Mozilla fans who are happy marching to the rhythm of Firefox’s new franticly beating drums will be pleased to know that not only is Firefox 6 still on track for 
While you're busy grilling cow parts and getting ahead on back-to-school shopping this weekend, Mozilla will spend the next few days spit shining Firefox 6, the next major browser release slated to ship on Tuesday. And though Mozilla is known for pushing back release dates, there doesn't seem to be any cause for concern that Firefox 6 isn't ready for prime time.
Spending time with Firefox is a lot like spending time with your lovable young nieces; usually, everything goes swell and you walk away feeling good, a content smile plastered across your face. But sometimes, they do something so overwhelmingly stupid that you can't help but shake your head and wonder about their future. You may not be able to convince your niece that shoving crap inside electrical sockets is a dumb idea, but Mozilla's tackling its horrifyingly bad memory issues head-on with the MemShrink initiative – and one developer's already reporting outstanding results.
Telling you that Mozilla's latest Firefox mockup is Chrome's "Single White Female" requires a little context. "Single White Female" is a suspense thriller from the early 1990s in which Bridget Fonda plays a newly single software engineer in need of a roommate. Enter Jennifer Jason Leigh who fulfills that role but turns out to be a psychotic nutcase obsessed with Fonda. In one scene, Leigh alters her wardrobe and hair style to look just like Fonda and, well, see where we're going with this?
Every month we examine the state of the browser market in terms of market share, and it's usually more of the same. Internet Explorer, while still dominating with over a 50 percent share, slides downward month after month. Firefox, still the biggest threat to IE if looking at the numbers and not the trend, also continues to lose market share, but at a much slower pace. And Chrome, which popularized the concept of a minimalistic browser interface, just keeps gaining ground. While all this has been going on, Apple's Safari browser has been closing in on the big three.
Several months ago you could have criticized Mozilla for dragging its feet with new Firefox releases while one of its main rivals -- Google Chrome -- was kicking out new builds nearly as fast as you could download them. Mozilla responded by implementing a rapid release schedule of its own, and now that it has, some IT users are concerned things are developing a little too quickly. To put those fears to rest, Mozilla this week unveiled its Enterprise User Working Group.
A belated birthday wish goes out to the Mozilla Foundation, the not-for-profit organization which turned 8 years old on Friday. Mozilla's roots actually date back to early 1998 when Netscape created the Mozilla Organization to oversee the development of the Mozilla Application Suite. On July 15, 2003, AOL (Netscape's parent company) helped launch the Mozilla Foundation, and gave the three-person team a set of wings in the form of hardware, intellectual property, and a $2 million donation before pushing it out of the nest to fly on its own.
Mozilla over the weekend gave its Firefox 6 browser a groom and haircut so that it can pass for a beta release. The next step is to give the 6.0 release a suit, tie, and spiffy pair of shoes so that it's ready to mingle with the public at large. Until then, you can download the beta build and get acquainted with Firefox 6, which offers a handful of changes and improvements over previous builds.
Mozilla's Firefox browser rose to prominence by doing things Microsoft's Internet Explorer refused to do, like tabbed browsing, providing frequent updates (five years passed between the release of IE 6 and IE 7), playing nice with Web standards, and supporting extensions. But if Firefox has an Achilles heel, it's the browser's notorious memory leak problem that some users have reported with each and every release. Word on the Web is that Mozilla may have finally found a permanent solution.
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