GNU IceCat formerly known as GNU IceWeasel is not IceWeasel

You want a complicated story? Here is one. The Firefox user agent has a logo that is in terms of the Debian project not free. So they put out a differently packaged version of Firefox with a new logo and name it IceWeasel. But that did not happen until the Mozilla foundation complained to the Debian project that they cannot use the name Firefox with a different logo. To make it really complicated there was a browser called GNU IceWeasel by the GNU Project. It was renamed to GNU IceCat in 2007 to avoid name conflicts with Debian’s IceWeasel. Pretty complicated, eh?

Find out more about GNU IceCat and the GNUzilla.

Newsflash: Songbird 1.1, Firefox 3.5, IE Windows 7, Firefox Fennec

Songbird 1.1

The final version of Songbird 1.1 is available for download. Songbird is an open-source customizable music player based on Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

Firefox 3.5

Rumors of a version jump for Firefox from 3.1 to 3.5 have been confirmed.

Beef about IE bundling

Google and Opera’s CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner demand that there is a choice of browsers even though Microsoft confirms there is an option to switch IE 8 off completely.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 3

Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 with native JSON support has been released last week.

Fennec

A first beta – the twelfth milestone – of Fennec a mobile browser from Mozilla has been released. As this is a very interesting user agent I will write a follow-up with detailed information.

If Browsers Were Women

Internet marketer Zee has posted a fun article with a woman a browser what he thinks a women would look like if it were a browser. Have a look!

Prototype implementation of Gazelle Web Browser

Researchers Helen J. Wang, Chris Grier, Alexander Moshchuk, Samuel T. King, Piali Choudhury and Herman Venter of Microsoft Research published a paper on The Multi-Principal OS Construction of the Gazelle Web Browser.

They see a need for a new kind of web browsers as the way people use the web and web browsers has changed over the past years.

Web browsers originated as applications that people used to view static web sites sequentially. As web sites evolved into dynamic web applications composing content from various web sites, browsers have become multi-principal operating environments with resources shared among mutually distrusting web site. Nevertheless, no existing browsers, including new architectures like IE 8, Google Chrome, and OP, have a multi-principal operating system construction that gives a browser-based OS the exclusive control to manage the protection of all system resources among web site principals.

Their solution is a web browser with its own kernel for a mini operating system named Gazelle.

… we introduce Gazelle, a secure web browser constructed as a multi-principal OS. Gazelle’s Browser Kernel is an operating system that exclusively manages resource protection and sharing across web site principals. This construction exposes intricate design issues that no previous work has identified, such as legacy protection of cross-origin script source, and cross-principal, cross-process display and events protection. We elaborate on these issues and provide comprehensive solutions.

Gazelle might not only what we might see as Internet Explorer 9 some time in the future but Gazelle might be a solution for existing browsers.

Our prototype implementation and evaluation experience indicates that it is realistic to turn an existing browser into a multi-principal OS that yields significantly stronger security and robustness with acceptable performance and backward compatibility.

You find a link to the research paper (PDF) at the bottom of the blog post The Multi-Principal OS Construction of the Gazelle Web Browser.

Camino 2.0 Beta 1 as first preview of Camino 2 available

Camino 2.0 Beta 1 is a preview release of what will become Camino 2. The following major features have been added to Camino 2.0 Beta 1 and will be in Camino 2 when it is released.

• Tab Dragging: Tabs can be rearranged by dragging and dropping.
• Tab Overview: There is now an optional toolbar icon for opening and closing Tab Overview.
• Blocking Flash Animations: A new exceptions list allows disabling “Block Flash animations” on a per-site basis.
• Gecko 1.9: Camino 2.0 Beta 1 includes changes that improve stability on Mac OS X 10.4.
• Downloading: On Mac OS X 10.5, the downloads folder in the Dock will bounce when a download finishes.

See preview.caminobrowser.org for details.

Firefox 3 little features

I installed Firefox 3 as soon as it was available via system updates on my OpenSuSE 10.3 box. That was a couple of days after it was released. So I am using it now for several days.

Today I did uploaded an image to one of my blogs. That was when I discovered the first nifty feature I had not read about before. Selecting an image for upload you get a preview next to the file selectio area. I have always missed this before. *great*

The second nice little feature I discovered for myself is the progress of downloads in the status bar. It shows how many downloads are in progress and how long it will take until these are finished. *nice*

All in all the update went smoothly, the new version feels a little faster (not as much as other people have reported) and all the new concepts seem to be very useful so far.

Have you discovered features you like that are new to Firefox 3? Let me know!

Get the new Firefox today!

Mobile Browser User-Agent strings

On some research for mobile clients I stumpled upon this comprehensive list on mobile browser user-agent strings.

Howto for a custom user-agent in Konqueror

See the article How to add a custom user-agent string to Konqueror on Linux Showroom.

Firefox displays SVG graphics

The recent version of my firefox browser (2.0.0.8) displays SVG graphics inline. That is news for me. However if I choose to display the image by right clicking and using the appropriate action it does not work.

User agent statistics, updates and other useful information

This blog will bring you the latest and greatest on user agents, browsers, internet agents and similar web software.