When Microsoft released the consumer preview version of Windows 8, right after that Mozilla had confirmed the Metro version of Firefox Browser. Recently leaked document shows how exactly the Metro UI of Firefox looks like.

Getting back to the Windows 8 basics, there are 3 types of applications:

1. Classic Desktop Applications
2. Metro Applications
3. Metro style enabled Desktop Browsers

Mozilla is looking forward to building the Metro styled enabled Desktop Browsers, which will be built using Gecko and will be integrated with the Metro environment. Unlike all the other apps, even Firefox will support full screen resolution and touch based interactions, connected with the metro environment.

But unfortunately, a browser can run in Metro mode only if it’s the default browser. So if Firefox is not our default browser, then we won’t able to enjoy the Metro version of it.

Here are the few snapshots we got for you to show how Firefox will look in Metro mode.

Layout Explorations

Interactions across Desktop and Mobile

Basic Layout

Awesome Screen

Metro UI Design – Start Screen Mockup

Metro UI Design – Tabs Mockup

Metro UI Design – Web Page Mockup

The Firefox Metro enabled desktop browser will be included and packaged in the traditional way.

However, it’s still in its very early stages, so don’t expect to see a test/beta build anytime soon. But when that happens we will surely keep you informed. Stay tuned for more updates! Thanks!

First month of 2012 has been an interesting month in the Browser Market. Internet Explorer saw a good growth while Firefox and Chrome have lost a small range of market share.

Last year 2011, Browsers were put on a battle field, so 2011 can also be called as Year of Browser Wars!  . Chrome’s market share grew to a larger extent and hence both IE and Firefox couldn’t expand it’s growth much.

Chrome loses the fight for first time!

According to Net Applications, Google Chrome has lost a small amount of market share first time in a history. From the initial release Chrome never lost the market share. Instead it gave a strong fight to IE and Firefox in just a couple of years!

Chrome market share went down from 19.11 percent in December to 18.94 percent in January.

But our StatCounter has got a different story. According to them, Chrome extended their share from 27.27 percent in December to 28.4 percent in January.

Welcome back IE!

Good news! IE has shown a strong growth in the beginning of the year. After many months we have seen this growth. It ended the month with 52.96 percent market share, according to Net Applications data, up from 51.87 percent in the previous month.

No takers for Firefox!

Just a day before, Mozilla has released the Firefox 10 to public. It has come out with many new features. Analysts say, Firefox is catching up IE and Chrome in good pace. Even though Mozillians are working hard, users are leaving Firefox.

Firefox share declined rapids in 2011 and it is continuing in 2012 as well. Their share dropped by almost one percent reaching a share of 20.88 percent.

According to StatCounter, Firefox share goes down below 25 percent!

Lots of changes! Seems like 2012 will also witness good fight between browsers. Browser Wars has started!

What  do you think could be the reason for recent IE growth? And what went wrong with Chrome? Share your thoughts. Lets discuss.

Mozilla has released the latest of version of Firefox – Firefox 10. Although this is not an important update, but still they have added some interesting features with few bug fixes and performance enhancement.

Major updates like all new “New tab” tab has been pushed to the  later versions of Firefox. It is expected to come with the release of Firefox 12. Apart from that, version 10 comes with several new features that attracts both regular users and developers.

Here are the notable top five features of Firefox 10.

#1. Add-ons are Compatible by Default!

Almost a year back, Mozilla revamped their plans to release new version of browser every six week. This update had become a big issue with add-on developers. The add-ons developed within Mozilla labs are automatically checked for the add-ons compatibility and then published to the Mozilla Addons Store. Whereas the third party Developers had to run the compatibility check on their add-ons for every new release of the browser.

Considering the fact that the 3/4th of the Firefox addons are developed by the third party developers; Firefox marks all the add-ons as complatible by default in this latest version.

#2. Full Screen APIs for Video, Games and Apps

This feature allows developers to build a web application that runs throughout the  full screen. This includes many HTML elements, so developers can build full screen games,  interactive video experiences, presentation software or anything else that should dominate the experience.

#3. No Forward Button

Mozilla has eliminated the “forward button” from the latest Firefox browser. But the same control pops up when you navigate back.

#4. CSS 3D Transforms

The latest release of Mozilla’s Firefox brings support for CSS 3D Transforms. This allows web page designers to position elements in three dimensional spaces on the page. CSS 3D Transforms was previously only supported on WebKit-based browsers. This will also allow a web developer to animate page elements.

