The mobile Operating System, Symbian goes completely open source – all the Symbian source code that comprises 108 packages is now available for free to all under the Eclipse license (EPL) version 1.0. The Symbian Foundation consider this transition from proprietary to open source as the biggest of its kind in software history. The Symbian Foundation is a non-profit organization “guided” by Nokia and other manufacturers like Sony Ericsson. More on Symbian Wiki – Platform Opening.
For Windows, Mac, Linux: Thunderbird, the open source desktop e-mail client reaches another important milestone. The first alpha of Thunderbird 3.1 has just been released. The Thunderbird team wants to align its development cycle more closely with that of the Firefox web browser, so that Thunderbird can better leverage the constant stream of improvements that the Firefox development community is making to Gecko and other components that are shared between Firefox and Thunderbird. More»
Mozilla’s Stephen Horlander that showed us some iterations of Windows design mock-ups for Firefox 4 has posted again on his personal blog a couple of animations showing what might be tab-tasks in still-to-come Firefox 4.
The goals of these animations as Stephen puts it, is to give a visual clue to the functions of Tabs. The animation posted here simply shows how adding a new tab is will be an animated task.
For more details and Tab tearing animations with affordance move to Stephen blog.
Google Chrome for Linux Dev Channel has been updated to version 5.0.307.1 with “preliminary” desktop notification support, for GTK builds of Linux only.
Chrome desktop notifications in Linux uses D-BUS notifications also known as libnotify. Also, GTK+selection colors when using GTK theme mode gets noticeably better. Other adds and fixes in this update include;
– Improved complex text support, fixing a number of bugs in Hebrew/Arabic/Hindi/etc. display.
– Plug-ins will now be loaded from ~/.config/$PRODUCT_NAME/Plugins.
Many years back, Aaron Boodma wrote the Greasemonkey extension “exclusively” for Firefox, now working with Google, he has bent and twisted Greasemonkey so well that thousands of user scripts written in JavaScript now natively work in Chrome – just like any regular Chrome extension. Its a big smack to Firefox, if you consider that its even easier to get user scripts working in Chrome unlike in Firefox where you have to install the Greasemonkey add-on then get the script. More»
