Firefox hits a billion

Firefox celebrates a landmark today. Credit: Mozilla.

The much-loved Firefox Web browser reached a milestone this morning -- its billionth download.

The download counter rolled over within the last hour. Quite a feat for a browser that unlike Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Apple's Safari is run by a nonprofit organization with fewer than 250 employees. Despite its lack of big corporation backing -- or maybe partially because of that lack -- Firefox has become hugely popular worldwide.

But it couldn't have gotten there on good feelings alone. The free browser that debuted in 2004 consistently gets high marks for speed, efficiency, adaptability and user-friendliness. 

Also, Firefox is built on open source software, which means that its programming code is accessible to  developers who want to make compatible, collaborative products, and even participate in the further development of the browser.

More than 1,000 volunteers have indeed contributed to Firefox's code and about 20,000 test daily updates.

-- David Colker

How excited is Google about the ad blocker for Chrome?

With one quick download, Google's browser will soon enable users to do something that the company can't be happy about -- block online ads.

Google Chrome, the company's recent entry into the Web browser market, will begin accepting software extensions developed by third parties, similar to what Mozilla Firefox has offered for years.

The company, which derives the vast majority of its revenue from online advertising, recently made an API tool kit available to developers that would help them create powerful extensions to Chrome.

These third-party features aren't available yet to the public, but an extension called AdSweepwill be one of the first on tap. Similar to a popular extension for Firefox, AdSweep hides advertising on Web pages.

The extension has been available since March, but Google hasn't yet cemented a way to easily install such features.

Asked for comment, Google did not directly address the issue.

"We are designing Google Chrome's extensions to be flexible enough to support all different types of features, and we are encouraged by the development that we've seen in this area so far," a Google spokesperson wrote in an e-mail.

Surely AdSweep, specifically, isn't the source of that encouragement, right?

"Put a different way, we are encouraged by the work that developers are doing as they experiment with building tools on our extensions platform," the spokesperson wrote.

Google, being an advertising company at its core, probably won't benefit from ...

Internet Explorer viral video taps Microsoft's funny bone

IE8 Net History, the online video that Microsoft released alongside the launch of the newest version of Internet Explorer, is hip, sarcastic, slightly vulgar and funny -- a bouquet of qualities rarely associated with the software giant.

With a pastiche of interviews with recognizable faces, Net History provides a comedic overview of the history of mainstream Internet use. Janeane Garofalo, Dave Hill and the ninja from the Ask a Ninja podcast riff on topics from modems to Internet memes. 

The ad continues Microsoft's recent tradition of hiring comedians to hawk its software. You might remember the pervasive TV commercials with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates, in which the pair move in with a suburban family to regain their connection with the average citizen.

Some tech bloggers accused the Seinfeld campaign of being irrelevant and alienating to the average consumer. The Net History video, however, is neither. It's down to earth, clever and self-deprecating.

From the beginning, Bradley and Montgomery, the ad agency behind the video, wanted to catch people off guard with the video. "How do we ...

Powerful Firefox feature will become ubiquitous

Getting the weather with a few keystrokes, using Ubiquity for Firefox. Credit: Mozilla

Firefox developer Mozilla is planning to make Ubiquity a lot more ubiquitous.

The company quietly announced plans last week to build features from the Swiss-Army-like browser extension into Firefox itself, so users can do things such as search websites, insert interactive maps into e-mails or update Twitter, all with a few keystrokes. The native features are being called Taskfox.

More than 200,000 people have installed (and actively use) Ubiquity since it was released in August, and hundreds of developers have contributed new features -- like the ability to quickly submit a site to most social networks or search just about any site -- that users can choose to install on top of the program, according to a post by Blair McBride on his blog.

Mozilla says the goal of Ubiquity is to let you "talk to your browser." So eventually it should recognize "Translate this page into English," "Translate to English," and "What would this website look like in English?" all as the same command.

The extension borrows from the command line approach -- the home court for programmers. That's a shortcut language that's entirely text-based, in which a user first enters an action (like search) followed by any modifiers. Quicksilver, a super-powered application launcher and system interface for the Mac, similar to Ubiquity, has revived command line computing, but its audience is still niche.

Because Firefox is available in more than 60 languages, accomplishing the goal of "talking to your browser" is a grand undertaking. Taskfox is a way to more immediately bring some of those features to a wider audience.

Mozilla hopes to make it more accessible by building a simpler version into the default Firefox software package. How exactly the tentatively titled Taskfox accomplishes that is anyone's guess, since the feature is still early in development. But Mozilla designer Alex Faaborg provides a few mockups showing how the features could be integrated into the location bar, search box or as an overlay.

In one mockup, pictured above, you'd type a few letters of an action, like "shop for" or "search Wikipedia." Then when you hit the space bar, you're prompted to enter the next input -- be it what to shop for or what encyclopedia article to pull up.

Taskfox probably won't make its way into a milestone build of Firefox for quite a while, Ubiquity developers said. But to get a feel for some of the features, you can find the Ubiquity extension on Mozilla Labs. Mozilla says it plans to have test versions of Taskfox out before the end of the summer.

-- Mark Milian

Safari 4 beta heats up the already fiery browser wars

What a wonderful world it would be if every industry were like Web browser software. Companies entangle themselves in a fiery arms race to deliver us the absolute best products, free! Can we get the automakers in on this?

The new Top Sites feature in Apple's Safari 4 beta.

Apple released a beta version of Safari 4 on Tuesday, and it gets a lot of things right. The company bills Safari 4 as the "fastest browser ever," and while my feeble brain has trouble deciphering differences in fractions of a second, it certainly feels snappy.

ZDNet put the claim to the test on the PC and Mac using speed-benchmark software, producing some nifty graphs. Safari did indeed rank in as the fastest -- producing far better results than Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer (and even the new IE8 that hasn't officially come out yet).

Its only main competition in terms of speed are Minefield (the code name for the next major release of Firefox, presumably version 4) and Chrome. Chrome, Google's Web browser, quickly snapped up about 1% of market share in January, according to Net Applications, an Internet statistics firm. (And in the browser world, 1% is no small potatoes.)

Safari 4 takes one of its most notable new features from Chrome -- the relocation of the tab bar, which lists the window's open Web pages. Apple has moved it to the top of the browser -- probably to preserve space. (Some have expressed outrage over the change, so we've provided a tip at the end of this post to switch back to the old tab format.)

This version of Safari also boasts the addition of Cover Flow -- the visual browsing feature in iTunes, on the iPhone and in just about every new Mac application -- and a similar feature called Top Sites. These ...