Now when you hear mashing or mashups of services, you think of wacky combinations like Yahoogle or Microdigg. A web site or service that awkwardly brings two or more services together. Ubiquity, a new Firefox add-on from Mozilla wants to turn mashing on it’s head. How? They are going to take a more natural approach to it.
Ubiquity takes language based instructions and turns them into action, right where you need them to be. This video goes a great job at explaining the add-on and showing it in action:
The initial prototype is a little rough, and not ready for prime time yet. It does show a lot of promise though, and with a little creativity this type of tool could go a long way. Ubiquity looks to be another amazing tool to add to the many that have come out of Mozilla Labs.
For those of you who didn’t like Firefox 3, or haven’t gotten around to updating yet - you only have a few more months left. On the Firefox 2 download page, Mozilla states:
Firefox 2.0.0.x will be maintained with security and stability updates until mid-December, 2008. All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.
Out with the old and in with the new! Just curious, for those who might be lagging behind, why are you still using Firefox 2? For the Firefox 3 users, what is your favorite feature you think might win them over?
The team at Net Applications via their Market Share service have collected some very interesting numbers as it pertains to the current generation browser wars.
With browser market share, Firefox is at 19.22% across all operating systems. In third place is Safari at 6.14% - which shows you it pays to trick people into downloading your browser. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is still the king of the mountain though with 73.02% of the market cornered.
Breaking down the Firefox numbers even further, it appears Firefox 2 is still used by 13.02% of the people while Firefox 3 is at 5.67%.
So overall, it is safe to say that everything is going good in Mozilla land. It seems like every time I check out a survey or poll like this, the number keep going up and up a few percentages every time. The browser wars are still heating up which in turn is good for all of us, regardless of the browser you use.
The team over at Wired have posted a very interesting article with Mozilla’s CEO, John Lilly about a number of topics. One of the topics that came up was iPhone and the easy somebody like Mozilla would have developing for it:
Wired: Are you going to develop a version of Firefox for the iPhone?
Lilly: No. Apple makes it too hard. They say it’s because of technical issues — they don’t want outsiders to disrupt the user experience. That’s a business argument masquerading as a technological argument. We’re focusing on more important stuff. The iPhone has been influential, but there’s not that many of them. We’re part of the LiMo Foundation — Linux on Mobile. The Razr V2 is a LiMo phone, and you’ll see more in the next year or so.
I do understand Apple’s need to “control the experience” with the iPhone, and hey… who knows, this could really open some doors for other phones and mobile devices. Also Apple isn’t going to want to take away from Safari which for me as a Windows user has not been much than bundle-ware with iTunes.
The latest version of Firefox is out and patches a few holes here and there in our favorite browser. Here is the official word from Mozilla:
We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3.0, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.
So what exactly is new in Firefox 3.0.1? Here are a few of the details from the release notes.
In certain cases, installing Firefox 2 in the same directory in which Firefox 3 has been installed resulted in Firefox 2 being unstable. This issue was fixed as part of Firefox 2.0.0.15.
Fixed an issue where, when printing a selected region of content from the middle of a page, some of the output was missing (bug 433373).
Fixed a Linux issues where, for users on a PPP connection (dialup or DSL) Firefox always started in “Offline” mode (bug 424626).
For more information, be sure to check out the official release notes for Firefox 3.0.1 and happy browsing to all, and to all a good night day.
How would you like to have your own huge Firefox-bot in your own backyard?
Better yet, what does it take to build a giant tribute to the promotional art for Firefox 3? From the looks of it, a lot of aluminum foil, some social networking and a lot of love. Just make sure you don’t get too close to the ice cream.
We got setup in the park at 2pm and the sun was shining. We made sure to have enough robot building fuel ie pizza, and sangria to keep everyone running. We also had a friend from a chemistry department bring dry ice and liquid nitrogen, which we used for special effects and to make cryogenic Firefox icecream (carrot and blueberry, a flavor we made up).
Along with a fresh design, Mozilla Labs has also release Weave Prototype 0.2. What is Weave, you say? It is Mozilla’s answer to the problem of keeping all your bookmarks, history, passwords and more in sync across multiple computers.
So what is new in this 0.2 version of Weave?
Intelligent scheduler for synchronization to improve performance.
Expanded set of supported browser settings and metadata, including: Bookmarks, Browsing History, Cookies, Saved Passwords, Saved Form Data, and Tabs.
Support for retrying failed network operations.
New server format performs better when there are frequent changes (e.g., for history sync).
Significant reworking of the startup experience, including a new Setup Wizard that performs account creation in chrome and allows for customization of settings.
Improved error detection and handling.
Notification dialog added to the status bar for displaying error, status and asynchronous events with or without required actions, e.g. authentication errors, notification of shares, etc.
Might be worth mentioning that they are still saying this version is for testing purposes only, so if Firefox later on kicks you in the head, points its browsing finger and laughs while your down, you were warned.
Here recently, I just switched from Google Browser Sync to Foxmarks. Once Weave gets all the kinks out though, I’ll probably be switching again because I really like the idea of having everything accessible no matter which PC I might be at. Check out the Weave 0.2 Release Notes for more information.
Now when you hear mashing or mashups of services, you think of wacky combinations like Yahoogle or Microdigg. A web site or service that awkwardly brings two or more services together. Ubiquity, a new Firefox add-on from Mozilla wants to turn mashing on it’s head. How? They are going to take a more natural approach to it.
For those of you who didn’t like Firefox 3, or haven’t gotten around to updating yet - you only have a few more months left. 
So what exactly is new in Firefox 3.0.1? Here are a few of the details from the release notes.
