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Mozilla and Google have extended a search deal through 2011, providing some financial security to the backer of the open-source Firefox Web browser.

“We’ve just renewed our agreement with Google for an additional three years. This agreement now ends in November of 2011 rather than November of 2008, so we have stability in income,” said Mozilla Foundation chairwoman Mitchell Baker in a blog post Monday.

Google pays for prominent placement in Firefox, including the default home page and the default choice in the search box.

The deal has been lucrative for the foundation whose two subsidiaries create Firefox and the Thunderbird e-mail software. In 2006, Google supplied $56.8 million of Mozilla’s revenue–85 percent of the total for the foundation.

Google is the default search provider in the Firefox search bar.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

And the money will come in handy. Firefox grew to its current position as the second-ranked Web browser during a hiatus when Microsoft rested on its Internet Explorer laurels. Now Microsoft is fighting back hard with IE 8, and Apple is spreading its Safari browser to Windows, the iPhone, and iPod Touch. Even fourth-ranked Opera is determined to stay in the game.

Mozilla hopes to release Firefox 3.1 by the end of the year with improvements to JavaScript execution speed, the ability to run JavaScript tasks in the background, and built-in video and audio support.

(Via TechCrunch.)

Original post:
Mozila’s Google subsidy to last three more years

An annoying and long-lived bug is preventing some users from viewing Web videos. There’s a workaround, but for many, the cure is as bad as the disease.

The bug is that Flash videos don’t play for certain Firefox 3 users on Windows XP or Vista, when using the current Flash player version 9. On YouTube, CNET TV, and other sites, embedded videos will start, but they halt after two seconds. Both Mozilla and Adobe have been aware of the issue since late May, but as yet no solution has been found. For some people suffering from this bug, it’s intermittent. For others, it’s a consistent block to viewing online videos.

One workaround solution is to install the Flash 10 player, which is still in beta. Unfortunately, many Flash video sites don’t recognize that Flash 10 is a valid and current player. CNN, for example, thinks Flash 10 beta is older than Flash 8, asks users to upgrade to Flash 9, and thus won’t play at all.

The cure is worse than the disease.

Since the bug is serious and has been known for some time, I called both Mozilla and Adobe to see what’s going on. I spoke first with Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s “phenomenologist,” aka head of user experience. He pointed me to the record in Bugzilla where they’re tracking the issue and gave me some of the issues they think are responsible for this one. In a nutshell, Mozilla thinks there’s a miscommunication between plug-in and browser but doesn’t know which product is the culprit.

He also took a minute to trumpet Mozilla’s open-source philosophy. Since Firefox’s code is open, Adobe can look at it to try to determine what is going on. But Mozilla’s team can’t look into Flash. Beltzner didn’t blame Adobe for the bug itself, but he did say that Adobe’s traditional closed software architecture is slowing down their investigation. “We hit a wall when it’s a closed-source solution,” he said.

An Adobe spokesperson, who asked not to be named, said Adobe is looking into the issue but isn’t yet sure if the problem is isolated to Firefox 3 and Flash 9, or if there is a third culprit–another plug-in, perhaps–that is throwing things off for the Flash player.

Finger pointing is common in software troubleshooting, and I give both Mozilla and Adobe credit for only generally waving, not pointing, their fingers at each other. Unfortunately, neither team seems to have developers who can reproduce this issue, which just keeps the ping-pong game going.

What I find most interesting is the way the differing philosophies of Mozilla and Adobe are slowing down resolution of this issue. If both companies were open then any developer–at Mozilla, Adobe, or elsewhere–could get into things and start experimenting to find a fix. If both companies had closed philosophies then their engineers could swear each other to the secrecy, swap source code, and together fix the issue. But right now I get the sense that the two very different companies simply are not meshing well. And because of that, I can’t play my videos.

Flash 9 works just fine in Internet Explorer.

See also: Two quick fixes for Firefox 3.

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Why can’t they fix the Flash/Firefox bug?

