• Personas: New Firefox themes called “Personas” let you change the look of your Firefox with a single click. Choose anything from simple designs to colorful patterns to content from community members and partners like Harry Potter, Bob Marley or Lady Gaga. With a gallery of over 35,000 to choose from, you can change your Persona as often as you like. Go to GetPersonas.com to start browsing the galleries and check out “Themes” in the Add-Ons Manager to manage your designs.
• Plugin Updater: Some Web pages require that you install small applications called Plugins to watch videos, play games or view documents. It can be hard to make sure that all of your Plugins are always up to date. Since outdated Plugins are a security risk, Firefox will let you know when you have a Plugin that’s vulnerable to attack and help you get an updated version. If you want to check your Plugins at any time, just select “Check for Updates” from the Help menu, or click on “Find Updates” in the Plugins page of the Add-ons Manager.
• Stability improvements: Firefox 3.6 significantly decreased crashes caused by third party software – all without sacrificing our extensibility in any way
• Form Complete: It’s like the Awesome Bar, but for forms. Now, when you’re filling out an online form like your shipping address, Firefox will suggest information for each field based on your most common answers for similar fields in other forms (rather than just showing you an alphabetical list). Instead of typing out the same answers over and over, you’ll be zipping through the forms in no time.
• Performance: Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness, and startup time
• Open Video and Audio: With the world’s best implementation of HTML 5 audio and video support, now video can be displayed full screen and supports poster frames

And for our fellow developers:

• Support for the latest HTML5 specification, including the File API for local file handling
• Font Support: In addition to OpenType and TrueType fonts, 3.6 now supports the new Web Open Font Format (WOFF)
• CSS gradients: Supports linear and radial CSS gradients which allow for a smoother transition between colors
• Device orientation: Firefox 3.6 exposes the orientation of the laptop or device to Web pages

Whether the new Firefox can live up to our expectations is yet to be seen. The last Thunderbird release left some users frustrated because of add-on incompatibility and flash-related problems (we even got some mail regarding these issues), but Mozilla products are usually of great quality, and I shall hit the update button without hesitation.
If you do however give it second thoughts, I’ll leave the job of convincing you to Mike Beltzner, Director of Firefox Development:

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Mozilla is taking act on the several innovations that have been popping up these last years in interface design, and they’re taking act. According to the last Firefox 4 mockups from a developer, the interface will slightly ape Google Chrome’s as well as one feature from Office 2007. First of all, the tabs-on-top configuration is likely to take over. Secondly, Mozilla will be adding an “app button” that will group all of Firefox’s most common actions. Some other ideas, like a progress bar sitting on top of the browsers’ tabs, that the blog post doesn’t talk about are also features in the mockup (below).

But the real innovation may be yet to come. The “Challenge” proposed by Mozilla has the goal of creating the content of the “home tab”, an entire new concept that will be introduced with Firefox 4. It’s now the users turn to tell the developer what they need.

So you’re bored now that you’ve received your Christmas presents? Why not have a go a that challenge? The next Firefox may have a bit of you in it.

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Thumbnail credit: Arjan Menger

The video below is the result of quick “research” (i.e. some Google guys asking questions in Times Square, New York) on what people thought a “browser” was. The results are scary. For those who are not courageous enough to watch it, this video basically proves that most people have no idea what a browser is, and assimilate the term to the concept of search engine.

The problem is that people are not aware of what software they are using. If they bump into limitations from using that software, they’ll think their at the edge of all possible technology and not that the particular software they are using is limited. One out of ten people is using Internet Explorer 6. They are not using it because they chose it but rather because they have no idea that Internet Explorer is a software program that can be replaced. You might argue that there’s no bad to that, but it is clear that people using IE 6 have a lower web experience than those with IE 8, FF3, etc. Of course Google is worried because their whole business is on the web: a bad web experience for 10% of the Internet’s users ultimately means 10% of users that would have a limited experience with their products.

Imagine what people would answer if they were asked what OS they used? Would they know there were alternatives? Microsoft has long taken advantage of this situation by pushing hardware brands to tie their operating system to the PCs. Practically nobody revolted against that situation because they did not have the knowledge to study the alternatives. You might say that the situation has changed because Apple is making a lot of noise, but according to the numbers I’ve seen, Firefox is much more used than Mac OS. That means that if more than 10% of users are not able to see the advantage to switching to a new browser from IE6, these same users will not even think of changing the whole OS. If 90% of users do not know what an OS is (and it’s probably harder to understand what an OS is than what a browser is), who can break the Microsoft monopoly.

On a more cheerful note, Apple’s advertisement serves the OS market as a whole as it opens consumers eyes and consequently pushes it towards more innovation. Now I’m asking myself a question: will the browser chooser option on Windows 7 (in Europe only) open people’s eyes about choice? The “ballot screen” that Microsoft will have to provide their new costomers with a new insight on browser competition, even if I don’t believe a larger share of customers will actually will care. This video just made me realize why Microsoft was fighting the EC so much.

Conclusion? I’d say computer illiteracy is good for Microsoft and any information is dangerous for their dominance. If people don’t know what a browser is, they won’t feel the need to change. The same thing goes for the OS.

If you’re not sure yourself what a web browser is, here’s a video that explains it is (very) simple terms:

You might want to check whatbrowser.org (from which this video comes from), a web site made by “some folks at Google”, that is non partisan (i.e. not pushing Google Chrome down your throat), and that’s simple to understand for non-tech-savvy users. I think I’ll send the address to my clueless friends. You should do the same.

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