Archive for April, 2013
Trond Werner Hansen Responds To Opera’s Claims
Offers the other side of the coin.
Yesterday, Opera revealed that they are suing one of its ex-employees, Trond Werner Hansen, who allegedly leaked trade secrets to Mozilla. Now, the man himself has decided to provide further details and explain the reason behind the case.
According to Hansen, after leaving Opera in 2006 he had an idea about developing a striped down version of a web browser, which would not only be an open source project but also have a unified search and address field as well as provide contributions to a green cause. As it turns out, Google had a similar idea too as they released Chrome few years later.
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Opera Sues Its Ex-Employee For $3.4 Million
Claims he took trade secrets to Mozilla.
Now here is a new drama for you. Apparently, Opera Software is suing one of its visionary ex-employees, Trond Werner Hansen, who joined the company in 1999 and worked till 2006, then left shortly after only to join for another year from 2009 to 2010.
Why visionary? According to the claims, he was behind a lot of innovations that everyone loves, including tabbed browsing, speed dial, mouse gesture and integrated search.
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Firefox’s Usage Stats (Telemetry) Are Not Anonymous
Your personal information will be shared with 3rd parties.
We won’t blame you if you never read Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and other “useless” information. However, there is one guy who did so and as it turns out, Mozilla’s telemetry data policy got some disturbing details.
In fact, the open source organization states that their policy is to “make Personal Information, such as your name and email address, and Potentially Personal Information, such as the URL of the site you last visited, only available to its employees, contractors, and selected contributors who signed confidentiality agreements that prohibit them from using or disclosing such information other than for approved Mozilla purposes.”
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Tips: Disable Firefox’s Telemetry Data
If you are concerned about your privacy after reading Mozilla’s statements, here is a simple tip to disable all telemetry data collecting. Go to:
Settings > Advanced
Click on the “Data Choices” tab
Uncheck the “Enable Telemetry” box
That’s it, as simple as that.
Forrester: Internet Explorer Dominates The Enterprise
But nothing to brag about.
Now here is a shocker for you: according to the recent report by Forrester, when it comes to enterprise, Internet Explorer still remains the number one web browser that IT workers choose.
How credible is it? Well, the survey itself is based on 7,295 IT workers, so the sample size is pretty decent. However, it’s not all rainbows and sunshine for once dominant IE, which holds 40.2% of the market share. Turns out, Google’s own web browser is sitting right on its toes with 27.8% share, followed by Firefox’s 25.4% and Apple’s Safari (1.8%).
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1,000 Firefox OS Phones Ordered Within Few Hours
Already out of stock.
Now here is something that will make Mozilla’s Firefox OS fans happy. According to the recent report, the open source organization sold out all their phones in just a few hours.
Although Geeksphone manufactured a total of 10,000 FOS phones (mostly for Mozilla employees and other partners), only 1,000 of them were shipped, which caused the supply issues. Interestingly enough, Geeksphone founder and CEO Javier Aguera said that they were surprised at the quick reaction and the number of people who were trying to buy a Firefox OS phone.
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Opera Mini 7.5.2 For Android Released
Be careful about the fonts.
Now here is a small Opera Mini update that will keep you happy for a while: 7.5.2. While not bringing any significant changes, the following release offers some page layout improvements as well as various stabilization fixes.
However, there are a couple more changes that are receiving a lot of negative feedback (at least in the comment section here and here). Due to font improvements for high resolution devices and font calculation method, people report that the text is now too small so please keep that in mind before upgrading.
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Twitter To Halt Internet Explorer 6 & 7 Support
May 13th is the day.
Chances are, if you are reading this blog, then IE6 or IE7 are not exactly your browsers of choice. However, in case you are using Twitter and Internet Explorer 6 or 7 (shame on you), then we have some bad news to tell.
Starting from next month, TFW (Twitter for Websites) widgets-js library will no longer initialize the Follow button, Tweet button, embedded Tweets and timelines on Internet Explorer 6. In addition to that, Web Intents Events will stop supporting both IE6 and IE7 while factory functions for the creation of widgets are going to return false to any callback made by Internet Explorer 6.
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Tip: Extract Web Site’s Color Scheme
Now here is something for the Firefox web developers. If you’ve been looking for an easy tool to quickly parse the color scheme of the web site that suits your taste (from images and CSS), then “Rainbow Color Tools” is the add-on you’ve been waiting for.
In addition to that, you can also use RCT as a color picker and save them for the later use.
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Q&A With Mozilla’s Security Community Hints At Electrolysis Re-Evaluation
Seeing that today is a slow news today we’ve decided to dig around the web and see what kind of glittery magic you can find there. As it turns out, Mozilla has recently did the IAMA session on reddit, which can be found on the following page.
Interestingly enough, the open source organization has revealed that they are re-evaluating Electrolysis (e10s), the multi-process architecture that they canned back in 2011. What was the point of it (other than process isolation)? Offer better UI responsiveness, stability and performance on multi-core machines.
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