Mozilla appoints new CEO

OPEN source luminary Mitchell Baker has stepped down as chief executive of Mozilla Corporation, effective immediately, but says she will continue as both chairman and an employee of the company.

Ms Baker is a much-loved personality in the open source community and has helped steer efforts toward the creation of open source browsers to compete with Microsoft Internet Explorer since the early days of Netscape.

Mozilla Corporation is best known for its open source Firefox browser, which had a spectacularly successful 2007 and now boasts more than 125 million users worldwide.

Ms Baker said she was handing the CEO role to John Lilly, Mozilla’s current chief operating officer.

“John Lilly is the right person to guide the maturation of Mozilla,” Ms Baker said. “John has been instrumental in developing an organisation that is both embedded in Mozilla and open-source DNA and that can function at the extremely high degree of effectiveness that our setting requires.”

As CEO, Mr Lilly would focus on the product, technology and execution of the Mozilla, while Ms Mitchell would focus on bringing Mozilla goals and mindshare to affect change in related aspects of internet development – such as standards and interoperability, treatment of data, and use of market mechanisms to support public benefit organisations.

“I will remain an active and integral part of MoCo (Mozilla Corp),” Ms Baker wrote on her blog.

“I've been involved in shipping Mozilla products since the dawn of time, and have no intention of distancing myself from our products or MoCo. I'll remain both as the Chairman of the Board and as an employee,” she said.

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Mozilla release Firefox 3 beta

OPEN source software specialist Mozilla has launched the first beta release of its next-generation Firefox 3 browser, highlighting better security, ease of use, and personalisation features.

The organisation said the beta was still “a bit rough”, but would let developers preview features and functions, and to get feedback before the project proceeds into its next phase.

“Much of the work leading up to this first beta has been around developing the infrastructure to support a bunch of exciting new features,” Mozilla said in its release notes.

“With this first beta, you'll get a taste of what's coming in Firefox 3, but there's still more to come, and much of what you'll see is still a bit rough around the edges.”

Rough edges include the fact that Firefox add-ons don't work properly with the beta version.

Those add-ons include applications such as ad blockers, search engines, and dictionaries in other languages. Mozilla did not offer a final release date, noting only that the final version will be launched “when we qualify the product as fully ready for our users.”

Mozilla has set out to make the Firefox 3 browser more personal, with a star button that lets you add bookmarks from the location bar with a single click. A “smart places” folder lets you access recently bookmarked and tagged pages, as well as more frequently visited pages.

New security features in Firefox 3 include malware protection, more informative SSL information, and a one-click function to identify who owns a site.

Firefox 3 automatically checks add-ons and will disable older, insecure versions. The browser even will inform anti-virus software when downloading executables, and it respects the Windows Vista parental control setting for disabling file downloads.

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Thunderbird 2.0 roars out of Mozilla

THE popular open source development community Mozilla has released its Thunderbird 2.0 free and open email client, adding new features that include email tagging.

The organization says the free email client has better features – a main one being email tagging – improved security and better privacy provisions. From its first day of release, it is available in 30 different languages.

Mozilla chief executive Mitchell Baker, who is a keynote speaker at the CeBIT Keynote Series on May 1 at the Darling Harbour convention and exhibition centre in Sydney, says the new Mozilla Thunderbird is “personalisable” and customisable than the previous version.

“Thunderbird 2 has powerful new features and proven security, delivering an improved email experience to users worldwide,” said Thunderbird’s lead engineer at Mozilla Scott MacGregor.

“In Thunderbird 2, we incorporated the proven benefits of tagging to email. Tagging initially gained popularity on blogs, photo and link-sharing sites as an intuitive way to organize online information so users could easily find desired content, MacGregor says in a statement about the release.

The software is available for Windows, Mac and Linux clients.

Mozilla said the messaging tagging feature would make it much easier for users to track and search email. The user can create their own tag (like From Mum, or This Weekend) or use default tags like Important, or To Do.

Another strong new features is the message history navigation that is similar to the web browsing history. Users can move backwards or forwards through their messages and easily browse through their message history.

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