Popular open source news - Web Browsers

This week marks the fifth anniversary of Mozilla's Firefox browser. Launched on November 9, 2004, the software now boasts an estimated 330 million users. Any company or product than can achieve that manner of popularity in such a short period of time is clearly a success, but Mozilla shouldn't get all of the credit. Most of the congratulations belong to the open source movement.

Despite the rise of open source within the federal government, Mozilla's Firefox has yet to gain an official nod from the Department of State, at least according to a recent question-and-answer session that Secretary Hillary Clinton and Under Secretary Patrick Kennedy hosted last week, with an ironic back-and-forth on Firefox kicked off by government employee Jim Finkle:

What is a browser? was the question we asked over 50 passersby of different ages and backgrounds in the Times Square in New York. Watch the many responses people came up with.

Director of Firefox Mike Beltzner gives a quick video preview of what’s new and exciting in Firefox 3.5, coming soon from Mozilla.

If Mozilla has its way, you'll soon be able to watch streaming video on sites all over the web without ever having to use a plug-in. The software maker announced Monday that native support for the open-source Threora video format will be added to Firefox 3.1, the next version of its popular web browser.

With 200 employees and a $50-million budget, Mozilla is the for-profit subsidiary of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. Firefox is "open source," meaning users everywhere are encouraged to improve it. Its success depends largely on thousands of devoted volunteers -- 40% of the code is written by people who don't clock in.

A colleague today showed me a cool, new browser that he's been using to browse the web at blisteringly fast speeds. The browser? Minefield. The author of the code? Mozilla. Yes, that same Mozilla that makes the Firefox browser. Minefield is, in fact, a way to glimpse into the future of Firefox, as it's a pre-release/alpha version of the Firefox browser.

Mozilla Labs has announced the availability of Geode, an experimental Firefox extension that implements the W3C Geolocation Specification. Geode provides an early preview of the same location-aware functionality that will be included in both Fennec and Firefox 3.1.