Red Fox - Credit: mikebaird on Flickr (CC BY)

Firefox 3.5 has been released.  Of much importance to free culture, it supports the HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags.

Originally envisioned as a quick follow-up to 2008’s release of Firefox 3.0, Mozilla ended up packing in quite a few extra features into its flagship browser and spent months making sure that Firefox 3.5 was the fastest, most powerful Firefox yet.

Firefox 3.5 brings with it entirely new and much faster rendering engines for both static web pages and the JavaScript code that powers today’s complex web-based applications. There are new privacy features, new capabilities for playing video and audio files and improved search tools. There are also a handful of other new features that should prove useful for both Firefox devotees and newcomers alike.

Yay FF.

• Web Monkey

Groklaw reports that Mozilla, after the negative reaction from the community, has decided to forego having the next version of Ubuntu display an End-User License Agreement upon first use of the Firefox browser.

Here’s a screenshot of the latest language from Mozilla, and as you’ll see, they absolutely have listened to the community’s EULA concerns (if you click on the image, it gets larger). Instead of a EULA, the new page you get on install is a notices page with no “I agree” requirement, along with a link to an optional services agreement, and instructions there on how to avoid having to accept the services, if you don’t want them. The notices inform you about the license being the MPL, that Mozilla’s trademarks are theirs, not ours, and the link to the services offerings. I believe trademarks are important to protect, as you probably know from reading Groklaw.

This is far better than an EULA, especially because it both addresses the real issue at hand (trademarks, not copyrights) and because it exists in a human-readable short summary.

• Groklaw
• Slashdot

Firefox

Recently a subcommunity within the Ubuntu community became upset because Mozilla required that Firefox show an EULA on first startup. Mozilla has alterred their stance since then.

“There is a need for something, something to explain the license I’m not sure I would call it a EULA because that has a meaning to many people of adding restrictions to software and we won’t be doing that,” Baker said. “We’ll be having a license agreement much as Red Hat has a license agreement that says the software is available under the GPL and don’t use our trademarks etcetera. So we’ll have a license agreement but we won’t think of it as a EULA.”

The move away from a EULA to something more in line with other open source approaches to licensing on Linux is something that Baker noted has been in process for some time.

I really think that free licenses should consider adding a clause about trademark so that stuff like this can’t happen.

• Internet News
• Slashdot

Firefox

Mozilla is requiring that Ubuntu show the Firefox EULA to continue calling the browser Firefox.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable for Mozilla to have requirements and guidelines for the use of their trademark – we have the same for Ubuntu, and many other free software projects do the same. I would in fact consider it a best practice to have a good brand on a free software project, which means having trademark guidelines.

That said, I would not consider an EULA as a best practice. It’s unfortunate that Mozilla feels this is absolutely necessary, but they do, and none of us are in a position to be experts about the legal constraints which Mozilla feels apply to them. We had extensive conversations with Mozilla in order to find the best possible way of meeting their requirements while preserving the flow of use of the system for our users.

This trademark stuff is so sketch.  I’m not really digging Mozilla as of late.

• Launchpad (Shuttleworth’s response)
• Launchpad (EULA)
• Slashdot
• Wikipedia (Firefox)

Google has launched their own browser, chrome.

A Google browser has been rumored for so long that most people have stopped talking about it. But the folks in this room know that the talking will soon begin again. Chrome is due to rock the Web just 16 days from this meeting.

It turns out the state of the release is … not so bad. At Release Build Minus One — ideally, the last version before the public beta hits the streets — there are only five “blocking” bugs, all of which Rakowski and team deem fixable. “Things are looking good,” says Mark Larson, one of the tech leads.

Uh oh.  It seems that Chrome is built on free software (Chromium) but is not actually free itself.  Can anyone verify with licenses?

• Wired
• Chrome

Ubiquity introduces human-language driven commands to make firefox do whatever you want.

Ubiquity 0.1

• Lets you map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; lookup and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more. Ubiquity “command list” to see them all.
  
• Find and install new commands to extend your browser’s vocabulary through a simple subscription mechanism
  
• Read about Ubiquity In Depth, or see a number of the commands in action (with screenshots) in the Ubiquity Tutorial.

All of the code underlying the Ubiquity experiment is being released as open source software under the the GPL/MPL/LGPL tri-license.

Go to the link and check out the video…it’s pretty cool.  I’m still not a fan of Mozilla because of trademark stuff, but this could keep me hooked on FF for a while if I can’t figure out how to get this to work with Konqueror.

• Mozilla Labs

Firefox was downloaded 8,002,530 times in 24 hours, making it into the Guinness Book of World Records.

Thanks to the support of the always amazing Mozilla community, we now hold a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. From 18:16 UTC on June 17, 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18, 2008, 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3 and are now enjoying a safer, smarter and better Web.

Ever since Firefox was launched in 2004 we’ve relied on our community to help us spread the word, and thanks to projects including crop circles, newspaper ads, giant stickers, videos, blogs and more we now have over 180 million users in more than 230 countries.

So what’s next? We’ll just have to wait and see what YOU come up with!

“8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3″…ok, we all know that that is a lie. At least one person downloaded twice.

• Spread Firefox
• Slashdot

Firefox 3 has been released, setting a world record for the most downloaded software in 24 hours.

The Web is all about innovation, and Firefox 3 sets the pace with dozens of new features, including the smart location bar, one-click bookmarking and blindingly fast performance.

Yea, I know.  Sorry this is late.

• Mozilla