Archive for July, 2015
Firefox OS Spinoff With 40+ Mozilla Employees Receives A $100 Million Boost
Mozilla must be kicking themselves in the foot.
Back in May, Chris Beard, the CEO of Mozilla, has announced plans to drop the $25 version of Firefox OS and overhaul the overall plans for the mobile operating system.
Shortly afterwards, a couple of execs have left the company, including the president, Li Gong, who have since formed a new startup codenamed “Gone Fishing”, to create a new mobile solution, which is partially based on the Firefox OS itself. Since then, more than 40 former Mozilla employees have also joined the company as well as people from other sources.
Now, it looks like the very same startup (Acadine Techologies), has received a $100 million investment from China’s Tsinghua Unigroup, with a goal to create a better mobile operating system called H5OS, which is set to target tablets, smartphones and wearable devices.
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Vivaldi Browser Hits Technical Preview 4
If the previous Vivaldi release was still to raw for you then here comes the fourth technical preview, which promises to bring a boatload of bug fixes as well as new features.
Among new features there are also new ways to customize it, with developers claiming that you can have more than 155 million unique user interface combinations, including: start page customizations, UI zoom, more Speed Dial options, Light as well as Dark user interface and a new mode with no UI at all (Ctrl+F11).
In addition to that, there is a new settings menu, gestures with a touchpad (using alt key), tab switching with mouse wheel, welcome performance improvements, better bookmark management, and much more.
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Microsoft: Edge Is Blazing Fast
With the announcement of Windows 10 RTM, the software giant has also revealed more details about some of the OS specifics and their software.
One of such mentions was about Microsoft Edge, which has also been promoted to the stable build. If you were reading FavBrowser for quite some time, then you should remember that we also published early Edge benchmarks where it dominated everyone (including Google Chrome) on their own benchmarks.
In case you are wondering if these claims are still valid then good news, as Microsoft has now shared that Edge is still #1 on WebKit’s Sunspider, Google’s Octane and Apple’s JetStream benchmarks. By how much exactly?
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June, 2015 Mobile Market Share: Safari, Google Chrome – Up, Android Browser, Opera Mini, Internet Explorer – Down
Just like every month, it’s time to reveal the mobile market share data for June from the NetApplications.
After quite a few months of drops, Safari is ready to fight back and is up by 1.99 point, from 39.67% to 41.66%.
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Mozilla Kills Adobe Flash On Firefox, Disables It By Default
Now here is an interesting piece of news for all the tech (aka Flash hating) enthusiasts out there.
Unless you have been disconnected from the Internet for the last week or so, then the Hacking Team / Adobe Flash exploit leaks should be pretty known to you. Now, according to various reports, people are starting to see Flash disabled by default with the following pop-up displayed at the top of the page:
Firefox has prevent the unsafe plugin “Adobe Flash” from running on www.domain.com.
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Palemoon To “Dump” Gecko
While press screams doom and gloom for Firefox, here’s a real explanation.
Not so long time ago developers behind Palemoon, a web browser based on Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine, have announced that they will be switching away from Mozilla’s to their own rendering engine called Goanna.
Now, before you start thinking about the PR disaster for Mozilla, it does not take rocket science to figure out that nothing actually changes. How so? Here’s a story in 60 seconds or less:
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Firefox For Windows 10 UI Revealed
Shows no substantial changes yet, as expected.
As we all await for the promised Firefox build for Windows 10, Mozilla has published their very first concept on what could the first release look like.
If you were expecting any major changes then be prepared for a disappointment as it’s pretty similar to the native Windows 8 skin, at least for now.
Could you have guessed which one is which?
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Recent Leak Reveals New Adobe Flash Exploit
And everyone was vulnerable.
It seems like Flash has more security holes than the Swiss cheese and thanks to a recent leak, every single one of computers running it were vulnerable to a new attack.
The news come after the breach of the “Hacking Team”, an Italian spyware manufacturer, which have had clients (mostly governments) from all over the world. As it turns out, in more than 400 gigabytes of published data, there was a yet unknown Flash vulnerability, which too got revealed and allowed anyone (with some tech knowledge) to exploit computers running Adobe Flash 18.0.0.194 or earlier.
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Mozilla Abandons The 18 Week Firefox Release Schedule
Promises to ship fixes to users in minutes.
With Microsoft finishing Windows 10 later this week and releasing it globally at the end of this month, it looks like Mozilla is too working hard on a Windows 10 specific version of Firefox, which (according to them) is coming out soon.
What is more interesting however is the fact that the company has decided to abandon its “18-week development” plan and instead, focus on shortening the time it takes for new Firefox features to reach the users. On a message board, Mozilla’s Dave Camp has stated that “today [code deployment] isn’t done on an 18-week cycle. We think there are big wins to be had in shortening the time that new features reaches users. Critical fixes should ship to users in minutes, not days.”
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June, 2015 Desktop Market Share: Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera – Up, Internet Explorer – Down
It’s getting hot out there but the web browser news must go on, and today we look at the latest market share data from the NetApplications.
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