In addition to the interactive demos the website delivers to you, you can also learn more about how each demo works and what technology is used to make it happen. The man navigation of the website divides the demos between HTML5, Design, Video and WEBGL.  Hopefully more demos will be added soon!

As a bonus, if you want to see more great demonstrations of what HTML, CSS and JavaScript can do – head on over to the Mozilla Demo Studio. 

If you are using the new Firefox 4 release candidate, then this is a website you should definitely check out.  Take a trip to Mozilla’s Web O’ Wonder and let me know what your favorite demo was.

Even though Firefox 4 might not yet be ready for the public, it does not hurt to take a look at some of the nice themes that have been developed for the browser of the future.  One theme that caught my eye for Firefox 4 is AvantGarde. It brings a unique new look to the Firefox 4 browser interface.

Once Firefox 4 gets released, one of the first things people will want to do is change the way it looks.  That is the reason we have themes for Firefox in the first place, right? AvantGarde brings a colorful and fun browsing experience to the Mozilla browser.

Here is a little more about the theme from the developer.

"Avant-garde" is a French term, with no real English translation, that essentially means "out of the cultural or accepted norm". Avant-garde artists and designers push the boundaries of what is known, and considered normal – and that’s what this theme is all about. It pushes the boundaries of colour, visual association, and user experience.

If you think the default look and feel of Firefox 4 is going to be a little too vanilla for you – the AvantGarde theme is a great way to spice it up.  Have any other Firefox 4 themes impressed you? Let me know in the comments.  You can pick up the AvantGarde theme from the Firefox Add-ons website.

I know I have a lot of creative and opinionated readers here, so I thought this challenge would be right up your alley.  Last week, Mozilla Labs announced the Winter ‘09 Design Challenge.  What is at stake?  You might get to help design how Firefox 4’s home tab looks.

In the future release of Firefox, it seems the home tab will replace your default homepage as the big starting point for the browser.  Rather than having something like MyYahoo or iGoogle, you will have your own personalized home, served locally, just for you.  This page will have access to a lot more of your information since it never leaves the browser — history, add-ons, bookmarks, and pretty much anything you can see in Firefox at the moment.

Here is a little more about the project from Mozilla:

To participate in this Design Challenge you need to create a short video explaining your idea(s), presenting the mockup and showing how your idea works. Your video can contain anything from a napkin drawing, a wireframe, to a polished graphic/prototype.

Here are the important dates you should make note of, if you want to participate:

• December 2009 – Launch of The Home Tab – Winter ’09 Design Challenge
• February 14th, 2010 – Submission Deadline
• February 15th, 2010 – People’s Choice Voting starts
• March 1st, 2010 – People’s Choice Voting ends
• March 15th, 2010 – Best in Class honors are announced

Good luck to all those who get involved with this challenge.  To learn more about it, be sure to visit the design challenge page over at the Mozilla Labs web site. You can also get updates via Twitter, @mozconcept.

Getting in on the fun, the Lifehacker team has also posted a list of the top 10 Firefox 3.5 features you should check out, if you want to see what is in store for your favorite browser.

Bonus – Also worth mentioning is there is rumors that Firefox 3.5 could be out by June 30th?

You’ve arrived in a new city, a new continent, a new coffee shop. You don’t really know where you are, and are looking for a good place to eat. You pull out your laptop, fire up Firefox, and go to your favorite review site. It automatically deduces your location, and serves up some delicious suggestions a couple blocks away and plots directions there.

It sounds to me a lot like what people had hoped Google would do with their Android phones, except Mozilla here isn’t talking about ad space yet. 

How can this be done?  It is in part thanks to the new W3C Geolocation Specification which, in turn, adds the ability for web sites to request and users to provide their locations.  It would/could be done a number of different ways such as GPS, WiFi, entering the details yourself, and so on.

If this tickles your fancy, you can download the Geode add-on for Firefox or just check out Mozilla Labs for more of the inside dirt on the idea.

Mozilla, do we have a problem?

I have a feeling I am not the only one who is wondering about this one.  What will happen to all the current Firefox themes once Firefox 3 goes final?  It seems like a handful of theme designers are having issues with getting their themes to look right with the new Firefox 3 interface.  Will they all have to start from scratch again?

The above screen shot was taken from TwisterMc – who is describing his own issues getting the iPox theme to work correctly.

Does it make you feel nervous at all that your success is so tied into the success of addons for the browser? You have clients for both Firefox and Internet Explorer, but what if addons sometime become “not so cool”.

