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Mozilla has posted more information about Geode, the Labs plugin we foreshadowed yesterday that helps websites detect your current location. Geode is also now available for download here.

Geode is a forerunner to Firefox’s future implementation of the W3C Geolocation Specification, a standard that (once universally implemented) will allow websites to serve up localized content and services within any browser. Mozilla plans to let the user determine how they want to reveal their location (via GPS, WiFi, manual entry, or other methods) and how specific they want that information to be (exact location, neighborhood, city, etc).

The plugin, however, will only leverage one method for determining your location - Skyhook’s Loki technology, which uses WiFi to determine your location within a second and with an accuracy of about 10-20 meters.

Since location-aware services are most useful on mobile devices, Mozilla plans to integrate Geode functionality into alpha releases of Fennec, its mobile browser under development.

Pownce and Yahoo’s Fire Eagle are launch partners of sorts for Geode, having both already hooked the plugin up to their services. Pownce is using the plugin to attach location information to messages and other contributions to the service. Fire Eagle will use Geode as another way to gather and broker location information for its users and the services they use.

Mozilla isn’t the only one who has decided to innovate in geolocation technology on its own instead of waiting for standards to evolve. Google Gears, another browser plugin of sorts, features similar location-aware functionality for websites.

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MozBackup est un programme opensource et gratuit qui permet de sauvegarder et de restaurer les profils de nombreux logiciels parmi lesquels le navigateur Internet Firefox, le navigateur Internet Netscape, la suite logicielle Mozilla, la suite logicielle SeaMonkey et le client e-mail Thunderbird, mais aussi ceux de nombreuses extensions de Firefox et de Thunderbird.

Update: Google has posted on its official blog saying they screwed up by mailing this cartoon out early. A beta version of Chrome will be made available tomorrow in over 100 countries - but, alas, for Windows only to start, with Mac and Linux on the way.

Update 2: It looks like Google has at least semi-launched its Chrome site here. It provides this screenshot of the browser.

Google Blogoscoped has published a lengthy cartoon sent to them by Google and drawn by Scott McCloud that provides the first public details about Google Chrome, an open source browser based on WebKit and powered by Google Gears that has been rumored but never before confirmed.

According to the cartoon (which can be seen in its entirely here - thanks Marshall), the Google Chrome project has already undergone a substantial period of development with engineers working to create a product that’s secure, user friendly, fast, stable, safe, and easily testable. No word yet, however, on when it will be released.

This is a straight shot over the bow of Microsoft, which has tightly integrated its Live Search offering into its dominant Internet Explorer browser (and which, surprise, is in turn tightly integrated into Windows). It also makes for an awkward relationship with Mozilla, whose Firefox browser Google basically funds.

The cartoon breaks down Google Chrome’s features into the following four topics:

Super Tabs and Scalable Testing

Unlike other modern web browsers, which can only run one process at a time, Google Chrome will give each tab its own process. This speeds up overall performance and saves the entire browser from crashing when one tab causes problems.

The multi-process design requires more memory allocation up front but less memory over time as users tend to multitask. It also prevents your computer from slowing down after you browse for an extended period of time and open/close lots of tabs.

Google Chrome also features a task manager that can be used to determine just which tabs and plugins are hogging just how much memory. It’s main purpose is to spot bad actors and close them before they ruin your browsing experience.

Google is leveraging its massive server infrastructure to run automatic performance tests for Chrome. The company is claiming that its Chrome Bot can test the browser on tens of thousands of different webpages within 20-30 minutes of each build. These webpages are chosen on the basis of their popularity, which has already been determined by Google with the data it collects from its search users. When Google started testing Chrome, it only rendered 23% of those pages correctly (no word on how many it gets right as of today now it apparently renders 99% correctly).

Speed: Webkit and V8

Google decided to implement the Webkit rendering engine (also found in Safari and the forthcoming Android mobile platform) because of its speed and simplicity.

To improve the performance of JavaScript processes, Google also decided to build its own JavaScript virtual machine (called V8) from the ground up. The virtual machine leverages the concepts of hidden class transitions, precise garbage collection, and machine code generation to make JavaScript-heavy applications snappier. It will also be made freely available for other browsers to use if they so please.

Search and the User Experience

Google Chrome will feature a few peculiar design choices as well. Most noticeably, tabs will be displayed at the top of the browser window instead of below the address bar and other buttons.

The address bar (which Google is calling the “omnibox” in contrast to Firefox’s “awesome bar”) is intended to make very helpful and unobtrusive suggestions.

The search box not only displays your favorite search engine but also detects what site-specific search engines you’ve used so you can use them from the Chrome toolbar later. For example, if you’ve searched on Amazon, you can do so again in the toolbar by hitting the letter “a” and the tab key before you type your keywords.

A starting page not unlike Opera’s own Speed Dial page gives quick access to your most frequently visited sites and search engines, as well as your recent bookmarks and page visits.

Google Chrome will also let you open a so-called “Incognito” window that doesn’t record anything you do there (a similar feature to the one introduced by Internet Explorer 8 that has been dubbed “porn mode”).

