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11.10.11

Links 10/11/2011: Ask Fedora, Thunderbird 8

Posted in News Roundup at 6:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 8 released with integrated Twitter search, other improvements
      • Boot to Gecko open web-based mobile OS being tested by Mozilla

        With Firefox only available for Android and Maemo, Mozilla hasn’t made many inroads on the mobile front, but that doesn’t mean it’s sitting still. The open source organization has been working on a project called Boot to Gecko, or B2G, with the goal of building a standalone OS allowing web developers to build apps that are equal “in every way” to native apps built for iOS, Android, or Windows Phone. To that end, B2G is creating new web APIs that safely expose capabilities like the phone, camera, Bluetooth, and SMS to web pages and applications. The goal is to boot the OS on an Android-compatible device, as well as port or build new apps.

      • Mozilla Firefox Adds Twitter Search and New Features that Make Web Browsing Easier
      • Firefox 8 arrives today to leave unwanted add-ons out

        Mozilla is releasing a major update for Firefox (Firefox 8) today, so let’s give a look at what we are getting in this release cycle.

        Some releases ago, Firefox introduced a feature so that when you are restoring a previous Firefox session, the current tab is loaded first while the others are loaded afterwards in the background or as soon as you switch to another. If this is not the behavior you want, there is now an option in the Options (Preferences) window, to load all tabs at once as before.

      • Thunderbird 8 lands with Lightning calendar

        Thunderbird 8, made available for download on Tuesday, is built using the Gecko 8 browser engine used in Firefox 8, also released the same day. Notably, the new version of the email software is accompanied by Lightning 1.0. The add-on, which has been under development at Mozilla for years, gives Thunderbird a calendar module.

      • Mozilla’s Brendan Eich on the Birth of Firefox

        A couple of weeks ago I posted the first part of an interview with Brendan Eich, who is Mozilla’s CTO. That covered the early years of browsers at Netscape, and the origin of Mozilla. Somewhat belatedly, here’s the second part of that interview, which picks up the story at the beginning of this millennium, and reveals the complex sequence of events that led to the creation of Mozilla Firefox.

        One of the key people in this tale is Dave Hyatt, the main architect of tabbed browsing at Mozilla, and now at Apple. Eich explains: “he was getting fed up with Netscape management.” Perhaps as a result of that frustration, he was also writing new browsers, one of which became the popular Mac OS X browser Camino.

        “Dave quit Netscape to go to Apple,” Eich recalls. “This was a real feather in Apple’s cap – Hyatt knew all about Web compatibility – the team at Apple was very talented, but they didn’t know about Web compatibility. He wasn’t working on Mozilla at that point, except in his spare time. Inside Apple he was working on a fork of KHTML which led to the whole Webkit story.”

      • Firefox 3.6 Users to Get Nudged to Upgrade to 8 on Nov 17

        Firefox 8 has been officially released today as an upgrade from Firefox 7.0.1.

      • Firefox Turns 7, Releases a Polished Firefox 8 [REVIEW]

        It’s a big week for Mozilla, as Firefox celebrates its seventh birthday and Firefox 8 hits the interwebs.

        In recent years, Firefox has lost ground to browsers such as Google Chrome. Yet Firefox remains a significant and important part of the browsing landscape.

      • Download Official Firefox 8 and Thunderbird 8 for Linux

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The Darknet Project: netroots activists dream of global mesh network

      A group of Internet activists gathered last week in an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel to begin planning an ambitious project—they hope to overcome electronic surveillance and censorship by creating a whole new Internet. The group, which coordinates its efforts through the Reddit social networking site, calls its endeavor The Darknet Project (TDP).

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Flash is dead. Long live HTML5.

      Adobe’s love affair with its Flash format has come to an end. Oh sure, Adobe said they were just killing development on mobile browser Flash in favor of HTML5, but seriously, do you think, that they’ll keep working on Flash on the desktop for much longer? If you do, I have a nice, lightly-used bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you. No, the end of Flash is in sight and HTML5 is now the one true future for Internet video.

      In Adobe’s official announcement, Danny Winokur, Adobe’s VP and general manager of interactive development, wrote, “HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.”

    • It’s Official. Flash is Terminally Ill
    • Exclusive: Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5 (UPDATED)

Leftovers

  • Finance

    • Goldman Updates Mortgage Impact

      Goldman Sachs Group Inc. could face as much as $2.6 billion in legal losses, largely on mortgage-related lawsuits and probes, the securities firm said in a regulatory filing Wednesday.

      New York-based Goldman also reported trading losses on 21 days in the third quarter, a period in which Goldman posted just its second quarterly loss in a dozen years as a public company. That was its highest number since the bank’s fiscal fourth quarter in 2008, which saw the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Goldman’s previous quarterly loss.

  • Censorship

  • Civil Rights

    • What’s the justification for warrantless access to customer data in “lawful access”

      The Public Safety Minister and various police folks are arguing that telecom operators should have to hand over any and all of the following information without a warrant and without an underlying criminal investigation: name, address, telephone number and electronic mail address, Internet protocol address, mobile identification number, electronic serial number, local service provider identifier, international mobile equipment identity number, international mobile subscriber identity number and subscriber identity module card number that are associated with the subscriber’s service and equipment.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Unlicensed Wireless vs. Licensed Spectrum: Evidence from Market Adoption
    • Net Neutrality Enforcement Put to the Test

      The enforcement of Canada’s net neutrality rules, which govern how Internet providers manage their networks, was in the spotlight earlier this year when documents obtained under the Access to Information Act revealed virtually all major Canadian ISPs have been the target of complaints, but there have been few, if any, consequences arising from the complaints process.

      The documents painted a discouraging picture, with multiple complaints against Rogers Communications due to the throttling of online games going seemingly nowhere, while a complaint against satellite Internet provider Xplorenet languished for months until the Commission threatened to launch a public proceeding.

  • ACTA

    • FFII objects to secret INTA committee meeting on ACTA

      According to the agenda, the Committee on International Trade will discuss ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) behind closed doors on 23 November. [1] We object to this discussion being held behind closed doors. Since the publication of the ACTA text, discussions have to take place in public.

      ACTA’s predecessor, the TRIPS agreement, killed millions of people. 500 Million Europeans, and billions abroad, are entitled to full transparency.

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2 Comments

  1. anthony said,

    November 10, 2011 at 12:44 pm

    Gravatar

    New, authored March-April.

    http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111109/02574116691/barnes-noble-claims-that-microsoft-patent-shakedown-over-android-is-antitrust-violation.shtml

    Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
    November 10th, 2011 at 12:49 pm

    Thanks. I’ve worked on an article about this for 3 days.

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