Mozilla Interfaces to Get 'Humanized,' Developer Says
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Mozilla should soon be experimenting with some novel user-interface technologies for its browser and other products, according to a UI developer that joined Mozilla this week from startup company Humanized.
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In a link from Dynamically Typed today, there's a new presentation about Creating Rich Applications with Mozilla, XUL, and AMP Technology (Mozilla-based browser needed to view).
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Mozilla should soon be experimenting with some novel user-interface technologies for its browser and other products, according to a UI developer that&#160;joined Mozilla this week from startup company Humanized.Aza Raskin, who until Wednesday was president of Humanized, a five-person startup in Chicago, is now user experience lead for the Mozilla Labs team, he said Thursday. He will be working on technology to let people &quot;do anything you want to do, anywhere, anytime on your computer,&quot; he said.Mozilla announced Wednesday that it had hired three of the principals from Humanized, which is known for its innovative work with the Enso project to create more intuitive user interfaces. Mozilla did not identify the people it hired, and Raskin was hesitant at first to say which of his colleagues had joined him at Mozilla. Eventually he acknowledged that Humanized&#39;s Jono DiCarlo and Atul Varma also have joined the company known for its Firefox browser.Enso user-interface software was designed to make it easier to perform daily tasks that require the use of multiple applications or functions. The software runs in the background and allows users to type in simple commands to access applications, instead of leaving the window or application they are in to use another one.For example, if a user wants to open Firefox from the current screen, instead of having to find the Firefox icon or go to the Start menu in Windows, Firefox can be opened by pressing the Caps Lock key and typing &quot;open firefox.&quot; Performing calculations and acquiring word definitions can be executed in a similar way from whichever window the user is in at the time.&quot;Those ideas need to be explored at Mozilla,&quot; Raskin said, though &quot;it&#39;s unclear yet what form that will take.&quot;He and his Humanized colleagues were attracted to Mozilla because the company &quot;has a lot of vision&quot; to extend the Web beyond the browser, he said. The Firefox browser remains the company&#39;s primary product for now, however, although it also offers the Thunderbird open-source e-mail client.Raskin said that many advances on the Web, in terms of online services and mashups, have been designed with the developer in mind, and because of that they run the risk of making the browser a mere delivery vehicle for streaming applications -- much like what the desktop has become. He aims to use technology and ideas from the Enso project to add more human interaction not just to the browser, but to anything people do on the Web itself.&quot;I want the power of mashups not in the hands of the developer but in the hands of end-users -- in the hands of your grandmothers and your teen-aged son,&quot; he said. &quot;So you really can be writing an e-mail and say, &#39;Now I want a map in there.&#39; Things like that -- a place where you can actually start having a conversation with your computer.&quot;Raskin said that most people, whether they know it or not, are captive to their computer -- they do their work on it or use it only in the way the computer allows, and have very little control over that interaction. The idea behind Humanized, and now the work Raskin and his colleagues will do at Mozilla, is to change that for everyone, not just people who know their way around a computer.Mozilla did not actually acquire Humanized, and Raskin said its Web site will be up for some time, but the company is effectively now part of Mozilla. He and his colleagues are working out which pieces of the Enso project will be relevant to their work at Mozilla, he said. Raskin posted on his blog about his new position.Of the remaining Humanized employees -- systems architect Scott Robbin and Treasurer Andrew Wilson -- only Robbin&#39;s next move is clear for now. Raskin said Robbin is running the company&#39;s music-search-engine project, Songza.&#160;
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Mozilla Corp.'s Web site features mock-ups of Places, one of the most-anticipated new features in the upcoming Firefox 3.0.
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Mozilla gets ready to launch what may become one of the most significant steps in Internet browser innovations since the release of the Internet Explorer 4.0.
