Posts Tagged ‘Mozilla’

French tax authorities moving 130000 PCs to Thunderbird

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Posted 30 Oct 2009 — by Arun
Category News

According to OSOR.EU,

All 130,000 desktop PCs at the Directorate General of Public Finance (DGPF) in Paris are to be switched to using the open source Mozilla Thunderbird email client, its Lightning calendar and the open source groupware application OBM.

The French tax authority DGPF is the result of a merger begun in 2007 of the Directorate General of Taxes (DGI) and the Directorate General of Public Accountancy (DGCP). Each uses their own email system, IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook and the integration of the two departments prompted a move to new email and groupware software.

The tax authority selected Thunderbird for reasons of cost and management of licenses.

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Mozilla Weave – Nothing happens

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Posted 16 Sep 2009 — by Arun
Category Technology

I installed Mozilla Weave in Firefox 3.5.x couple of weeks back (Click here to see what Weave is). I created an account and signed in. When I click on the Sync Now option, I get a pop up window saying Starting Sync Engine with a red circle and nothing happens (screenshot below). Nothing gets synced. I’m not sure if it’s a bug in Weave or something I did or didn’t do.

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Mozilla Firefox 3.5 released

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Posted 30 Jun 2009 — by Arun
Category Announcement

Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5 today. Here are some of the new features in Firefox 3.5, according to Mozilla:

  • Performance. Firefox 3.5 includes the powerful new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which delivers unprecedented performance with today’s complex Web applications. Firefox 3.5 is more than two times faster than Firefox 3 and ten times faster than Firefox 2.
  • Open Video and Audio. Enjoy video and audio content from within your browser, without the need for plugins.
  • Privacy Controls. Firefox 3.5 includes features designed to protect your privacy online and provide greater control over your personal data. While using the new Private Browsing mode in Firefox 3.5, nothing you encounter on the Web will be stored from that moment on during your browsing session. Unique to Firefox 3.5, the new Forget this Site feature can remove every trace of a site from your browser.
  • Location Aware Browsing. Location Aware Browsing saves you time by allowing websites to ask you where you are located. If you choose to share your location with a website, it can use that information to find nearby points of interest and return additional, useful data like maps of your area. It’s all optional – Firefox doesn’t share your location without your permission.

To learn more about Firefox 3.5, check the video below.

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McAfee sucks with their Siteadvisor Linux support

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Posted 23 Jun 2009 — by Arun
Category Linux, Technology

SiteAdvisor is a very good addon for Firefox that scans the Google search results and also the sites you visit for rogue sites. I have been using this addon for a long time. This addon used to be part of Mozilla’s Firefox addons website and it was available for all Oses. It was still available for all OSes even after McAfee bought SiteAdvisor. You don’t get the SiteAdvisor anymore in Mozilla addons site. McAfee also offcially took away the Linux support for SiteAdvisor. If you use SiteAdvisor and want to install it in Linux, you can do it by going to the download page and select the Mac version. Click on the I agree button and click the Free Download. It should work just fine. I hope McAfee stop sucking Windows and make it available for all OSes.

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Firefox 3.5 beta 4 available

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Posted 28 Apr 2009 — by Arun
Category Announcement

Mozilla team has released the 4th beta version for Firefox 3.5 (formerly Firefox 3.1). According the Mozilla developer center, here are the list of features that are new or changed in beta4.

  • Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
  • Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
  • The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.
  • Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
  • Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
  • Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.

Here is a note about Firefox’s Geolocation feature. According to Mozilla, Geolocation lets websites know where you are in order to bring you more relevant information, or to save you time while searching. For example, if you’re looking for pizza restaurants in your area, a simple search for “pizza” will bring you the answers you need…no further information or extra typing required.

Some modern websites offer services that are richer and easier to use if they know your location (such as online mapping, or searching for specific things in your area). When you visit one of these sites, Firefox will ask you if you want it to provide the site with your current location.

If you choose to allow Geolocation, Firefox first looks for relevant location markers such as location data provided by a GPS device built into or attached to your computer or browsing device, the signal strength of nearby wireless hot spots and/or cell phone towers, and/or your computer or device’s IP address.

So what about Privacy? Here is what Mozilla says: Firefox never shares your location without your direct permission. When you visit a page that requests your information, you’ll get a notification that you can accept or deny before any information is shared.

If you do authorize Geolocation, the following information is sent from Firefox to Google to retrieve your location based on WiFi and/or IP:

  • your IP address
  • information about nearby wireless access points
  • a temporary cookie-like identifier

This information is sent via an encrypted SSL connection to further protect your privacy. Google Location Services sends back to Firefox an estimate of your location which Firefox provides to the requesting web page. Google does not know the URL or domain of the requesting page.

It’s your choice to expose yourself or not.

