Firefox

Review: Firefox for Android used to be a must-use mainly for Firefox fans. It was good at what it did, but it wasn't great, and the competitive field of Android browsers surpassed it on many levels.

As a reaction, Mozilla spent the better part of a year redesigning the browser from the ground up. The new Firefox for Android brings an interface powered by native code, competitive page-load times, and Flash support. As important for Mozilla is that the sum of the new browser's parts will keep its flagship brand relevant on Android as Chrome for Android grows. … Read more

The Portable Document Format is one of the more ubiquitous document types both on the Web and on personal devices, and can be used for distributing manuals, brochures, and most other formatted documents.

However, until now Firefox, one of the more popular Web browsers, in part due to its availability on OS X, Windows, and Linux, has not had a built-in PDF reader. Instead, to open PDFs it's been necessary to either install a browser plug-in or download the PDFs and open them in a managing program like Apple's Preview.

However, in the latest version of Firefox, Mozilla … Read more

Mozilla is catching its browser up to Windows 8.

The Firefox Nightly version -- the precursor to Aurora, beta, and final releases -- now supports the touch-oriented, no-menu interface of Windows 8 formerly known as Metro, according to a tweet from Mozilla about the development.

Mozilla developer Paul Rouget posted several screenshots of the Metro version of the early Firefox build.

The early build features a number of Metro features, including a no-menu-bar look that relies instead on actions triggered by swiping in from the edges of the screen. That includes the access to search engines, downloaded files, and tab … Read more

It is nearly impossible to hear the acronym "IE" in a workplace setting without somebody appending to it the word "sucks." To be more genteel about it, older versions of Internet Explorer on corporate computers simply do not reflect the quality of modern browsers. So why does that massive corporation you work for make you use IE 8 or older in the first place?

A complicated problem Why you're forced to do at least some work in slow, standards noncompliant, security risk-prone legacy versions of Internet Explorer comes down to your employer's need to … Read more

For most users, Firefox's hiding the "http://" prefix and the trailing slash of Web site addresses in its URL bar falls somewhere between a non-issue and preferred. (By default, for example, Firefox displays howto.cnet.com instead of http://howto.cnet.com/.) These users get a cleaner view of the Web site they are visiting and go about their day.

If you make it a regular practice to enter your own characters after the the trailing slash, however, then you can tell Firefox to stop trimming URLs in such a manner. Here's how:

Step 1: Type … Read more

The Web browser is the most-used kind of software in the world, having become the de facto way that people access the Internet. Today, virtually all computing tasks can be completed in the browser.

Testing browsers can veer from incredibly complex to shockingly simple, depending on what you're looking for and why. At CNET, we prefer a holistic approach to browser benchmarking, looking at a combination of tests that benchmark general browser behavior, as well as several "real-world" tests that look at browser performance in common scenarios.

The days of needing an app, add-on, or extension to make video calls in your browser are numbered. Google and Mozilla, the respective makers of Chrome and Firefox, just demonstrated a new development in HTML5's WebRTC protocol that lets people talk to each other using two different browsers and no third-party apps.

Currently only available in Chrome 25 beta and Firefox Nightly, the change in WebRTC comes thanks to the development work of several groups. These include members of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), as well as engineers at Google and Mozilla. … Read more

Well, look what just landed in my in-box a few minutes ago: a save-the-date from Mozilla, best known for its Firefox browser, for a press conference at Mobile World Congress later this month.

Mozilla has been hard at work on Firefox OS, an open-source operating system alternative for developers to really sink their teeth into.

We got our latest hands-on with the developing OS last month at CES, but to me, a press conference worthy of a save-the-date means one thing: that Mozilla is ready to show off a major new development.

CNET reached out to Mozilla and will update … Read more