Can Thunderbird ride the Firefox wave?
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The Mozilla Foundation is back at it. Following its recent launch of its Firefox 1.0 browser that ignited heavy interest, the organization this week launched the Thunderbird open-source e-mail client.
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ezberry writes &quot;After releasing version 1.0 of Firefox, what&#39;s ahead for the Mozilla Foundation and the venerable Firefox browser?
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The Mozilla Foundation announced the release version of its new email client, Thunderbird today. Roughly a month after the Mozilla Foundation made history by launching the first mass market open source browser
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Web surfing has belonged almost exclusively to Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer ever since it buried Netscape's pioneering browser. That doesn't seem to have bothered the developers of the Mozilla Firefox, a feisty new kid on the block that's worth a serious look.
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Mozilla&#39;s new &quot;Lightning&quot; project will integrate Mozilla&#39;s calendar application, Sunbird, with its Thunderbird e-mail application, creating an application not unlike Microsoft Outlook.
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The Mozilla Foundation has released version 1.0 of its Thunderbird open source email client, following up on the successful recent launch of its Firefox web browser, and delivering new anti-spam and anti-virus technology to the desktop.
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Mozilla has been quietly offering live Web support for the Firefox Web browser since the beginning of the year. It is one of the open-source group's experiments in improving the user experience and woo more of them from Microsoft Corp.'s still-dominant Internet Explorer.True to its open-source heritage, Firefox Live Chat is a valiant, all-volunteer effort. But the service remains in beta, buggy, http://blog.mozilla.com/sumo/2008/02/11/minutes-of-weekly-meeting-211/ and only available to users several hours a day during U.S. working hours."The hours of operation are currently very conservative," acknowledged David Tenser, who runs Mozilla's support programs, in an e-mail.Rivaling Linux itself as most popular open-source project, Firefox has never had trouble attracting volunteers. More than 1,000 people freely contribute code, 20,000 test pre-beta versions of Firefox every night and another 500,000 test the actual betas.But for the unglamorous job of chat-based technical support, Tenser has only been able to recruit about 20 volunteers. And during the actual 3-4 hour sessions, only about 3-5 of them are actually available answering users' questions."What we really need is more exposure so people can both discover how powerful this service is to users, as well as how fun it is to participate," wrote Tenser.Officially introduced in late 2004, Firefox has been downloaded more than 400 million times. New Mozilla CEO John Lilly claims there are 150 million active users, including 50 million people that use Firefox every day.Firefox is used by almost a third of European Net surfers, though global surveys show Firefox used by about one-sixth of Internet users, with IE still holding three-fourths of the market.Still, Mozilla would like to improve its retention rate, which it estimated several months ago to be less than 30 percent.Mozilla already offers several other forms of user support. Those include forums and newsgroups where users can post questions, knowledge base (KB) articles they can read at their leisure, and even an Internet Relay Channel (IRC) channel aimed at developers and more advanced users needing live support.As of early February, Live Chat volunteers had answered more than 4,100 chat requests, or about 100 a day, Tenser said. Most questions have been from users who had been unable to connect to the Web, usually due to firewall issues, Tenser said, or users having problems related to Firefox extensions.This reporter tried out Live Chat. The first time, no volunteers were available during the scheduled time. The second time, a tech support volunteer offered a fairly general fix to one problem (remove extensions one at a time to see which one was causing AJAX-heavy sites to render improperly), while suggesting I wait for Firefox 3 to fix another (occasionally missing passwords).Mozilla released its third beta for Firefox 3 in early February. The Mountain View, Calif. group is expected to release a final version of Firefox 3 sometime in 2008.Testers say that beta versions of Firefox 3 are faster and use less memory, have user interface improvements, and better security.Microsoft offers similar free and paid support offerings for Internet Explorer users through its support.microsoft.com Web site.IE users who have a retail copy of Windows XP or Vista are eligible for either 2 phone calls or live chats (XP), or 90 days worth of unlimited phone and chat support (Vista), according to a spokesman. After that, tech support calls or chat sessions cost $59 per incident.Mozilla has no plans to charge for Live Chat. Nor does it plan to make it part of a formal support program, something that some large companies have said they would need before they could consider switching from IE to Firefox.Tenser said volunteers do get questions from IT pros."They tend to ask about how to make changes to more than one machine without having to go in and make the changes via the user interface, or about locking down the preferences so users can't make changes," he wrote.
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Mozilla has pushed to users minor upgrades to both Firefox and the Thunderbird e-mail client, with both including seven security patches each and improvements to product stability.
