new earth online

In an attempt to push developers forward with getting their extensions ready for the upcoming release of Firefox 3.1, they have started a new page dedicated to reporting on the current status of compatibility with addons, and information for developers detailing how they can get their addon compatible.

So far it's not looking good:

• 54% of addon's are not compatible with any version of Firefox 3.1,
• 14% work with Alpha versions of Firefox 3.1,
• 3% work with 3.1 Beta versions,
• and 29% work with the latest nightly.

If you're interested in seeing how this progresses, go and check out their Compatibility Centre.

Mozilla Geode is a new development from the Mozilla Labs that implements the W3C Geolocation Specification in Firefox. In future versions Geode will actually become a part of Mozilla (in version 3.1), but for now it's just an extension. Now let me explain what it does.

The JavaScript, navigator.geolocation can be used to identify where you currently are - so for example a mobile device running Firefox might have built-in GPS and this would be made available to the browser so that Geode can use this to tell sites this information. It's best explained through the example Mozilla use:

You've arrived in a new city, a new continent, a new coffee shop. You don't really know where you are, and are looking for a good place to eat. You pull out your laptop, fire up Firefox, and go to your favourite review site. It automatically deduces your location, and serves up some delicious suggestions a couple blocks away and plots directions there.

It does seem like a brilliant concept - something I believe the iPhone is already doing with Safari. There are however still a few things to work out - such as the use of geolocation service providers. One thing they've already thought of is privacy concerns - if you don't want a website to know exactly where you are you can instead just send the neighbourhood, the city, or no location at all. Here is an example of retrieving the information on a site:

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(pos) {
  alert( pos.latitude + ", " + pos.longitude );
})

As you can see it is actually fairly straight forward. Now I just need an excuse to try it out!

It wasn't that long ago Mozilla Labs was talking about the Aurora concept browser that they envisioned for the future. Now they're talking a little more short term, with something they're planning to add to Firefox in the very near future. This is the idea of "contextual tabs". What they mean by this is that when opening a new tab it will give a search box on the page as this is what most users open a new tab to do, but it will also provide additional information based on any highlighted text from the last tab. So if you highlighted an address on the previous tab then on this new tab it will provide an option to see that address on a map.

The other new concept that they're talking about is providing news in the tab area - this concept I'm not so keen on but it's still worth watching the video on it.

Mozilla Labs have unveiled Snowl, their experiment with messaging for Firefox.

It doesn't matter where messages originate. They're alike, whether they come from traditional email servers, RSS/Atom feeds, web discussion forums, social networks, or other sources

They have a working prototype at the minute that only supports RSS/Atom feeds and Twitter but they are planning on more universal support including popular platforms such as Facebook, AIM, and Google Talk. This Snowl prototype extension is also available from their site.

If one day this also incorporates emails then there may no longer be a need for Thunderbird or Outlook - everyone could just collect their POP3 emails in Snowl/Firefox!