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Mozilla has hired three of the five top employees at Humanized, a small company known for its innovative work to provide more intuitive user interfaces, but will not reveal their identities.Mozilla confirmed the hirings through its public relations firm on Wednesday, but would not disclose their names. On the Humanized Web site, only five people are listed on the company&#39;s &quot;Who We Are&quot; page: developer Jono DiCarlo, President Aza Raskin, web and systems architect Scott Robbin, Vice President Atul Varma, and Treasurer Andrew Wilson.In a statement attributed to CEO John Lily, Mozilla said that the deal bringing the three to the company is not an acquisition and no intellectual property is changing hands. The Humanized recruits joined the Mozilla Labs team on Wednesday and will be working on the&#160;Firefox browser&#160;as well as other projects in the labs, he said. Eventually, the three will start blogging and reveal their identities and the nature of their work at the company, a representative from Mozilla&#39;s PR firm added.Both companies are intentionally close-mouthed about the exact nature of the exchange between them. Reached at the Humanized Chicago office, Wilson, who also does system architecture and programming work, said he&#39;s not at liberty to discuss the specifics of the deal or say who exactly is moving to Mozilla.However, he offered that &quot;all of us will remain in Chicago for the next two months to make the transition happen.&quot; He confirmed that Humanized has not actually been purchased, so it&#39;s unclear exactly what that transition entails and what the fate of the company&#39;s Enso project is, or how it might fit into Mozilla&#39;s plans.Enso user-interface software is available free and, according to information on the company&#39;s Web site, was designed to make it easier to perform daily tasks that require the use of various applications or functions.Enso runs in the desktop background and allows users to type in simple commands to access applications instead of leaving the window or application they are in to go to another one. For example, if a user wants to open Firefox from the current screen, instead of having to find the Firefox icon or go to the Start menu in Windows, Firefox can be opened by holding down the Caps Lock key and typing in &quot;open firefox.&quot; Performing calculations and acquiring word definitions also can be executed in a similar way from within the user&#39;s immediate screen view.Humanized&#39;s Raskin is handling inquiries about specifics, Wilson said, but Raskin did not return an e-mail requesting comment Wednesday.Aside from the Firefox browser, Mozilla also has an open source e-mail client,&#160;Thunderbird. But the browser is more popular and has been more influential in the industry, igniting the first spark of competition in many years against Microsoft&#39;s Internet Explorer browser when it was launched in November 2004.No matter who from Humanized has joined Mozilla, it&#39;s apparent the company is getting some brilliant young minds to help them galvanize any future UI innovations the company may be plotting. If their Web-site bios are any indication, Humanized is run by wunderkinds. DiCarlo, for instance, graduated from college at the age of 17 with a degree in physics before earning another degree in computer science from the University of Chicago, while co-founder Raskin started the company when he was 21 after co-authoring a physics textbook at 19.
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Mozilla has released alpha 8 of its Firefox 3.0 Web browser, unveiling for the first time to users several security features it's talked up for months.
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Mozilla wants Web application developers and its own testing community to get their hands on Gran Paradiso Alpha 1.
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Firefox continues to bite into Internet Explorer's market share. But users and analysts say that Mozilla hasn't changed its laissez-faire attitude about trying to get IT managers to formally adopt the open-source browser.
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(InfoWorld) - Mozilla has hit an early milestone on the road to the next version of its open-source browser, but the final product is still a year away, developers say. The Mozilla team released its first alpha release of Firefox 3.0 Friday, giving Firefox and Web application developers an early look at the next-generation browser. This release is not intended for regular users, not even those who like to play around with early versions of the product, Mozilla said. The software, code-named Gran Paradiso, comes justÂ six weeks after Mozilla shipped version 2.0 of the browser, but it has already been more than a year in development, according to Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering. The final version of Firefox 3.0 is expected to be released by the end of 2007. Developers hope that it will be a major step toward making Web applications indistinguishable from programs that are installed on the desktop, Schroepfer said. Gran Paradiso features better support for a number of graphics standards, such as the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) language and the Canvas specification, Schroepfer said. "These are fairly major architectural changes to enable us to improve performance." Firefox 3.0 also supports the Cairo graphics library, which aims to make Web pages look the same whether they are being printed or viewed on a Windows PC, a Macintosh or small-screen device. The Firefox 3.0 plan calls for browsing, bookmarking and privacy enhancements to be built into the browser, but Schroepfer said there is still a lot of time to work out new features. "It's a bit early to be talking about the user-facing features," he said. Â
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Mozilla's latest pre-release version of its browser remains buggy, but performance enhancements give us reason to get excited. In Monkey Bites.
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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's Mike Shaver tells us how the redesign of Firefox's community site will better serve its web tinkerers. Wired News Q&A by Michael Calore.
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Mozilla is working on a new application called 'Prism' which will help to blur the line further between applications for the web and the desktop.
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For those who have been technology enthusiasts for years, there is a familiar war brewing in the technology industry. Mozilla, an open-source community of developers and testers that was started by Netscape
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(InfoWorld) - The Mozilla Foundation has published a fix for a "critical" JavaScript vulnerability in the Firefox browser and the SeaMonkey application suite. The fix, released Monday, targets Firefox versions 2.0.0.2 and 1.5.0.10, as well as SeaMonkey versions 1.1.1 and 1.0.8. An earlier fix for a JavaScript problem allowed scripts from Web content to execute arbitrary code, the Mozilla Foundation said in a security update. The vulnerability allowed uniform resource identifiers in image tags to be executed even if JavaScript was disabled in the program preferences, Mozilla said. Disabling JavaScript does not protect against the flaw, so the foundation recommended that users upgrade the applications to new versions. Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client was not affected by the vulnerability, it said. The fix comes on the heels ofÂ criticism from independent security researcher Michael Zalewski regarding Firefox vulnerabilities, including spoofing and phising threats aimed at the newly released Firefox version 2.0.0.2. Mozilla CSO Window SnyderÂ saidÂ she is seeing more customer feedback regarding browser security and hopes thatÂ more independent researchers and customer feedback will help the company patch flaws more quickly. "The browser is one of most critical pieces of software on the computer in terms of something attackers are going after," Snyder said. "Attacks are constantly changing and every software developer needs to recognize new threats as they emerge, but that's nothing new, we've always considered security to be a top priority." Matt Hines, a senior writer at InfoWorld, contributed to this report
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The latest beta of Mozilla's browser has been up and running for