Tag: Mozilla
Firefox 64-bit for Windows Now Available
Grab it now.
With the recent release of Firefox 43, Mozilla has finally introduced the stable 64-bit build for Windows users, something we have been waiting for almost a decade.
In case you forgot, Mozilla has abandoned the 64-bit builds back in 2012 due to the “significant negative feedback” only to change their minds afterwards.
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Mozilla Abandons Firefox OS, RIP
At first it was Thunderbird and now FFOS…
Mozilla, the company that is ran by the headless chickens, has announced that they will stop developing and selling Firefox OS smartphones.
Unveiled back in 2013, Firefox OS was supposed to flood the developing world with the low cost devices. After that strategy failed, they switched to the “higher end”, and after this strategy failed too, Mozilla completely abandoned the platform and it is now dead.
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Mozilla Launches “Focus by Firefox” for iOS
No, it does not work on Firefox for iOS.
Recently, Mozilla has announced that they will begin focusing on the core user experiences instead; so they have pretty much stopped developing Thunderbird and even ditched sponsored tiles as a result.
Now, the very same organization has just announced a new product: Focus by Firefox, a free content blocker for the Apple’s Safari users. How exactly does it help Mozilla to focus on the core Firefox user experiences? I am not sure that Mozilla knows that either.
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Mozilla to Cut Down On Sponsored Tiles
Now cares about the “core” experiences.
Remember when Mozilla started to experiment with the sponsored tiles, saying that it was for the better? Then, despite a lot of controversy, still decided to implement ads into Firefox?
Well, after the continuous decline in the market share, it looks like Mozilla might have finally realized that selling out its users is not exactly a formula for the success. The result? The recently made announcement, which puts an end to this. As stated by Darren Herman, “Advertising in Firefox could be a great business, but it isn’t the right business for us at this time because we want to focus on core experiences for our users.”
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Mozilla Does Not Believe in Thunderbird Anymore
Might spin it off.
Mitchell Baker, the exec chairwoman of Mozilla Organization, has recently published an open memo on the mozilla.governance forum, sharing her thoughts about Firefox and Thunderbird, its free email client.
As it turns out, Baker does not believe in Thunderbird anymore and now considers it akin to “paying a tax”, even though the active software development has pretty much stopped back in 2012.
So what’s going to happen with the Mozilla’s email client? According to Mitchell, “Thunderbird should would thrive best by separating itself from reliance on Mozilla development systems and in some cases, Mozilla technology,” which pretty much indicates what fans have had feared for years: Thunderbird is dead, unless new home is found.
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Yahoo! Loses All Its Market Share Gains
The search deal did not come to a rescue.
Last year, Google and Mozilla did not come extend the search agreement, and as a result, Yahoo! became the default search engine in Firefox.
While at first Yahoo! experienced a pretty healthy increase in its market share numbers (where even Google was concerned as it begged users to switch back), it looks like the gains did not hold. According to the most recent data, for October, Yahoo’s global usage share was actually at a new low, 7.6%, down from 10.2% (January 2015).
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Mozilla to Cut Some Firefox Features
Tab grouping and heave themes are the first to go.
As a part of Mozilla’s “Great or Dead” strategy, the open source organization has announced that they will be removing some of the rarely used Firefox features.
What are these features? First is tab grouping (aka Panorama), which was introduced with Firefox 4 and allowed users to organize related tabs into groups, and switch between them when needed. As explained by Firefox’ director of programming engineering, “Very few people chose to use it, so we are retiring it because the work required to maintain it is disproportionate to its popularity.”
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Download Firefox for iPhone and iPad
Yes, the wait is over.
Long time ago, when Firefox was still a pretty dominant web browser, Mozilla said that they see no point to release a half-baked version of Firefox for iOS that uses WebKit rather than Gecko. Fast forward to now and the open source organization is singing another song.
The result? Firefox for iOS is finally here and can be downloaded by anyone on iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. Yes, it uses WebKit, which makes it more of a FireFaux web browser, but Mozilla still hopes to get at least some of the users with key selling points like data sync between Firefox Desktop and Mobile, intuitive tab management, Private Browsing and flexible search.
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Firefox OS 2.5 Now Available on Android
In an interesting turn of events, Mozilla has announced the availability of Firefox OS 2.5, not only for the FfOS devices (as one might expect) but also for the developers on Android. Yes, this means that you can play with the latest OS build and test it as regular Android app. For obvious reasons, it requires downloading it directly from Mozilla rather than the Play Store.
As far as the feature set goes, you can now install Firefox OS add-ons, enjoy the private browsing experience and ability to pin web sites to your home screen as apps.
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Firefox is 11 Years Old
Now here is a milestone for you.
Eleven years ago, Mozilla has released Firefox 1.0, which later became one of the most popular web browsers in the world. Fast forward to now and Firefox is sitting at the version 42, with more features than ever but far less excitement than 4-5 years ago.
In any case, we wish Firefox a very happy birthday and hoping to see some fresh innovations (and not Chrome copying), which might lead to the legendary browser’s come back.