Sure, industry change always makes us nervous. The key is to continually provide enough value for the user that cool transforms into indispensable. We are trying to provide a tremendous amount of information in a very small space, so there is always the possibility of looking at other ways to display the value, but at this point, the experience of surfing with your friends is so tied to where you are on the Internet, that a marriage between the browser and Me.dium makes sense.

How quickly has your user base grown and how many average users would you say you have at the present date and time?

We’ve been very pleased with our user growth and Firefox has played a big part in that. We’re looking forward to the 3.0 upgrade to fuel even more users. While specific numbers aren’t something that we publicize, the key with Me.dium has always been more about whether there are people that matter to me (my friends or people doing similar things) online right now. We have gotten to the point now where there are enough people using Me.dium at the same time that you are no longer alone online. You can bump into your friends and gain value by watching the activity of other users.

From my standpoint, you have done a lot when it comes to bringing a social interaction to any site or page. What is next with the Me.dium project?

Thanks for the vote of confidence! That’s definitely been our goal. I think as far as the next evolution goes, we need to really refine a bunch of things on the User Interface side to make it much more understandable and usable. Surfing with your friends in Me.dium still takes a bit too much of a learning curve from our perspective and adding a bunch of new features before the current version of Me.dium is a bit clearer and easier to use is probably just going to muddy the waters a bit.

When and where does Me.dium become a profitable business?

Working on setting that meeting right now. I’ll shoot over the coordinates and meet you there! :)

In all seriousness, were working hard to package the data that our users share in a valuable way right now. Based on all market data we have, it’s not too far out at the moment. The key for us will be making sure that our users know how we are creating value with their shared data so the process is clear and users know exactly what we are getting in return for whatever they choose to share with us.

As far as Firefox extensions go, what separates Me.dium from the rest of the pack as a must have addon to any browser?

That’s an easy one. Today’s browsing experience is simply way too solitary. Me.dium makes the entire web social. By connecting you in real time to all your friends online, Me.dium is the only way to get all the benefits of your social interactions from the real world in your online world.

Unlike social networks, Me.dium isn’t just a collection of pages where you post information about yourself and send your friends messages. Me.dium is a social browsing add-on that transforms the entire web into a social experience. Navigate around the entire web with people you care about. Bump into your friends and interact with the crowds, wherever they are.

Me.dium allows you to truly surf with friends for the first time:

• Watch YouTube vids together and share them with your friends in real time.
• Cruise Flickr or Facebook pics with your friends.
• Cruise the best shopping sites and shop together like your in the store with your friends.

Surfing the web has been a private and solitary activity for too long. Just like in the real world, you have more fun when you can share your experiences with friends. Me.dium has redefined what it means to surf the web by bringing you and your friends together in a true social experience. That’s what separates Me.dium from the rest of the pack.

Beta 2 addresses over 900 memory issues as well as various stability issues within the Gecko core itself with Mozilla migrating over to the 1.9 platform for Firefox 3.0 and the new Mozilla 2.0 platform for Firefox 4.0 and other issues like XSS (Cross Site Scripting) leaks through JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) which is used as a data interchange format.

Also making an appearance is the new highly touted download manager, and the awesome bar AKA the new location bar.

The browser also features a complete backend rewrite for using the SQL engine and garbage collection (software memory usage). Now that Firefox could also support offline applications like the ever popular Google Reader through its own built in functionality or through the usage of Google Gears which has also been in use for ZohoWriter – an online word processor and competitor of Google’s.

Functionality wise, Firefox 3.0 functions and behaves as well as other 2.0 and 1.5 cousins with the added bonus of better RAM usage and built in PDF page printing (currently not implemented in the UI).

For those of you who are hardware conscious about the RAM GB’s, there’s an extension available from Mozilla’s Stuart Parementer “RAMBack” which empties Firefox 3.0’s memory caches both disk and RAM.

Conclusion

After having used Firefox 3.0 solidly for the past 3 weeks I was impressed with the results of the work Mozilla have plagued into the browser. Looking through some of the other features, it’s clear that they have listened to the community regarding the direction of the browser. Features such as an integrated restart function for when new items – extensions/themes are installed and an all in one location bar.

I look forward to seeing the final product when it’s released later on this year.

Posted by Si Howard – Si Is currently studying for a Bachelors in Computer Science and turned to Firefox and Thunderbird after many years as a Netscape user. He maintains a personal blog at devastator.wordpress.com

While these “eye catching” sites may offer up a new level of interactivity and/or functionality, there’s always a price to pay no matter how good the engineering/technology is. For example, everyone these days a Gmail account. It extensively uses AJAX which, while making it appear very functional, also takes its toll on the browser in terms of memory usage, in this case Mozilla Firefox.

