Mozilla partners with public media to provide crowdsourced captions and subtitles for the U.S. Open Election 2012. The new technology called “Mozilla Popcorn,” is a HTML5 media tool which help developers and authors create interactive pages that supplement video and audio with rich web content.
This Wednesday the World Economic Forum will take place in Switzerland. Facebook, Google, Apple and other Web companies are waiting to see the next version of Europe’s data protection laws that would be revealed at the forum. The document could include harsh penalties that will enable the European Commission to impose fines of up to 5 percent of a company’s global financial turnover.
Wikipedia's English-language pages went black for 24 hours to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act. The splash page displays an announcement which says that the legislation offered by SOPA could fatally damage the free and open Internet. Google and Craigslist also joined the virtual protest asking their users to contact Congress and vote against the Stop Online Piracy Act.
Google shares the principles behind Chrome security in a document that gives users some insight into the browser development. Some of the major security principles which the company follows are: design for defense in depth, be transparent, engage the community, speed matters and make the web safer for everyone.
Mozilla announced its plans for the end of support for Firefox 3.6. The company won't release any new fixes or updates after April 24, 2012 which is also the date when Firefox 10 will be launched as it'll be Mozilla’s first Extended Support Release (ESR). Using Firefox 3.6 beyond the end of life date is dangerous and not recommended.
Google released Chrome 17 beta version which comes with improved speed and security. Thanks to the recent changes the browser will start to load some web pages in the background while the user is typing the URL and will examine executable files that are being downloaded in order to warn the user if any of them is malicious.
Mozilla didn't make big changes in the standard look of its latest Firefox 9.0.1 but the browser is much faster and better according to the reports. Tests show that Firefox 9.0.1 still is not as fast as Google Chrome 16 but its performance is far better than in the previous versions.
The first versions of Firefox 11 Aurora for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android is available for download on the Aurora developmental channel for the newest Firefox innovations in an unstable environment. With the new update Firefox supports playing Adobe Flash content and its Android interface has a more appealing look.
According to the latest data from Net Applications, IE6 usage has now officially dropped below 1% in the US. The outdated browser had already less than a percent usage in Austria, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway. The next to join the list are countries like the Czech Republic, Mexico, Ukraine, Portugal and the Philippines. That's good news for the web developers who can consider IE6 as a low-priority at this point and stop spending their time having to support it.
Mozilla released version 9.0.1 of its Firefox browser only a day after the launch of the Firefox 9. The update comes with a fixed bug 708572 which was causing crashes on Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.