To keep annoyances to a minimum, pages won’t be allowed to pop up new windows outside of their original tabs.

Windows can also be opened without an address bar and other superfluous buttons, allowing certain web applications to appear as though they don’t depend on a browser.

Security, Sandboxing, and Safe Browsing

Google Chrome is being developed with the assumption that you will encounter malware online. Each tab is contained within its own sandbox that stops malicious behavior.

Google will also continually download a list of phishing sites and list of malware sites to your computer, which will be used to warn you when you visit them. Site owners will be notified when their sites are put on either of the lists so false positives can be remedied.

With Chrome, Google appears to be making incremental yet important improvements that could add up to something very appealing. If the browser catches on, it will provide a distribution mechanism for Google Gears and help the company fend off Silverlight, Microsoft’s own rich internet app platform.

It has yet to be seen what the response from Mozilla will be like. The foundation can’t be happy that Google has snatched up two of its engineers who are now working on Chrome. But some reinforcement in the attack against Microsoft IE and in support of the open browser movement can’t hurt.

At the very least, Chrome sounds perfect for our tablet.

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Today’s the big day for the official, no-longer-beta release of the Firefox 3 browser. There is even a campaign to make today, June 17, Download Day and “set a Guinness World record for most downloads in 24 hours.” They are shooting for 5 million. Although, I’m not sure that there was a previous Guinness record to break, so any number might qualify.

But if you are going to go for a world record, even a made up one, in a single day, you might want to give yourself some running room by starting at the beginning of the day. But instead of releasing right after midnight, the new browser won’t be ready for downloading until 1 PM ET. Before then, when you go to the Firefox download page (or here or here), you are still prompted to download Firefox 2.

I can wait another 15 minutes, and I won’t be surprised if Firefox hits its download goal. Already more than 1.7 million people have “pledged” to download the browser today. Firefox 3 has the following features to recommend it:

—Much faster load times
—Fixed memory leak problem in Firefox 2
—An “Awesome Bar” (aka smart location bar) that suggests sites you’ve visited before or bookmarked when you type a URL into the address bar.
—Better security against phishing and malware
—One-click bookmarking
—Offline capabilities
—Built-in spell-check and session restore capabilities (like Firefox 2)
—Cool zoom-in feature
—Looks better on a Mac

Here is a list of all the new and improved features, as well as known issues.

Heavy Firefox users who download it today had just better hope that all of their add-ons work. (They will have 5,000 to choose from, but maybe not their favorite ones).

Firefox is the No. 2 browser with 18 percent market share compared to Internet Explorer’s 75 percent. (Its market share is higher among early adopters, perhaps 39 percent market share). Forget the world record for most downloads in a day. The real record Firefox is going for the most-used browser, period. This release should help it gain some more adherents.

Update 1:11 PM ET: The Firefox download page seems to be inundated right now. I am still waiting for it to load. Those 5 million people are going to have to wait a little longer. Maybe they should have made opened up the download floodgates by timezone at midnight in each country to spread things out.Has anybody been able to download this thing.

Update 1:19 PM: Still waiting. Now the page loads, but it’s the old page with Firefox 2. Come on, Mozilla. There’s a world record at stake here.

Update 2:30 PM: Back from lunch. Still waiting.

Update 4:37 PM: The downloads started about an hour ago, and Mozilla is reporting 14,000 downloads a minute. That is 840,000 per hour if it can keep it up. But access is still spotty. I’m still waiting.

Update 4:43 PM: Someone sent us this “secret” link where you can download Firefox 3 from a different server than the ones on the main site. It is only for Windows. (Download at your own risk). I have a Mac. So I’m still waiting.

Update 6:50 PM: After giving up for a few hours, I am finally downloading Firefox 3.0

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Mozilla CEO John Lilly revealed more details of their stealth Data project today, which we first reported here.

In a blog post, he says “data is one of the most important pieces to faciliate understanding (and innovation), and is also one of the most under-explored areas of the modern web.” He also says that Mozilla has two early projects that touch on the idea - Spectator and Test Pilot.

The Data idea is much broader, however. “There are worlds of information about how people use the web that are locked up and not currently shared,” he says. By simply adding optional tracking software to Firefox code, much of that data could be unleashed. Mozilla’s goals with the Data project include:

1. Collects & shares data in a way that embodies the user control & privacy options which are at Mozilla’s core.
2. Enables everyone — from individual researchers and entrepreneurs (both the social and capitalist types) to the largest organizations in the world — to take usage data, mix it up, mash it up, derive insight, and hopefully share some of that insight with others.
3. Helps move the conversation around data collection and web usage forward, to help consumers make more informed decisions.

As we said before, the project is still very early, has no name and Mozilla hasn’t “staffed it very much.” But the potential is huge. Tell them in the comments below and on Lilly’s blog how much you want this to happen.

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Mozilla invited a group of bloggers to its headquarters in Mountain View today for an open discussion centered around the upcoming release of Firefox 3 (currently in public beta).