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Cognitive Shield – New tabs in Firefox

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Posted 24 Mar 2009 — by Arun
Category Technology

Mozilla team has been working on how to make a new tab page more usable. You get a blank new tab page currently. Mozilla wants to change that and make it more useful. Google Chrome shows you thumbnails of most visited sites and Opera shows a speed dial. Mozilla wants to make something that’s not a distraction to users. This paved the way to Cognitive Shield.

The design of the cognitive shield is a ring of 8 circles, each containing one of your top-visited sites. The cognitive shield hides the distractions until you move the mouse. Then the links fade in quickly. If you are typing the web address directly in the location bar in the new tab, then the cognitive shield won’t distract you. On the other hand, if you want to use one of the most visited sites using the cognitive shield, then move the mouse over the circles and the icons will get brighter and colorful. I believe users should be able to edit the list of icons/websites that would appear in the cognitive shield.

To install, visit Mozilla Labs.

Cognitive Shield

Source: Mozilla Labs.

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Fashion your Firefox

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Posted 18 Nov 2008 — by Arun
Category Technology

Fashion Your Firefox is part of the Mozilla addon site, but it tries to simplify scrolling through the addons by picking popular addons and dividing them by category. Though it doesn’t have all the addons and it might miss some important or interesting ones, it makes it easier for end users to locate the addons they needed. Give it a try.

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Mozilla Lightning and Sunbird 0.9 released

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Posted 24 Sep 2008 — by Arun
Category Announcement

Mozilla calendar team has released version 0.9 of Lightning and Sunbird. This brings the calendar project close to their 1.0 release. Here are some changes/new functionalities included in 0.9. Lightning 0.9 is intended to be the last release for the
Thunderbird 2 series. The future plan is to integrate
Lightning fully into the upcoming Thunderbird 3 release.

  • Events spanning days now have a visual indicator indicating them as connected events
  • When reloading a remote calendar a progress indicator is now shown
  • The so-called “minimonth” (small calendar month in the upper left) has been given a visual overhaul
  • The calendar views (day, week, multiweek, month) have been given a visual overhaul
  • The today pane can now be displayed in calendar mode and task mode as well [Lightning-only]
  • CalDAV support and interoperability with various CalDAV servers has been improved
  • iMip/iTip support (support for email invitations) has been greatly improved [Lightning-only]
  • The application stability and memory consumption has been greatly improved
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Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 released

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Posted 08 Sep 2008 — by Arun
Category Announcement

Mozilla has released their 2nd alpha of Firefox 3.1. This version includes the following changes:

  • Support for the HTML 5 video element.
  • The new functionality of CTRL + T which shows previews of 3 recently used tab, now includes an option to close the tab.
  • You can now drag and drop tabs between different browser windows.
  • New selector to create areas of Aero style glass – works with Vista only. For more details, click here.
  • New CSS properties support.
  • GMail is now part of the web content handler for mailto: links. Clicking on a mailto: link will give GMail as an option to use.
  • Improved performance for accessing huge JPG image with embeded color profile on a local disk.

To download Windows version, Click Here. For Linux, Click Here.

Source: Mozilla.

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Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0 Alpha 2 released

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Posted 14 Aug 2008 — by Arun
Category Announcement

Mozilla Messaging team has released Thunderbird 3.0 Alpha 2 code named Shredder. Shredder Alpha 2 is a developer preview release that is being built on top of the next generation of Mozilla’s layout engine, Gecko 1.9. Shredder Alpha 2 is being made available for testing purposes only and is intended for developers and testing community.

What’s new in Alpha 2:

Integration improvements
  • Shredder can import mail from Mail.app on Mac OS X
  • Shredder theme looks more native on OS X
  • OS X Address Book integration on by default
  • Improved accessibility for screen readers
  • Outlook Express import now copies SSL and port settings
Other features
  • IMAP delete and undo operations are faster
  • Forwarded messages are inline by default
  • Replies allow to quote only selected text
  • Purge button added to toolbar optionally
Platform improvements
  • Extension authoring made easier by assigning IDs to most XUL elements
  • Windows x64 builds now possible
  • Several improvements to junk scoring subsystem

There were over 300 bug fixes in this release. You can download alpha 2 here.

Here are some of the known issues with alpha 2:

All Systems
  • There will not be any automatic updates to this developer preview.
  • Ensure extensions either come from a secure server using the HTTPS protocol or
    are digitally signed, or they will fail to install.
  • The “Move To” sub-menu is empty (bug 432088)
Microsoft Windows
  • Make sure Windows 95/98 compatibility mode is disabled for the Thunderbird executable. The setting will be inherited from previous Thunderbird installations if the original directory is over-written. Certain issues will go away once the compatibility mode is disabled. (Bug 381922)

Source: Mozilla Messaging.

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