ReadWriteWeb

It became a very heated debate over a very small thing: whether accelerated releases of Mozilla Firefox going forward will contain version numbers in its About dialog box. The opposition to Mozilla's plan to remove version numbers, and perhaps omit referring to them in consumer-focused marketing, centered around the difficulties IT departments face in managing end-users browsers, and that developers face in creating support products for them, such as add-ons.

Late Tuesday, the organization reversed course, saying the About box will remain as it has been. But in making that statement, Alex Faaborg, a contributor to the User Interface (UX) team of the open source project, told other contributors in Mozilla's public newsgroup that his team never actually made a final decision to remove version numbers in the first place, and that the vehement defense of UX's decision by Firefox product manager Asa Dotzler was, through no fault of his own, wrong.

Mozilla is continuing in its efforts to disrupt proprietary, single-vendor application ecosystems on mobile devices. This time around the Moz is taking up the task of providing a consistent API so developers can write HTML5 applications rather than native apps for iOS, Android, and other mobile devices and operating systems. Called WebAPI, the target is to provide "a basic HTML5 phone experience" within six months and submit the API to the W3C for standardization.

It might not be long before the phrase "new version of Firefox" ends up being not very thrilling at all. On schedule, just six weeks after the organization gave the final go-ahead to release Firefox 5 (the "dot-oh" is oh, so 2010), this afternoon installed versions of version 5 were buzzing their users that Firefox 6 was available.

It's part of an ambitious new scheduling plan by the Mozilla organization to expedite new features as rapidly as possible, in the wake of increased competition from Google Chrome, whose latest stable release is version 13, and whose dev channel release is on the tail end of 14. But the plan has met resistance recently from developers and IT personnel who claim six weeks is not enough turn-around time to test a new release before distributing it to users in their enterprise.

The developers of two of the most influential open-source Web browsers are working together on a feature that should make Web apps play together much more nicely. As we covered on ReadWriteHack yesterday, Google's Chromium engineers announced that they're working with Mozilla on a framework called Web Intents, the brainchild of Google developer Paul Kinlan. Firefox announced its project last month.

Web Intents, based on an existing capability in Google's Android mobile OS, will let Web apps express a simple call for an action, like 'share' or 'edit,' which receiving apps will be designed to use, without either app needing to have specific knowledge of the APIs of the other. This way, instead of having to code for each specific Web app one might want to access, developers can just use these simple requests, which will be built into the browser. The Chrome and Firefox teams are each building this functionality for their own browser, but they're combining their proposals to use a single API for Web app developers to reach both platforms.

In a blog post, Google software engineer James Hawkins revealed that the company is working on a system called Web Intents in which it will enable Chrome users to pipe data between different Web applications much the same way Android users can share data between apps. The idea is to create one API that various Web applications can all use to pass data back and forth without a need for each one to be designed to work with the other apps.

This week, Mozilla re-established its Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group, following last month's controversy over Firefox product manager Asa Dotzler's comment that, "Enterprise has never been (and I'll argue, shouldn't be) a focus."

At issue is Mozilla's lack of support for previous versions of Firefox, even as it releases new versions at a feverish pace. Mozilla released Firefox 5 only three months after Firefox 4, and announced it was end-of-lifeing Firefox 4. The organization will repeat the cycle in another three months when it releases Firefox 6. The problem for enterprises is that it can take at least 3 months to test required sites and applications against a new version of the browser.

According to a post on the Mozilla Add-Ons Blog, 85% of Firefox 4 users have at least one add-on installed. The average user has five add-ons installed. The figure doesn't include the Personas feature and excludes add-ons bundled with other software that users haven't actively chosen to install.

"We previously estimated that at least a third of Firefox users had chosen to install an add-on, but knew the number was higher than that," wrote Justin Scott, the product manager for add-ons at Mozilla.

Just three months after the hugely successful release of Firefox 4, Mozilla has released the newest version of its browser, Firefox 5. There's little fanfare today, unlike with the previous releases of Mozilla's browser. That's because much like the rapid release cycle of Google's Chrome browser, Mozilla has moved to a faster development cycle for Firefox.

This latest version boasts over one thousand improvements to the browser's security and performance, but the changes - at least to most users - probably won't be that noticeable. It also includes a number of updates to make it easier for developers to build Firefox add-ons and Web apps.

Mozilla is working on technology that will allow PDF documents to be rendered within the browser, rather than utilizing a browser plug-in or an external app to open them. On his blog, Mozilla researcher Andreas Gal has described the project to build a PDF reader in HTML5 and JavaScript.

Typically, PDFs are rendered in a browser with a plugin - either with Adobe's own PDF reader or with another provider's renderer. These plugins often cannot take full advantage of PDF features. Furthermore, as Gal points out, there is quite a large trusted code base, something that's forced the Google Chrome browser to have sandbox the PDF renderer in order to avoid code injection attacks. An HTML5 version would be make this more secure, as would the open source nature of the project.

Mozilla is always experimenting with how content is searched and discovered in Firefox. Mozilla Labs has released a new experimental feature today in its Prospector series. Called Predictive NewTab it supplements the fixed list of top sites presented to users when they open a new browser tab in Firefox.

The idea is to use the semantic data of browser history and tagged bookmarks to give users recommendations of places to visit on the Web when they open a new tab. It should make the "speed dial" list of sites users frequently visit faster and more relevant.