Tech Link: Demo Link

#5. New Inspector Tool for CSS and HTML

Firefox is poised to deliver some new tools for web developers. When you select “inspect element” Firefox will bring up a breadcrumb-style menu bar at the bottom of the page. To see the actual HTML or CSS applied to that element you need to click the corresponding buttons in the toolbar (or use the keyboard shortcuts).

It’s an unusual design decision given that inspecting the element generally means seeing the HTML (at least that’s how every other browser does it), and it means there’s an extra click necessary to get to the same information that’s just one click away in WebKit and Opera.

These are the top 5 feature which were added in latest Firefox version 10. Many new features are on Mozilla’s schedule. Keep watching this space for more updates.

Download Firefox Ver.10

What do you feel about these latest features on Firefox? Share your thoughts via comments. Thank you.

Android is growing rapidly in the Mobile OS market with the booming iOS and slowly emerging Windows Phone OS. And hence there’s been a  deadlock situation for both Blackberry and Symbian. In this fierce battle of different Mobile Operating Systems, Mozilla is trying to step into this with it’s own Mobile OS know as “Boot-to-Gecko(B2G)“.

Mozilla is seriously working on it’s own mobile OS Boot-to-Gecko (B2G) after being stumbled down by Chrome Browser day by day.

A while ago, Mozilla presented quite an ambitious project, Boot to Gecko (B2G) a completely new operating system built around Gecko (the rendering engine of Firefox). We thought it would be pretty much similar to Chrome OS. However, Mozilla has a different plan with B2G,  as it is targeting on mobile phones rather than the light notebooks.

What could be the Concept?

Mozilla made it clear that it will be using Android as their codebase, but with lots of customization which includes the entire user interface.It would also include all the necessary mobile features like SMS, Diapad, Data Connectivity etc.

Below is a stenciled image about the Boot-to-Gecko concept:

They demoed it! Watch these videos!

According to Mozilla’s milestone plan, they had promised to demo the first set of working features and here we go, The Mozilla  team demoed their work so far at a MozCamp Asia. Below are the videos of that demo, courtesy of Mozilla Tunisia:

How does it look? Well, it’s too early for us also to jump onto the conclusion. But Mozilla is working hard, as it’s not that easy to gain mobile OS market while there are already big players in the tug-of-war! Hope for the best @Mozilla.

What do you think? Will Mozilla be able to gain its spot in this crowded mobile OS market? Share your thoughts by hitting comment section now.

When the first browser was released it was nothing but a Textpad or Notepad with few buttons to navigate back and forth. Now just imagine what your current browser can do! For instance, Chrome can show apps which interact with other apps using Web intents. We must agree there are lot of innovations happening in browser wars.

Internet Explorer recently celebrated its 16th birthday. The first browser to give a real competition for IE was Mozilla’s Firefox browser. From the day Firefox was released people started switching to Firefox and hence Mozilla grew its users base from hundreds to millions!

Firefox team is always known for innovations and they are working hard to keep this reputation. You probably agree with this if you’re a hardcore Firefox user. Recently Mozilla adopted new rapid release cycle for Firefox which worked out quite well for them. Previous to this Firefox has been loosing much of  its loyal users to Chrome!

Just a few days ago Mozilla released Firefox 6 with minor tweaks. Following are the features of Firefox 6,

• Better security
• Developers will enjoy the new Scratchpad tool, which makes it simple to quickly enter, execute, test and refine JavaScript snippets in Firefox without needing to work in a one-line console.
• Web Console is improved with an auto-complete feature and the ability to customize the console’s location to save developers time.
• Panorama users will enjoy faster start-up times because tab groups are only loaded when selected.
• Awesome Bar (URL bar) highlights a website’s domain name.

More or less, the Firefox 6 release is more beneficial for developers than normal user!

What is expected out of Firefox 7?

Are you a normal Firefox user and disappointed with Firefox 6 release?. Well, you need not be. Just wait another 6 weeks and you will get a better Firefox version which is promising to deliver many features. Here is a list of expected features:

#1. New 2D Graphics API – Azure

Almost all the browser vendors are concentrated on improving browsing experience which refers to graphics. Firefox is also in this game of improving graphics performance with the introduction of new API called Azure.

What’s Azure?

Azure is a new graphics component built within Mozilla.

To display a web page, Mozilla’s Gecko layout engine looks at how that page is constructed and divides it into independent layers. Each of those layers is drawn using Cairo, a 2D graphics API built on top of the operating system’s graphics APIs. Cairo was the previous version of graphics API used since Firefox 4 to Firefox 6.

Well Cairo has lot of issues. It was stateful API. This means that any given function call depends on the results of the previous function calls to determine its result. Unfortunately, statefulness strictly adds overhead to an intermediate graphics API. So Mozilla team developed a new API which is stateless and new “3D” backend for drawing content in an accelerated way to OpenGL, Direct3D 9, and Direct3D 10.