Sugarsync, a pricey but excellent file syncing and backup solution has a new iPhone application that’s downright cool. It gives you access to all the files stored on computers linked up to your Sugarsync account. Better yet, it provides instant–and I do mean instant updates when a file has been touched by you or another user by utilizing some spiffy push technology.

I got a demo of it in action a few weeks back, and it’s one of the better looking applications I’ve seen. Like the desktop version each linked up machine has its own special icon, and all you have to do to access your files is to pick one from a neat spinning wheel. You’ll then get a similar view of the file structure, with folders, icons, and more.

One of the application’s greatest assets is that it can be synced up to several computers, and then pass over that data between them in the background. In the mobile world, something that makes this system useful is trying to send someone a large file (say 500MB) that you can’t just pull down on your phone and send through e-mail. Sugarsync’s solution is to simply send your recipient the link and they’ll be able to download the file through their browser’s download manager.

The application is also set up to let you move, rename, and delete files remotely. Since everything is linked up to the live sync server those changes will go out immediately. In the demo we saw these changes from desktop to phone and back again getting pushed out in about a second, even over EDGE.

For now, one of the only drawbacks is file compatibility. It handles everything the iPhone can just fine (like MS office documents, PDFs, Quicktime Movie files, etc.) but has had problems with certain movie codecs and audio files. I’m told all supported audio files will play just fine, it’s just an issue of trying to let you do other things while the music is playing, as it currently kicks the file onto the full-screen Quicktime player. Future versions should hopefully be able to let you multi-task.

The application is free, but Sugarsync’s service is not. Users can grab a 45-day free trial of the 10GB service, which normally costs about three bucks a month.

Sugarsync's iPhone app lets you access and manage your files on multiple devices, right on your phone. You can even open and access compatible file types while out and about.

(Credit: Sharpcast Inc. / CBS Interactive)

See more here:
Get remote file access, management on your iPhone with Sugarsync

Got the next big idea floating around in your head but want to see if someone else has already come up with it? Digging through the mountain of patents on file at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Web site can be a bit daunting. To help in that search is Patents.com, which has an index of more than 450 million patents in 15 different languages. All of this is combined with an online marketplace where these patents can be bought and sold.

Like Google’s patent search offering, Patents.com offers some great exploration, which is where I found the most value. The front page shows off some of the most recently approved and submitted patents, but the star of the show is the search tool, which goes from basic to “expert” mode with just one click. The expert mode gives you a whole new bag of search tricks like word proximity, a cheat sheet of commonly used patent jargon, as well as a “fuzzy” search that will look for alternate or misspelled words in patent titles or the actual copy.

One of its key improvements over the standard U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Web site is the image viewer, which I found far easier to use. It’s essentially a PDF viewer, but it’s stuck right on the page instead of opening in a new window. Also, unlike the U.S. patent office site, it does not require reloading the page each time you want to see another image. Users of Google’s patent search will feel right at home.

As for the actual sale of ideas, if you’re a patent owner you can claim patents on the site and, once verified, you can sell them. Patents.com includes a list price set by the patent holder, and anyone who is interested can be contacted through Patents.com. This is definitely a useful service for people who know what they’re doing. Like anything that involves legality and potentially large sums of money, it’s probably best to do some research before buying a patent on a site like this. The search, however, is quite a fun way to explore human ingenuity, and hopefully will lead to some fun patent discoveries from bloggers looking to unearth a major company’s next big thing.

Did you know sugar could be patented? Apparently it's true for the owner of this patent, which we found while browsing Patents.com.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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Patents.com lets you search through ideas (good and bad)

Robert Vamosi and I discuss the new features and browsing capabilities of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 and how it stacks up with other browsers. The new release brings IE up to par with Firefox, Safari, and Opera, and even pushes Microsoft a little ahead of the competition in a few areas.

See also:

IE 8 beta gives other browsers a run for their money

Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 review

Internet Explorer 8 screen shots

Internet Explorer 8 gets a massive makeover

Source:
Exploring Internet Explorer 8