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Technology news and Jobs 
The Linux distillery A bright open source future
The Linux distillery A bright open source future | A bright open source future |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Thursday, 10 April 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 3 Another major new feature in Ubuntu 8.04 takes a leaf from SMACK, being the uncomplicated firewall known as ufw. Sure, Ubuntu comes with a firewall in the form of iptables but ufw aims to provide a far simpler firewall which is much easier for regular users to turn on and configure and maintain.Also coming out this year is Firefox 3, available presently in beta form. This is a major new revision of the most popular open source web browser and, indeed, the web browser single-handedly taking away most of Internet Explorer’s market share. There’s no clear release date yet except for simply early 2008. Plans include a lot of simplification; if you read through the Firefox roadmap you see a recurring theme: add-ons installed in fewer clicks, simplified language, simplify task flow for updating add-ons, making it easy to locate and installing missing plugins, easier retrieval of files a user has previously downloaded, make it easier to get feedback on problems and for users to solve problems and engage with the support community, improve usability of password manager list, easy to understand search user interface, and many more. The famed tab page interface gets a going over with similar tabs being grouped together and plans to make a way to quickly find the tab you’re looking for. You’ll be able to resize tabs, re-order tabs and generally spruce up the tab UI as well as improve user control over tabs. The installer will offer scripted and silent installation options making it easy for admins to push out across a raft of systems. Content wise, the Firefox team have some lofty goals. They want Firefox to play all popular media formats on all platforms as best as can be done. And, fundamentally, Gecko – the rendering engine which parses web pages and displays them on-screen – gets a big revamp. Here’s where the big ticket items will come from. The aging graphics code will be updated and hardware-accelerated 2D graphics will be the standard. JavaScript jumps up a major level and appears in the form of JavaScript 2. More robust local client storage beyond simple cookies is being canvassed. Mechanisms for keeping usable offline copies of pages within web applications is being worked out, along with triggers to signal a user is going offline or returning online. All of these items and more combine to make Firefox 3 a major blockbuster release and the most modern and feature-rich web browser available. So, that’s the imminent future of three major open source initiatives. Two are out this month and the other sometime this half of the year and it’s all great news.
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