Google Devotee
Firefox already comes with a smashing full list of keyboard shortcuts for mouseless browsing, but here is a firefox extension which takes mouseless browsing(MLB) to the next level.
Mouseless Browsing(MLB) enables you to browse the web solely with the keyboard. It’s principle is to add numbers with unique ids next to clickable elements on any web page. In order to navigate to a specific clickable portion like following a link or selecting a text-field of the page, you just need to type in the id number to activate the corresponding action.
When you enable this extension web pages appear like this,
This extension supports numeric as well as character ids. You can also
define for which elements ids should be shown (form element, links, pure image links, frames).
It’s a perfect extension to keep for almost every webpage except the ones which contain many elements or buttons close to each other like in the case of WYSIWYG web editor, MLB might disturb the page layout in such cases.
Only 5 days ago we told you that Firefox had a 20% market share. Yesterday the Mozilla Foundation announced that Firefox turned 4! Only 4? It feels so much more, well, mature? But it is true. On November 9, 2004 Mozilla launched Firefox to the world and since then it has grown into the second-most popular browser worldwide, after Internet Explorer. It is currently available in more than 45 languages and on all major Operation Systems including Windows, Mac OS and Linux. Here is some background information (From WikiPedia) on how it all started:
Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross began working on the Firefox project as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project. They believed the commercial requirements of Netscape’s sponsorship and developer-driven feature creep compromised the utility of the Mozilla browser.[9] To combat what they saw as the Mozilla Suite’ssoftware bloat, they created a stand-alone browser, with which they intended to replace the Mozilla Suite. On April 3, 2003, the Mozilla Organization announced that they planned to change their focus from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox and Thunderbird.[10]
The Firefox project has undergone several name changes. Originally titled Phoenix, it was renamed because of trademark issues with Phoenix Technologies. The replacement name, Firebird, provoked an intense response from the Firebird free database software project.[11][12][13] In response, the Mozilla Foundation stated that the browser should always bear the name Mozilla Firebird to avoid confusion with the database software. Continuing pressure from the database server’s development community forced another change; on February 9, 2004, Mozilla Firebird became Mozilla Firefox,[14] often referred to as simply Firefox. Mozilla prefers Firefox to be abbreviated as Fx or fx, though it is often abbreviated as FF.[15]
The Firefox project went through many versions before 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004. After a series of stability and security fixes, the Mozilla Foundation released its first major update, Firefox version 1.5, on November 29, 2005. On October 24, 2006, Mozilla released Firefox 2. This version includes updates to the tabbed browsing environment, the extensions manager, the GUI, and the find, search and software update engines; a new session restore feature; inline spell checking; and an anti-phishing feature which was implemented by Google as an extension,[16][17] and later merged into the program itself.[18] In December 2007, Firefox Live Chat was launched. It allows users to ask volunteers questions through a system powered by Jive Software, with guaranteed hours of operation and the possibility of help after hours.[19]
If you haven’t tried Firefox yet you might want to start today. Happy birthday Firefox!!
“It’s Official” , triumphs the Mozilla blog, “Congratulations to the Mozilla community for reaching this historic milestone”. According to Net Applications, Firefox surpassed 20% worldwide market share. During the week of October 5th, 20 percent of Internet users browsed with the open source browser.
Watch your back Safari
The Firefox browser might steal some market share from Safari, as Apple’s browser will soon lose its greatest advantage for male Mac users. As I mentioned earlier, a friend of mine once told me he uses Safari’s stealth mode for his adult needs. Well, it seems like he can stay within the Firefox environment for that now.
Firefox released a beta version of a Private Browsing feature. Users of Minefield, Mozilla’s test area for new browser innovations, can now activate the “porn mode”. When toggled, it deletes your Web history, user names, passwords, searches, and cookies and bins as soon as you close the window, “effectively making it appear that the session never existed” – writes Josh Lowensohn from Webware.
These are exciting times for Mozilla. While they’re busy developing a Firefox Mobile browser, the global software community also faces the competition of Chrome: Google’s browser in beta which will probably take the market by storm.
Paul Rouget
Thus Mozilla felt the urge to hire an evangelist for Europe. This approach has proven to be successful for them – with the Spread Firefox campaign as the ultimate example. It’s up to Paul Rouget to live up to these high standards in Europe.
Rouget is French and lives in Paris. He told ReadWriteWeb how he became an apostle for Mozilla: “Five years ago, during my first internship, my boss asked me to find a way to build a kiosk browser. It was my first experience with Firefox and XUL. It was the beginning of a love story between Mozilla technologies and me .”
Ever since then, Rouget has been organizing Mozilla events and helped companies and schools getting started with Mozilla products like Firefox and Thunderbird. Now he’ll be able to quit his job as Mozilla developer at Aliasource and focus on what he has been doing in the after work hours: preach the open source evangelism.