Tech Link: Know more about Azure.

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Mozilla is planning to include Azure API in Firefox 7. If there are any negative test results then it will be moved to Firefox 8.

#2. Improved HTML5 Support!

HTML5 is a new version of HTML which is ready to replace many tools with HTML tags. The main feature of any browser is to render webpages which will be coded using HTML.

As per our past HTML5 tests ran on top five browsers in the world (i.e. IE, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Firefox), Chrome browser stood on top of the list. Yes, till today Chrome supports more HTML5 tags than any other browser even though Microsoft calls IE9 the best HTML5 browser!

Among all the tests we ran. Firefox always stood constant with their results. We actually thought Mozilla team has stopped concentrating on HTML5 support!

But Firefox 7 will boost HTML5 support as the alpha builds scored 298 (289 actual + 9 bonus) points out of 450. Here the points are equal to number tag tests included in HTML5Test.com!

#3. Faster Startup

Firefox 7 is expected to load webpages 20-30% faster than its previous version with the inclusion of new Azure graphical API.

#4. 30% Reduction in Memory Usage

Mozilla says Firefox 7 could reduce memory usage by up to 30% for some users. That’s great for those of us who like having a ton of apps running at once.

#5. Better Sync and Clearer text on web pages

Now passwords and bookmarks sync instantly between your computers and mobile devices. Firefox 7 will provide better sync option. Firefox 3 was the first to render fonts on web pages so they’d always be clear, even when you zoom in. Firefox 7 will take that to the next level.

Huh! We don’t think Firefox 7 will disappoint with the inclusion of these improved features. We’re hoping to see these features get added up in the next release. Please share your thoughts. If you know more about Firefox 7, please share with us. Thank you!

Welcome back Mozilla. Yeah of course our best readers as well! Wondering why @Tech18 is welcoming Mozilla? Because finally they woke-up and said, “Yes we want to get back to Browsers War and we haven’t lost it yet!”.

Let’s have a small flashback : Two and half years back, when Google entered  the battle of Browsers War with it’s sleek and slim Chrome Browser, which attracted almost all the web users, as the UI design was way too different from FireFox and Internet Explorer at that point of time.

What Google Chrome provided from past two and half years is what we are able to see in latest versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer. They were not having any other way other than bending their head and revamping everything to catch up with Chrome.

Mozilla went one step ahead and started adopting Chrome as their UX model and started revamping Firefox which we caught during Firefox 4 build. And here we got one more design mock-up of future Firefox browser and you will definitely like the feel of the UI.

On Mac,

Firefox UI change on Mac - Homepage

Firefox UI change on Mac - Tabs

Firefox UI change for Mac - Add-ons

Firefox UI change for Mac - Add-ons Drag 'n Drop

Firefox UI change for Mac - Add-ons on Settings Menu

Firefox UI change for Mac - Full-screen mode

On Windows,

Firefox UI change for Windows

Firefox UI change for Windows - Full-screen mode

Don’t you think, you just scrolled through a cloned version of Chrome with only few customized buttons as same in case of Rockmelt Browser (which is running in Chromium Build)?  Damn! Not again Mozilla!

Well Mozilla is really working hard on  the UI, which is changing  from version to version and yet they haven’t come up with a finalized UI. By now we already know that the trend of reduced Browser Interfaces will continue and Browser makers will come up with new ways to increase the number of pixels dedicated to apps and web pages and decrease the number of pixels in the browser interface.

If you see the mock up, most of the features from Firefox menu have been moved out to make it more easily reachable to user. The menu appears to be only providing core functionality as well as add-ons at first sight, while the user can choose to extend the menu on an individual basis.

When compared between Windows and Mac design, Mac Firefox design looks prettier than that of Windows! As a Windows user most of us would like to see a similar design as of Mac! Hope they are hearing to us.

Ok now! What do you think about the latest design UX by Mozilla team? Are you happy with it? Which browser would you like to support? Share your thoughts.

We are in a world where people tend to copy each other in terms of ideas, posts and functionality. Well it’s human tendency and tough to change.

When it comes to Browser War also, each and every browser is playing hard and coming up with new features to give a tough competition, and to stay in the Browser Market, they’re copying each others features with few more modules added to it . Here you can find lots of news on Browsers and most of them are of Google Chrome, which is one of the hottest trending topic in the field of Technology.

Just to remind you all, Google drafted a new schedule release cycle which promised to release new versions of browser once in every six weeks. Remember?

This new Release Cycle worked really well for Google in adding many interesting features to become one of  the world’s fastest browser. Do you agree with us?

