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Mozilla Opens Apps Marketplace for Developer Submissions

Mozilla is opening the doors of its Marketplace to developers next week at MWC 2012.

The Mozilla Marketplace will officially open for business as of World Mobile Congress 2012 next week, but only for developers looking to submit their Web apps. But when finally launched for the general public, the store will offer free and premium apps that are based on HTML5, JavaScript, CSS and “Mozilla-proposed APIs,” enabling consumers to use them on any HTML5-enabled device and operating system.

“The Mozilla Marketplace enables developers to create and distribute applications that work across HTML5-enabled devices and operating systems (OS),” the company said in a statement. “Mozilla is advancing the Web as a platform and closing the technology gap between Web and native apps, creating new APIs and putting developers back in control of every aspect of the app experience – from easy development and distribution to direct consumer interaction.”

Naturally there are positives and negatives about HTML5-based apps. On the plus side, the “write once, deploy everywhere” nature of the HTML5 platform will significantly reduce the cost of creating, versioning and maintaining applications. For consumers, it means they don’t need to purchase a version for Android, iOS, Ubuntu, Windows and so on.

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Flickr Getting New Look, HTML5 Uploader

Whether you’re sharing pictures of a toddler’s first steps with Grandma or you’re a professional photo artist looking for an audience and contacts, Flickr has been there for you. Want to browse magnificent nature and wildlife scenes, portraits, street photography? Ditto. The venerable photo-sharing site that receives about 5,000 photo uploads per minute, now a Yahoo property, will look a bit different starting next week, with a new “justified” layout and HTML5 upload page that makes organizing while you upload a snap.

PCMag met with Flickr’s head of product, Markus Spiering, this week for a sneak peek at what’s new and upcoming for the photo site.

“Flickr provides you with the most beautiful, most secure, most functional, and most engaging experience around your photos,” said Spiering. “We have a lot of native integration: You can view photos on your Apple TV or Google TV. You can work with it in Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture—there’s a whole ecosystem.”

The new Justified view resembles the layout you get with Google Image search, with tiled photos that retain their original aspect ratio—no cropping. The view means less wasted white space on the page, and a better, larger view of each image. It also features continuous scrolling, so you don’t have to repeatedly click a Next link.

“On a larger screen,” said Spiering, “it’s like a wall of photos.”

Spiering said that Flickr always uses the highest resolution available for display. This Justified view will launch starting first with Your Contacts on Feb. 28 and over the coming months across the other sections of Flickr. But for those who don’t like change, the old layout will be an option, while Justified will be the default.

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Why Mozilla Is Entering the Smartphone War

Mozilla’s mission since its outset in 1998, first as a software project and later as a foundation and company, has been to provide open technology that challenges a dominant corporate product.

Microsoft and its Internet Explorer browser was Mozilla’s original target. Today, Mozilla sees the rise of Apple and Google in mobile software as a “threat to the open Web,” said Jay Sullivan, vice president for products at the Mozilla Corporation.

In recent months, Mozilla has been developing its own open-source smartphone operating system, Boot 2 Gecko. Its published product road map says Boot 2 Gecko will be demonstrated in products before the end of March and will ship in phones by the second quarter of this year.

Mozilla is expected to announce handset and carrier partners at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, which starts next week. Brendan Eich, Mozilla’s chief technology officer, said in a recent Twitter message that Boot 2 Gecko would be appearing at the conference “with partners.”

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Google and Microsoft square off over online privacy concerns

Last week, users of Apple’s Safari browser accused Google of violating their privacy to place “tracking cookies.” Now Microsoft says Google is circumventing privacy features in the Internet Explorer browser, too.

Google spent much of last week dodging criticism from Apple users about its online privacy practices. But when Microsoft got involved this week, that’s when things got really interesting.

Users of Apple’s Safari browser recently claimed that Google was violating their privacy by circumventing a mechanism the browser uses to disable tracking. Here’s what’s (apparently) going on under the hood: by default, Safari disables third-party cookies, nuggets of code that companies can use to identify users returning to a site they’ve visited before, or to track what other sites they visit. Safari can accept cookies if a user explicitly gives permission, but Google’s ad platform reportedly used a workaround to mimic approval of its cookies.

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Now, Microsoft claims that Google is taking a similar approach to their Internet Explorer browser. Internet Explorer uses a different method than Safari to disable tracking cookies: its P3P technology allows it to gauge a site’s privacy policy and automatically block cookies if that policy isn’t up to snuff. In a blog post on Monday, Microsoft corporate vice president Dean Hachamovitch accused Google of intentionally bypassing P3P to enable tracking cookies.

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Firefox Add-on SDK 1.5 Released; Add-on Builder 1.0 Launched

Mozilla has released the latest version of the Firefox Add-on SDK. For those unfamiliar with the Add-on SDK, it is a toolkit designed to make it easy to create Firefox add-ons using web development languages and tools, and features a simplified API.

While earlier versions of the SDK were limited to developing add-ons for desktop versions of Firefox, this version of the Add-on SDK adds support for Firefox Mobile. However this support is only for creating add-ons targeting the new native version of Firefox for Mobile.

Localization support has been added to the SDK as well, so developers need not rely on external tools for that. Although this is just the first step in that process and currently has some limitations. Also — while this may not exactly be a feature — this latest version of the SDK is now under the new MPL 2.0 licence that Mozilla release recently.

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