Symbian has been completely Open-Sourced

The mobile Operating System, Symbian goes completely open source – all the Symbian source code that comprises 108 packages is now available for free to all under the Eclipse license (EPL) version 1.0. The Symbian Foundation considers this transition from proprietary to open source as the biggest of its kind in software history. The Symbian Foundation is a non-profit organization “guided” by Nokia and other manufacturers like Sony Ericsson. More on Symbian Wiki – Platform Opening.

Thunderbird 3.1 Alpha 1 ‘Lanikai’ now Available for Download

Thunderbird 3.1 Alpha1 - Lanikai

For Windows, Mac, Linux: Thunderbird, the open source desktop e-mail client reaches another important milestone. The first alpha of Thunderbird 3.1 has just been released. The Thunderbird team wants to align its development cycle more closely with that of the Firefox web browser, so that Thunderbird can better leverage the constant stream of improvements that the Firefox development community is making to Gecko and other components that are shared between Firefox and Thunderbird. More»

New tab and Tab Tear Off animations for Firefox 4

Mozilla’s Stephen Horlander that showed us some iterations of Windows design mock-ups for Firefox 4 has posted again on his personal blog a couple of animations showing what might be tab-tasks in still-to-come Firefox 4.

The goals of these animations as Stephen puts it, is to give a visual clue to the functions of Tabs. The animation posted here simply shows how adding a new tab is will be an animated task.

For more details and Tab tearing animations with affordance move to Stephen blog.

Chrome for Linux Dev Channel Updated to 5.0

Google Chrome Dev 5

Google Chrome for Linux Dev Channel has been updated to version 5.0.307.1 with “preliminary” desktop notification support, for GTK builds of Linux only.
Chrome desktop notifications in Linux uses D-BUS notifications also known as libnotify. Also, GTK+selection colors when using GTK theme mode gets noticeably better. Other adds and fixes in this update include;

- Improved complex text support, fixing a number of bugs in Hebrew/Arabic/Hindi/etc. display.
- Plug-ins will now be loaded from ~/.config/$PRODUCT_NAME/Plugins.

Follow-up; Why not libnotify, Linux FAQ. More on Chrome releases
If you get to implement Chrome desktop notifications on your Ubuntu, let us know how you did it. :-)

Chrome 4 gets 40,000 Extra Extensions [User Scripts]

Greasemonkey

Many years back, Aaron Boodma wrote the Greasemonkey extension “exclusively” for Firefox, now working with Google, he has bent and twisted Greasemonkey so well that thousands of user scripts written in JavaScript now natively work in Chrome – just like any regular Chrome extension. Its a big smack to Firefox, if you consider that its even easier to get user scripts working in Chrome unlike in Firefox where you have to install the Greasemonkey add-on then get the script. More»

Chromium for Linux Daily Builds reach 5.0

Chromium Daily

While the Dev and Beta channels are still stuck in version 4.0, Chromium for Linux Daily builds make it to version 5.0. The Daily PPA is updated more frequently than the Dev PPA, but it is completely untested, that certainly makes it more unstable and unreliable. It works and loads web pages quickly too. More»

VLC Media Player to get Community-Built Extensions starting Version 1.1

VLC 1.1

That Mozilla Firefox is a model to copy is well known, but I guess many did not expect the open source media player VLC, one of the best media players around to get community-built extensions just like Firefox. Well, a VideoLan player builder announced a complete overhauling of VLC codes to permit the implementation of community-built extensions come version 1.1. Developers will use Lua – a lightweight scripting language to create their extensions for VLC. More»

Opera 10.50 Pre-Alpha Snapshot for Linux, Mac and Windows

Opera

Opera developers have released another snapshot of the upcoming Opera 10.5 web browser. In the previous release, Linux builds were absent, this new snapshot marks the return of the penguin. But Mac and Linux versions of Opera 10.5 are much behind in development with respect to the Windows version. Opera intends to roll-out Opera 10.50 final for Windows first, and then set-off to deliver to the other platforms their ‘finals’. More»

Firefox for Nokia’s Maemo Platform Now Available [Firefox Mobile]

Firefox mobile

Mozilla enters directly into the mobile browser market with the release of its first ever mobile browser. Fennec ‘Maemo’ 1.0 is now available for Nokia N900.

Opera Mini the leader in this sector should watch-out as Firefox intends to bring all its desktop experience to mobile devices – for example Mozilla rolled out Weave Sync on Friday for Firefox and Firefox mobile, so users could completely synchronize their bookmarks, saved passwords, preferences, browsing history, and open browser tabs.

Flash was dis-activated by default in Firefox for Maemo 1.0 RC 3 as it greatly compromised its permanence, but no Flash also means Firefox mobile users wouldn’t be able to adequately view Flash dependent web sites or watch YouTube video clips – Mozilla now has temporary Flash substitute add-on called YouTube enabler for Firefox mobile, but it might still affect the overall performance and interactivity of the browser. More»