When it comes to Mozilla and Microsoft, both the browser developers usually take at least a year to get their final product into the market. Oh! Damn. How slow is that! This schedule was fine with both of them until Google came up with their New Release Cycle.

Hmm! What happened next? Mozilla had to follow the Google’s new strategy and hence came up with new Release Cycle. Mozilla had already changed their Release Cycle duration from 1 year to 3 months, which reduced their product development as the shorter cycles by Mozilla did not help them in getting more Firefox users and they kept on loosing their users in the Browser War.

Mozilla Copies Google’s Release Cycle Plan!

What’s next? Mozilla has to copy Google’s schedule for Chrome browser.

Yes, Mozilla plans to release new version of Firefox browser once in every six weeks from now. This was confirmed by Asa Dotzler, New Product Manager for Desktop Firefox in the below tweet :

We got tired of waiting a year to get new features and fixes out. Expect Firefox updates every 6 weeks from now on.

Tweet link: http://t18.me/kIJ4sB

Fasten your seat belts, because Mozilla plans to ship Firefox 6 in exactly six weeks, with Firefox 7 six weeks after that, and Firefox 8 … well, you get the idea. Not coincidentally, that release schedule perfectly matches up with browser arch-rival Google Chrome.

Mozilla is always copying from Chrome from the day they felt Google is growing stronger. Did you ever think about Firefox’s and Chrome’s different browser Channels? Here’s how they are matching.

LOL! Isn’t it?

Well we do agree Mozilla team is working really hard towards their new AwesomeBar, Predictive NewTab and many more. These are few of the best features by Mozilla. But few of them are not unique from other browsers!

Huh! What you guys think about this new release schedule by Mozilla team? Will this matter for others? Will this make them stronger in browsers war? Share your thoughts Lets Discuss!

There was a time when only few web browsers were ruling the browsers market. Those days web pages were like some .txt files Obviously we didn’t have technologies like CSS or JavaScript that time. So browsers were just like Notepad.

But as days passed, we got many other players entering the browsers war and strongly took over stakes from old browsers.

Mozilla is one of the strongest player in browser war and their Firefox browser is the second best browser in the world. Well what makes them the second most used browser in the world? Browser age? Of course not!

Firefox has got lots of unique features and they never stopped trying new things. If you remember, Mozilla team is running some interesting experiments like,

• LessChrome HD features that hides URL bar
• AwesomeBar HD and few others.

Hope many of our reader would have read these topics and tried them as well. We got one more innovative feature which is called as Predictive NewTab. Yes, Mozilla is experimenting one more feature in labs which can give a tough competition to Opera and IE9’s Speed dial and Chrome most used site thumbs.

Predictive NewTab is a new experimental feature introduced Mozilla labs which predicts what you may be interested look when you click new tab.

How does it work?

Working of this add-on is very simple but interesting. When you are trying open a new tab, Firefox displays some results you had previous visited and matches the tab from which you came to new tab.

For example, we opened a Pandora webpage and our browser looks like below,

Now we’ve opened a new tab, Firefox searches both your bookmarks and history for similar websites that you may be interested in based on what you were recently browsing(Pandora in this contrast).

As you can see above there a list of suggested links with few attributes like Score, Frequency, Hub and BM Engine. Here are the properties of the attributes:

1. Score: calculated experimental statistics which is calculated through similar tags.
2. Frequency: measure of frequency and recently.
3. Hub: page out algorithms and heuristics believe is a good candidate for being a “home page” or otherwise important page in a website.
4. BM Engine: indicator of whether the search result came from a bookmark tag.

Combination of all these 4 factors will rank the results found and displays in descending order.

Pre-requisites for better usage

Predictive NewTab is still an experimental feature. So it works effectively when we have,

1. More bookmarks and organised as well
2. Lot of pages in history

Conclusion:

One good advantage of this feature will be, it does all of its computation inside the browser and no personal information is sent to the web. This avoids service calls and provides result faster as it fetches data from local machine.

In future when this experiment gets added into Firefox browser it may provide following advantages,

1. Improved History Search feature in Firefox.
2. Developing better methods for suggesting which pages are important to you.
3. Introduce a painless way for users to provide feedback to the browser about what they like so we can help them find it quicker the next time.

That is all for now. We thank Abhinav Sharma who is an intern for summer 2011 in Firefox for providing this information.

Well! Well! What you think about this innovative idea by Mozilla labs team? Do you think it will give tough competition to Firefox rivals whom we mentioned above? Please share your thought!