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(InfoWorld) - Mozilla patched its flagship Firefox browser Thursday with fixes for six vulnerabilities, one of which was stamped "critical" by the open-source developer. This was the third time Mozilla has updated Firefox in 2007. The updates bring the current browser to Version 2.0.0.4 and the 2005 edition to 1.5.0.12. MFSA 2007-12, the most serious of the six, patched 30 separate memory corruption bugs in the browser layout and JavaScript engines. Even Mozilla seemed unsure of their impact. "Some of these crashes showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances, and we presume that with enough effort, at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code," the advisory read. Mozilla warned Thunderbird and SeaMonkey that their e-mail software, which shares Firefox's layout engine, may be vulnerable to these bugs as well. The developers recommend that users do not enable JavaScript in Thunderbird or the mail portion of SeaMonkey. The updates also fix a pop-up bug that could be used to mask parts of the browser, such as the address bar; a cross-site scripting vulnerability; a problem with how the browsers handle cookies; and a flaw that could let attackers crash Firefox using its autocomplete feature. Firefox 2.0.0.4 can be downloaded from the Mozilla Web site for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux; Firefox 1.5.0.12, meanwhile, is available from a different page. Current users can also update using the Check for Updates command in the help menu. Mozilla also reiterated that Thursday's patches would be Firefox 1.5's last and said that an update to Firefox 2.0.0.4 would be offered to its users "over the coming weeks." Although Firefox ended 2006 on an upbeat security note according to Symantec -- the anti-virus vendor tallied 40 patches in the last six months of the year, 26 percent fewer than the 54 released for rival browser Internet Explorer -- so far this year, Mozilla has addressed more than twice as many vulnerabilities as IE. In the first five months of 2007, 22 bugs in Firefox have been patched, nine of which were pegged as critical. Microsoft has fixed only eight in IE; seven were labeled critical.
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Mozilla Firefox has features and extensions that go far beyond what you get with Internet Explorer.  Here's how to turbocharge the browser to enhance your online experience.
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Q:I am now happily using Mozilla Firefox for Web browsing instead of Microsoft Internet Explorer. Now I wonder whether I should also switch to Mozilla&#39;s free e-mail program.
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Mike told me it would be okay to use Firefox 3 beta on the Mac. So I am. So far so good.  Firefox 2 was starting to hang every five minutes. But one of my critical plugins doesn't work in Firefox 3. Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh. Software sucks.&trade;
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The free Thunderbird e-mail client from Mozilla, which complements the group's Firefox browser, combines advanced e-mail sorting functions, first-rate spam filters and lightning-fast performance.
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MozSource, the independent company that operates the Mozilla Store and the Netscape Store, has announced the launch of its new high-quality, affordable technical support service for Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird and Mozilla 1.7.
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Mozilla's next iteration of its Firefox browser was supposed to be released in beta this month. That hasn't happened, but you can still check it out in its alpha phase.
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(InfoWorld) - If the Firefox browser were a car, it would be in the garage right now being souped up by an anxious group of gearheads. When Firefox 3.0 is released later this year, the open-source browser is likely to contain a host of new features, including offline support for Web applications and new bookmark and search features. Mozilla released the second alpha version of Firefox 3.0 earlier this month. While the final feature set hasn't been determined, Firefox 3.0 will also contain elements for its 4.0 release and beyond, said Mike Schroepfer, vice president for engineering for Mozilla, during a stop in London on Tuesday. The browser is due out in the second half of the year. "What we're trying to do with all of these things is lay the foundation," Schroepfer said. Perhaps most exciting could be Firefox's ability to support writing an e-mail in, for example, Gmail while offline, with the data sent later when a user is connected to the Internet again. Ultimately, Mozilla engineers are aiming for an integration between the browser and Web-based services that is as smooth-running as a desktop application, Schroepfer said. So far, engineers have made Firefox work with Zimbra, an open-source e-mail, messaging, and VoIP application. With a bit of code from GoogleÂ and Microsoft, it would be possible to integrate with Gmail and Hotmail and other e-mail services. To do offline support, engineers have overcome the hurdle of how to store data locally on the computer, Schroepfer said. The feature will make it into Firefox 3.0, although the user interface is still under development, he said. Other changes could come to the bookmarks and history features,Â which have seen relatively little innovation, he said. Mozilla would like to create a function where bookmarks could be automatically sorted based on popularity and frequency rather than the static presentation now. Firefox 3.0 will also have a small, embedded database -- SQL Lite -- that will eventually be used for full-text indexing of the browser's "history." Users could search for images and text and see the cached page. The feature, however, may not make it into the 3.0 release, he said. "The advantage of the database is that we can search your cache," Schroepfer said. Most importantly, Firefox has to be fast and standards-compliant, he said. Some users have complained about Firefox sucking up processing power because of add-ons or extensions, a popular aspect of Firefox where small programs can be downloaded into the browser to add new functions. But extensions sometimes tax system resources, in part because it's often part-time hobbyists doing the coding, Schroepfer said. Mozilla will soon set up a shared library of tested code that extension writers can download and use, Schroepfer said. Mozilla also relaunched its extension site, cutting back on the number of extensions listed so first-time users don't overload their browsers and dampen their experience. In a few weeks, discussion forums will also be set up for developers to exchange feedback as code writers sometimes don't know of the problems, he said. Firefox 4.0 will support the JavaScript 2 language, now under development in part by Mozilla'sÂ CTO Brendan Eich and the ECMA International standards body, Schroepfer said. The idea behind the JavaScript revamp is to make high-performance Web applications easier to write and assemble for people with less coding expertise, he said. "It's less about making it possible and more about making it easy," Schroepfer said. Â
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The latest beta release of the next Mozilla Firefox browser is unleashed. Read our review. Plus: Having trouble finding a Firefox 2 download? We've got links. In Monkey Bites.