Editors • About the Site • Comes vs. Microsoft • Using This Web Site • Site Archives • Credibility Index • OOXML • OpenDocument • Patents • Novell • News Digest • Site News • RSS

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.

Share this post: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Reddit
  • co.mments
  • DZone
  • email
  • Google Bookmarks
  • LinkedIn
  • NewsVine
  • Print
  • Technorati
  • TwitThis
  • Facebook

If you liked this post, consider subscribing to the RSS feed or join us now at the IRC channels.

Pages that cross-reference this one

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.

What Else is New

  1. An FSF That Rejects Its Founder Would Not Remain FSF As We Once Knew It

    It's important to keep the FSF focused on its goals; that won't be achieved by expelling those who insist on these goals

  2. Links 24/2/2020: Linux 5.6 RC3, Netrunner 20.01, Google Summer of Code 2020 Mentoring Organisations Announced

    Links for the day

  3. Alexandre Oliva's New Article About a Coup

    Some people try to tell me that the criticism I've got, inside the FSF and outside, since the Free Software Sept 11, are not about my being supportive of RMS, but about my making public statements referencing him at all.

  4. Debian Leadership Should Not be 'Shy' of Politics (and It's OK to Admit Palestinians Are Human Beings Too)

    The contemporary tendency to limit people's freedom of speech (e.g. permission to express political views) means that while people may find software freedom they will lose other essential freedoms

  5. New Series: Inside the Free Software Foundation (FSF)

    In the interest and motivation of exposing the true nature of things, Techrights will turn its attention to internal affairs at the higher echelons of the FSF, founded more than three and a half decades ago in MIT (where Stallman launched the GNU Project, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and a lot more foundational Free software)

  6. IRC Proceedings: Sunday, February 23, 2020

    IRC logs for Sunday, February 23, 2020

  7. Links 23/2/2020: PipeWire 0.3 and Osu!

    Links for the day

  8. FSF's Interim Co-President Alexandre Oliva on Being Cancelled

    It was reading this that I realized I’d been cancelled myself. In my case, I was painted misogynist and transphobic, and for a post in which I supported women but denounced a crowd of men twisting the feminist cause, that I share, to attack rms, as if he wasn’t a feminist himself; and in which I express curiosity as to what pronoun to use to refer to zero women to paint me as someone who disregards gender identities and their pronouns.

  9. Good People Need to Run for Free Software Foundation (FSF) Board Positions After an FSF Coup Threw in the Towel, Pushing Out the Founder

    "I have been hit, but not knocked out, and my campaign for free software is not over." --Richard Stallman, October 2019

  10. IRC Proceedings: Saturday, February 22, 2020

    IRC logs for Saturday, February 22, 2020

  11. Alexandre Oliva's Message About Cancel Culture at the FSF

    Being cancelled is no fun. In my case, it was for standing for a friend who got canceled for defending someone else from an accusation that was later proven false.

  12. Links 22/2/2020: Polish Government Increases GNU/Linux Use, Samza 1.3.1

    Links for the day

  13. Being Rich Does Not Imply Being Smart (Especially When One is Born Into Wealth)

    Presenting the 'genius' (college dropout, but that does not matter when the yardstick of wisdom is wealth alone), with his own predictions overlaid on top of his photo from the show of Bloomberg (another 'genius' whose supposed brilliance is measured using money alone)

  14. The Rise and Fall of Free Software

    "We simply need to make the movement less corporate, and more grassroots."

  15. Why You Should Adopt Debian 10, Not Vista 10 (Windows Vista With Microsoft's Latest Surveillance Add-ons)

    A little personal story and recommendation of Debian "Buster" (10) or Devuan (whose developers persist)

  16. Ethics by Exclusion

    It's the same old philosophical question; can excluding those who are perceived to be intolerant be seen as an act of tolerance?

  17. Even Worse Than Microsoft Inside the Board of the OSI

    The OSI has accepted people from companies that actively attack Software Freedom and there may be more on their way

  18. ZDNet Continues to Stuff Its 'Linux' Section With Proprietary Software of Microsoft

    The above is what the "Linux" section of ZDNet is going to look like throughout the weekend (and this is hardly unusual, either)

  19. IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 21, 2020

    IRC logs for Friday, February 21, 2020

  20. Links 21/2/2020: EasyOS 2.2.11 Released, Microsoft's Control of the Linux Foundation Increases and More Binary Blobs Arrive

    Links for the day

  21. IRC Proceedings: Thursday, February 20, 2020

    IRC logs for Thursday, February 20, 2020

  22. Video: LinuxWorld 1999, Torvalds and Stallman

    LinuxWorld 1999, Torvalds and Stallman

  23. GNU World Order is a Personal Sacrifice, LinuxWorld Just Business

    As the Linux Foundation shows, Linux is just business (and proprietary software) as usual, software patents included, whereas it’s GNU that continues the Free Software Movement’s battles

  24. Links 20/2/2020: Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU18, Mesa 20, VirtualBox 6.1.4

    Links for the day

  25. Open Source Did Not Win, It Was Assimilated to and by Proprietary Software

    Don’t fall for the whole “Open Source has won!” spiel; You know we’ve lost the battle (and were in effect gradually conquered) at OSI and elsewhere when those who speak for the OSI are Michael Cheng (Facebook), Max Sills (Google), and Chris Aniszczyk (Linux Foundation); they say “Open Source Under Attack” (FOSDEM talk) but their employers are the ones attacking and they downplay openwashing

  26. Former Microsoft Employees Don't Like Talking About Past and Present Microsoft Back Doors (Designed for Spy Agencies)

    In a typical Microsoftian fashion, once they cannot defend the illusion/delusion that Microsoft values security the 'Softers' run away and block any further debate

  27. Techrights Warns Against Impending Extradition Efforts (Passage of Julian Assange to His Death in the United States)

    Imprisonment of journalists who are effective at exposing crimes (of the powerful, not petty crimes) must never be condoned

  28. Team UPC: Many Mouths and No Ears

    The mental condition of Team UPC gets more worrisome by the week

  29. Team UPC Insults Judges Because the UPC is Dead and UPC Lobbyists Have Nothing Left to Lose

    More judge-shaming tactics are in the mix; Team UPC seems to feel like there's nothing left to lose as the UPC is already dead (hope itself is next to die)

  30. IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, February 19, 2020

    IRC logs for Wednesday, February 19, 2020

RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channel: Come and chat with us in real time

Recent Posts