OStatic

Mozilla Messaging is looking forward to a big year in 2010 including Thunderbird 3.1 and figuring out how to make the project financially sustainable. Making Thunderbird better is the easier part. Figuring out how to make money as a project is another story entirely.

No doubt the next release of Thunderbird, currently code-named Lanikai, will do a lot to win users. Lanikai will focus on making the upgrade from Thunderbird 2 more gradual, and improving on the Thunderbird 3 platform. This means fixes for IMAP, stability and memory improvements, interface enhancements, and improvements to message filters and Smart Folders. The 3.1 release is avoiding disruptive changes and the team is shooting for a May release. The bigger challenge ahead for Moz Messaging is how to pay for itself.

The Mozilla Labs Test Pilot program is studying the way users interact with the browser's menu bar. The Firefox user experience (UX) team is considering major changes of the menu bar design, at least for versions of Firefox running on modern versions of Windows.

Mozilla Test Pilot is a Mozilla Labs project to collect structured user feedback from Firefox and other Moz Labs technologies. Users work with the program by installing the Test Pilot extension and then users have the option of participating in tests like the Menu Item Usage Study. All tests require user approval and data is anonymized before being sent to Mozilla.

Just when you think you've got all the Firefox add-ons you'll ever need, the developer community is busy dreaming up more. Here's five add-ons you'll love that also might solve some problems you didn't even know you had.

TinEye Reverse Image Search - The next time you come across an image on the Internet and wonder where it originates, TinEye can help you track it down. If you've got this add on installed, all you need to do is right-click the image, select Search Image on TinEye, and wait for the results. It tells you where an image is being used on the Web and can even search photos that have been edited, cropped, resized, and even find ones of higher resolution than the one you're viewing.

Firefox 3.7 dumped in favor of feature updates. Mozilla has dumped Firefox 3.7 from the release schedule, replacing it with regular features updates for version 3.6 of the browser.

Why Linux on the desktop is wrong. Perhaps this is a poor choice of focus if we really care about Linux success.

Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 benchmarks with early Fedora 13 numbers. Check out the speed trials.

Norwegian broadcasting moves to OpenOffice and ODF. Norway's national broadcasting and TV facility NRK is intent on going open.

Opera recently released an alpha of the coming 10.5 release, which includes quite a few improvements and new features. One of the things that most users probably didn't notice is that Opera is now using the GStreamer media framework.

Even though the Opera browser isn't open source, the company is doing some good work to push open standards. In addition to utilizing the GStreamer framework, Opera is pushing heavily for the use of Ogg formats with HTML5. Philip J?genstedt, a core developer at Opera Software, says that the Web should be built on open standards, and that includes open video and audio codecs.

There's no place like home. The Home Tab, that is. The Mozilla Labs team is hosting a design challenge to come up with an innovative design for the Home Tab in Firefox 4. This is a new feature for Firefox 4, a tab that will always be open to display information about the browser. The challenge is open to all, developer skills aren't necessary.

Many users default to portals like Yahoo! or an iGoogle page as a home page, and make use of widgets meant for the masses. The Mozilla team is looking to provide a more personal experience. The question is what are some interesting uses of a Firefox-hosted start page? Since the Home Tab will have a bit more access to the user's data and be open to wider customization, the sky is the limit. Portals make for an interesting starting point, but winning designs will likely go farther than a standard start page.

Delays are inevitable, no matter what the undertaking ? the starts just can't line up every time. Such is the case at Mozilla this week, with word coming that the much-anticipated next version of the popular Firefox browser won't be in the hands of users when the ball drops on Friday.