CEO John Lilly started things off by pointing out that this coming Monday is the Mozilla Organization’s ten year anniversary. He described the organization as rather humble and discombobulated when it was spun off from AOL into an independent entity in 2003. As recently as 2005, when the Mozilla Corporation was created to lead development on Firefox and Thunderbird, the organization still struggled to keep its servers from crashing during “hours of terror” when browsers deployed across the world tried to update themselves at the same time (this problem has since been remedied).

These days about 150 international employees work for Mozilla, which has been divided into six organizations, including ones for Europe, Denmark, China, and Japan. The ratio between work performed by employees vs. the developer community at large stands at about 60/40. Mozilla’s fastest growing markets include China and Russia, with China seeing six-fold growth since a year ago. Mozilla has netted about 160M users globally.

Lilly and several other Mozilla employees including Mike Schroepfer, the VP of Engineering, spent a considerable amount of time discussing Firefox 3, which has been in development for three years. Firefox Beta 4 is the version currently made available to the public. Beta 5, which will be released next week, will be the last beta before a release candidate in late April or May. The final version of Firefox 3 has been slated for release in the first half of this year - in June or sooner.

Firefox 3 is meant to carry forward the motto of keeping the internet “open and participatory”. It will support 50 languages, unlike IE7, which was released with support for only one. About 50% of the extensions developed for Firefox currently work with FF3, with further compatibility expected to accelerate in May. There are about 20,000 community members testing the latest build of FF3 and submitting an average of 150 bug reports on a daily basis. Testers have been particularly vocal about moving the “home” button back to the main button area (and Mozilla has acquiesced).

The company stressed a few of FF3’s primary features. Native skinning has been implemented so that the browser looks at home in various operating systems (Mac, Windows, and Linux). The so-called “awesome bar”, an advanced version of the address bar, not only auto-completes but searches your browsing history for matches as well. Much of Firefox’s core has been rebuilt, including the way it handles history. Now more than 6 months can be searched instantaneously whereas before, the default was set at 2 weeks. And password management is more discreet; you won’t have to decide on saving a password until after you’ve signed into a site.

FF3 also includes extended security measures such as new anti-malware techniques that will prevent users from visiting sites that might infect their computers with malicious programs. The detection system relies on a blacklist of software that gets downloaded to the client periodically. There’s also more advanced SSL certificate handling and the ability to easily check whether you’re actually on a trusted site.

As far as performance goes, Mozilla is claiming that the FF3 outperforms competitors both in how quickly it processes JavaScript and how little memory it uses. The company has also been working on better caching methods that work particularly well with SSL-protected sites.

When asked about Microsoft’s recent public show of support for open standards and interoperability, Mozilla insisted that the Redmond behemoth still has a “mixed record” and that declaring support for CSS2.1 (a ten year old standard) is nothing to get excited about. The company points out that Microsoft has done nothing to support the next generation JavaScript spec and little to implement CSS3. The same goes for HTML5, the standard for offline functionality that has been embraced by Mozilla, Apple, and Opera.

Lastly, if you’re an iPhone owner who was hoping to run Firefox come summer, don’t hold your breath — the SDK license precludes apps like Firefox that interpret code. Mozilla does, however, still intend to ship a mobile version of Firefox. The platforms that will support it are yet to be seen.

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The Firefox browser has been downloaded nearly 500 million times, says their SpreadFirefox website. Parent organization Mozilla is celebrating by raising 500 million grains of rice on FreeRice. That, says Mozilla, is enough to feed 25,000 people for a day.

Earlier this month we reported that Firefox 3, beta version 3, had been released. The browser has around 17% market share worldwide and 150 million active users.

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Mozilla is expanding its universe today, moving beyond desktop software products like Firefox (browser) and Thunderbird (email) and into cloud territory - web services.

The initiative, Weave, is a new project that will store user information - like bookmarks, passwords, history, preferences and customizations, and sync it to your Firefox account. Users can then access that information in the event of a hard drive failure, or if they are on a guest machine (say, at a cyber cafe).

An early version of Weave is available (you must be using the Firefox 3 beta) here. I have not been able to sign up for an account (the confirmation email won’t send).

The service clearly overlaps with initiatives by Google and Microsoft to store user information in the cloud (and Mac users can already sync some user information to the cloud via .Mac). And there will likely be a slew of casualties in the “web OS” space, as their main selling point is to store user settings and other data and make them portable for the cyber cafe crowd.

Based on the proposed architecture and use cases, Mozilla is not yet proposing to get heavily into the online storage space. Backing up non-browser content like photos and videos would compete directly with service providers who store this information online for customers (Flickr, YouTube, Photobucket, etc.). But by managing passwords to those services, Firefox is both supporting those service providers and encouraging users to not even bother keeping a desktop copy of content. Keep it all online, and use the browser, from any computer, to keep it all organized. And don’t forget, the social graph just may be hosted by Firefox, too.

Mozilla’s vision is clearly to become the operating system of the Internet, much as Windows is the OS for most desktops. Web applications already run through the browser, and now some of the user data will be stored on servers connected to the browser, too. While Google and Microsoft fire away at each other in the battle for users’ online life, they just may want to keep an eye on Mozilla, too. It’s a non-profit, but its brand is solid gold and they just might do an end around and grab all the users.

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