ReadWriteWeb

It's been two years since ReadWriteWeb last published the Thunderbird 2 review. Since then Thunderbird has been restructured away from Firefox into Mozilla Messaging and the group is finally releasing its desktop email application, Thunderbird 3. While the launch has been widely anticipated, the fact that the entire project is open source means that the company's point releases have been hashed out in clear view. ReadWriteWeb caught up with CEO of Mozilla Messaging David Ascher to hear about the latest updates to Thunderbird as well as the company's plans for open conversation aggregator Raindrop.

Recently, a consortium of type designers and web designers have gathered around a new font format specification called Web Open Font Format (WOFF). The format would allow more typefaces to appear across the web and to be readable by both humans and search engines.

With support from Mozilla announced with the release of Firefox 3.6, and with the advocacy of leading type foundries such as Linotype, Emigre, and Hoefler & Frere-Jones, the question of web fonts might be satisfactorily resolved in the near future.

The latest update to the Firefox web browser has now been made available. Released Friday evening, Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 promises a number of new features, including built-in theme support and drag-and-drop file uploads, but perhaps most importantly, there is a renewed focus on browser speed. Claiming improved JavaScript performance, better overall responsiveness and faster startup times, there's no doubt Firefox's development in these areas has been fueled, at least in part, by the speed increases achieved by its rivals, Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera.

The French Government's public finance department will switch 130,000 desktop PC's to Mozilla's email and calendar applications. Mozilla's Thunderbird email service, Lightning Calendar and an open-source groupware will replace IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Office.

The move signals how more government agencies from around the world are dropping enterprise accounts with major vendors to cut down on costs and get better license agreements.They are turning to open-source providers and companies like Google that can offer email and services such as Google Docs.

Flock, the "social web browser" built on top of Mozilla's Firefox, has remained somewhat of a niche product despite its integrations with the most popular social networking sites on the web. Although its features should have made it a top product in our Facebook and Twitter-obsessed age, it has clearly remained on the sidelines of the web browser market.

Today, Flock is trying a new strategy. The company plans to extend itself beyond the "social" niche by trying to find a home in an entirely different one: the Hispanic web. To tap into this new audience, Flock is releasing a Spanish-language web browser in partnership with Univision Interactive Media, the top Spanish-language media company in the U.S.

While most conversation aggregators are concerned with harnessing your river of data, Mozilla is breaking it down into manageable raindrops. According to a morning blog post on the Mozilla Labs site the company is launching the prototype for Raindrop 0.1, a product that they're calling "open messaging for the open web". While Mozilla's Snowl Firefox Add-On made it possible to follow streams and rivers of messages in your existing browser, Raindrop offers what appears to be a much cleaner interface and an API to hack on your own personal conversation dashboard.

Mozilla plans to release Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, for Nokia's Maemo, Windows Mobile and Android devices in the near future. In an interview with Om Malik, Mozilla CEO John Lilly also said that Mozilla has fallen behind in the mobile space, as WebKit-based browsers like Safari on the iPhone currently have a large lead, but he is confident that Mozilla can deliver a better browsing experience. Mozilla, according to Lilly, wanted to wait for devices to get to the point where they could handle everything a desktop browser could. Mozilla, however, isn't likely to develop a mobile version of Firefox for BlackBerry anytime soon.

Think desktop email is dead? Not so says the latest entrant to this field, San Francisco-based startup Postbox, who is today revealing the final release of their desktop email application based on Mozilla technology. Originally launched into beta a year ago, Postbox has a heavy focus on search and organization with a primary goal of addressing email users' information overload issues. Like Mozilla's own Thunderbird email application, Postbox exists only as downloadable software. However, unlike other desktop programs, Postbox natively integrates web services into its interface, including Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

TestSwarm is a new Mozilla Labs project that aims to give developers an easy way to quickly test their JavaScript code on multiple browser versions. According to John Resig, who originally initiated this project as a tool to support the jQuery team, today's methods of cross-browser JavaScript testing simply don't scale. As a solution, he proposed to crowdsource these tests and farm them out to the browsers that people are already running on their computers. If you want to contribute to the project as a tester, simply head over to TestSwarm.com and the site will tell you if your browser is currently needed.

The Opera Mini application is now considered not only the world's most popular mobile browser, but also the world's most downloaded app. According to independent applications marketplace GetJar, the browser has been downloaded more than 25 million times from its store. "The fact that Opera Mini is the most downloaded app on an open app store like GetJar makes us proud," said Opera's Chief Strategy Officer Rolf Assev. "It proves that our vision of providing a browser that works on almost all phones will give millions a better way to access the Web."