May 2011 has been a very busiest month when we speak about browsers. Google’s never ending increase in version number! Mozilla’s all new plans for Firefox working really good for them. New plan and Opera Next nightly builds by Opera team!

Wow! That sounds great. Isn’t it?

Well after all these latest update, finally comes a question. Who is standing where? Who’s growing stronger than their rivals?

Last month browsers statistics tells couple of mind blowing stories which could certainly heat up the browsers war!

#1. Google Chrome Marching Towards 20% Market Share!

Chrome browser is one of the fastest growing products by Google which we all know! One better knows fact is Google Chrome has changed the browsing world very smartly in very short period of time.

Google’s new release cycle of Chrome browser is really giving them an upper hand when compared to other browsers. With the shortest release cycle strategy (six weeks), Google is adding very interesting features like restricting instant to search, shortened URL bar and much more.

Well the latest worldwide browsers market share showed Google Chrome is inching towards 20% overall market share. Yes, it is a something bigger for Chrome which is just two and half year old!

The way Chrome browser is growing will surely put IE and Firefox aside in coming years if they don’t think out of box and add some interesting and unique features into it!

By the end of yesterday, Chrome was just 0.09% behind 20% target.

#2. Firefox 4.0 Lead Firefox versions!

Yes, you heard right. Confused how come a new comer could take leading note in just few months? Well Firefox 4.0 is one of the strongest growing browsers when compared to Internet Explorer 9 and Google Chrome 11!

As you all know, Firefox started dumping older Firefox 3.5 version and started moving them towards Firefox 3.6 and 4.0. This has already started boosting Firefox 4.0’s market share which is now becomes the leading among other versions of Firefox.

Firefox version 4.0 has got 14.2% of share when compared to Firefox 3.6’s 12.28%!

Tech Note: Firefox 4.0 surpassed Internet Explorer 7 just two months back

#3. Internet Explorer 9 Poor Run Continues!

Microsoft will surely be thinking what’s going wrong with their latest version of Internet Explorer! The growing graph of IE9 is really slower when we look into their ancestors.

The main reason could be the wrong marketing strategy by Microsoft IE team. And of course how can we forget about Windows XP which didn’t get IE9! Hope MS will take their call soon on IE9 survival!

By the end of May 2011, Internet Explorer had got 4.57%!

How are you enjoying this browser war? Hot! Isn’t it?

Every browser vendor is pushing hard to prove they are the best one amongst others. Well as a user we are getting to see something interesting every time.

Browser Stats by StatCounter.

Which browser are you using and which one are you supporting? Raise your voice and let us discuss which one is best! Comment box is waiting for u Cheers!

In our previous article we were speaking about how browsers got revolutionised in past few months. The latest browser versions have really got great makeovers and amazing features which makes them better when compared to their rivals.

But yes, Google and its Chrome browser is one of the strong leaders who forced Firefox and Internet Explorer to follow them with re-modifying their design.

Well all those are old stories and we hope you all accept this.

But Google team has went one step ahead in adding one more latest and mind blowing feature which killed/hide URL bar in Chrome browser. By the time wrote about this new feature it was only available through nightly builds and canary version. But now this feature has also hit developers’ version.

This makes clear that Compact Navigation is ready to get added in Chrome 13 feature list.

Hide URL Bar! But in Firefox!

Ok now let’s get into our article! Just few days after we noticed compact navigation feature of Google Chrome we were looking out for a way to do the same in Firefox browser.

Here comes Mozilla labs add-on which does the same compact navigation of Chrome.

LessChrome HD is a new Firefox add-on is another Mozilla labs experiment which gives as much space to the page and only shows the browser interface when needed.

Tech Link: Firefox’s AwesomeBar Getting Better Than Chrome’s OmniBox!

The default browsing behavior now is to only show tabs at the top of the window, and pointing there will reveal the rest of the browser. Moving the mouse cursor back down makes it go away.

Well this experiment is an extension of Home dash experiments by Mozilla labs. Home dash used to display webpage in full screen mode with small icon on top-left corner. But due to users demand Mozilla labs team decided to show tabs on top with LessChrome HD add-on.

This add-on works fine on Firefox 4 and above versions only!

Advantage of this labs experiment when compared to Chrome’s compact navigation is it just hides the full URL bar and shows the same on mouse over. But Chrome’s compact navigation has got a new shorter version of URL bar.

Another advantage is none of the add-ons will be affected. Chrome’s new feature has almost killed extensions like Chrome SEO, Shareaholic!

In the end, browser war has heated up again! Get ready for clash of titans Watch out this space for more info!

Does the interface appear and hide when you want? Do you like seeing the page context (URL and identity) when switching tabs? Please share it with Mozilla labs team and make it more interesting