Recently, the Mozilla Foundation released Prism (renamed from WebRunner) from the Mozilla Project which is stripped down version of the XULRunner platform using the Firefox runtime environment (Gecko). It handles JavaScript/CSS etc…. well and is light on the memory usage from personal usage and handles several web applications well – Gmail, GReader, Facebook, Twitter etc… As well as the option of programming your own and has a list of user contributed web application scripts.

Prism can become a very useful application for those who just want to visit a few selected sites and since there are no high memory issues then it can also be run without issue on legacy hardware. Although those that prefer a full desktop browser know where to look (Mozilla Project page)

Since rebranding from WebRunner, Prism has had a number of feature added to it. Including:

• “CSS themes - Bundles now support common (all platforms) and OS specific CSS theme overrides. You can make web applications take on different CSS styles
• Spell check support – Red squiggles and suggestions on the context menu.
• Better external link handling – Spreadsheets from Google Docs were opening in the default browser.
• Tooltips support – We now display tooltips for elements with “title” attributes.
• Copying hyperlinks – Context menu supports copying a link location, if you right click on a link.
• More “Install Shortcut” options – Quick Launch Bar and Start Menu were added on Windows and Application folder was added on Mac.
• “Install Web Application” – similar to the “Install Shortcut” dialog, but this will create a web application *without* needing a webapp bundle. Launching Prism without any parameters, or from the Start Menu or Finder, to activate the dialog. (Alex’s post has more details).”*

*Source: Mark Finkle’s Weblog

Prism’s development looks set to advance and it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves within the Mozilla Project especially with the Mozilla-based browser Flock on the social networking side.

Posted by Si Howard – Si Is currently studying for a Bachelors in Computer Science and turned to Firefox and Thunderbird after many years as a Netscape user. He maintains a personal blog at devastator.wordpress.com

Then a relatively new browser came along by the name of Mozilla Firebird, shortly afterwards because of a trademark dispute it changed to Fire Phoenix. Then, finally, it changed again in February 2004 to Firefox. Back in 2003 the (newly established) Mozilla Foundation announced they were to begin working exclusively on Firefox and Thunderbird as part of the Mozilla Project.

Late in 2004 (August/September), I switched over to Firefox. Then shortly afterwards, Thunderbird. They both – in my opinion fitted in with the Unix philosophy:

Do one thing but do it really well

Firefox had its web standards (HTTP/SSL) and Thunderbird had its E-mail standards (IMAP/SMTP/POP3) and both accomplished their tasks admirably. The interfaces were simple and not cluttered; they loaded quickly and ran smoothly. They are both modular programs – developers can at their discretion add theme’s/extensions much like the latest Sun Microsystems (and now IBM) backed OpenOffice.org release. In short, they complimented each other perfectly.

3 years on, and Firefox has become the browser of choice for most people along with its official forks – Flock (http://www.flock.com), Wyzo (http://www.wyzo.com) and K-Meleon (http://kmeleon.sf.net).

Now Thunderbird is moving to its own stable for the Mozilla Foundation/Corporation to focus its efforts on Firefox but, will still remain with the Mozilla Project and under the Foundation’s guidance.

The decision was announced by CEO/Chief Lizard Wrangler Mitchell Baker late Monday to go with Mozilla’s second option – to make a taxable entity – MailCo – under the Mozilla Foundation whose sole focus was Thunderbird thereby keeping it in the Mozilla Project and still within the Foundation.

The news comes in addition to Eudora releasing their binaries of the Penelope project (http://wiki.mozilla.org/Penelope) – collaboration between Mozilla developers and Qualcomm developers to port the Eudora E-mail client over to the open-source Thunderbird framework with Penelope available as an extension to provide all the additional functionality.

If Mozilla commits even a fraction of the resources it has available for Firefox to the Penelope project, then I can see it becoming a very useful client in the same vain as Thunderbird and Firefox.

I am fully aware of the move to webmail that most people use; case in point – Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Etc…. But, I still firmly believe that there will always be a need for an E-mail client (I prefer to use an IMAP/SMTP E-mail server) and still praise Mozilla with making Firefox a better browser and improving Thunderbird and the Penelope Project.

Posted by Si Howard – Si Is currently studying for a Bachelors in Computer Science and turned to Firefox and Thunderbird after many years as a Netscape user. He maintains a personal blog at devastator.wordpress.com