Written on 10th October 2008
3 COMMENTS Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Friday Flashbacks is a new article series we’re going to try and establish here on The Next Web blog, in which we look back at what happened in this week one year ago. The aim is to get some insight in what had us – “us” being tech bloggers in general – buzzing last year, and if all that noise was worth it or not.
(I was trying to make this a weekly series but skipped a few weeks. You don’t mind, do you?)
So where does last year’s buzz stand now?
October 8, 2007 – Loïc Le Meur launched his new startup, a video conversation platform dubbed Seesmic, with a review on TechCrunch. (Michael Arrington later disclosed he had personally invested in the company). The company is still going strong, even made an acquisition last April with Twhirl and recently raised another $6 million round co-led by Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners, where Le Meur is a Partner. Competitors are jumping onto the scene nowadays, examples given 12seconds, Phreadz and TokBox.
October 9, 2007 – Google acquiredJaiku, the Finland-based mobile IM and presence company. The terms of the acquisition were never disclosed. Jaiku didn’t continue to grow as much as Twitter did in terms of users and traffic, and the only posts that are being published on the Jaiku blog since the acquisition seem to be about maintenances and outages. The service was ported to the Google App Engine and moved to the search engine’s infrastructure, and they made invitations unlimited. That’s about it. As far as I’m concerned, Jaiku fell off the grid and unless Google has some major plans with it, I suspect it won’t make any headlines anymore.
October 10, 2007 – Mozilla announced they were serious about building a mobile browser. The project was given the codename “Fennec” and is still under development. Nobody really knows when Mozilla plans to release a beta version. Anyway, Fennec will face competition with IE Mobile, the iPhone and Android browser, Opera Mobile / Mini, SkyFire, etc., but based on the prototype concepts introduced last June, it looks like it might just be a worthy one.
In case you haven’t noticed yet, the early adopters are moving their workspace from the desktop to the browser. Sure, we all use Google Docs once in a while. But these guys have everything on-line, even their hard disk. Erwin Blom, a Dutch new media pioneer who brought the ‘2.0′in public broadcastings’ web, explains on his blog why he has his tools and documents on the web:
Always available, wherever he is, even in his favorite bar.
Always up to date. You don’t have to install or update, the owners of the web applications will deal with that.
Professional back-ups. Blom admits he’s too unorganized to back-up his stuff, so why not let the professionals take care of that important job?
Sharing & publishing, he wants to be able to publish his Twitterposts and blog articles from whatever place.
Cooperating, Blom calls it a ‘major advantage’ that you can work on documents together, without being in the same place.
Mobile, more and more of those web applications offer user friendly interfaces on mobile phones.
In the field of web applications, Google is dominating. They simply offer rather good services, that work together like a charm. Their greatest force though, is the address book. Whether you want to share a Google Doc, invite somebody for an appointment or tip a good article from a feed, all your contacts are easily available for your sharing-needs.
Google’s hegemony must be quite frustrating for browsers. Since the browsers are becoming more and more important, yet they don’t seem gain a lot of web applications users. With the shift to web applications, the number of users of software like Apple Mail, iCal and Outlook is drastically lowering. The browsers however, are getting used more. Need some more convincing material? Have a look at the most used software page of our friends from Wakoopa. Since the browsers are THE tools that matter now, it’s about time they show up to claim their part of the web applications pie.
For instance, why on earth is there a service like del.icio.us? Bookmarking was a browser’s thing. Yet by creating the social factor, services like del.icio.us conquered that part of the market. Will the browsers ever be able to take it back?
That’s where Mozilla comes into play. They’ve just launched a prototype of Weave. The 0.1 version offers Firefox users the possibility to save browser related info, such as bookmarks, surf history and passwords and synchronize this info with different computers and mobile devices. The data is encrypted and saved on the servers of Mozilla, and can be accessed from computers all over the world.
Hello Google! Somebody wants compete with Browser Sync! And you, Delicious! You’re warned as well: in the 0.2 version – expected early 2008 – Weave will also go social.
Are these the first steps of a browser that wants to conquer with web applications, especially Google? Will the next step be a smashing good rss reader? Or a spectacular user friendly text processor? It looks like a mission impossible, yet users love the brand Firefox, and isn’t everybody a little afraid of Google, considering the privacy issues? And what if Microsoft joins the battle?
Mozila versus Google, hopefully it’s just the beginning.
Written on 19th May 2009
1 COMMENT 
The Mozilla Labs Design Challenge Summer ’09 is looking for creative solutions to reinvent browser tabs.
Written on 7th May 2009
One of the most exciting developments of Google Chrome, and more recently IE 8, is its multiprocessing technology allowing for each tab to include its own running processes.
Written on 10th November 2008
Written on 5th November 2008
Written on 10th October 2008
In case you haven’t noticed yet, the early adopters are moving their workspace from the desktop to the browser. Sure, we all use Google Docs once in a while. But these guys have everything on-line, even their hard disk. 
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
