Reuters reports that Microsoft is trying to solve two EU cases at the same time by letting users choose their browser, rather than IE or no browser at all.

The solution is one of we've discussed before, using a dialog at the first boot of Windows to let the user choose their default installed browser. If this will be part of Windows 7 it could be seen as a big victory for Opera (and those in favor, such as Mozilla and Google).

Of course the details are still a bit sketchy: will it be included in Windows 7, which browsers will be offered as a choice, will Microsoft actually (properly) educate about what the choices mean (or let browser vendors speak for themselves)?

Stephen Horlander has updated the Mozilla wiki with initial mock-ups of Firefox 3.7's new theme for the Windows platform. Although it's nothing more yet than a mock-up it does show quite a big and exciting change.

Also do note that what is currently called Firefox 3.7 might be relabeled to something else, so see it as a future improvement somewhere after the current 3.5. At first the new look looks a but like what we've seen with Chrome and Safari, but applies a more polished look as seen below:

Highlights:

• The toolbar and tabs are using Windows Vista and 7's Aero glass like theme, meaning it's transparent and will color with your appearance settings.
• The navigation buttons are translucent and slightly glossy to meld with the toolbar on all Windows platforms, with or without Aero. The shape of the buttons looks a bit like Chrome, but better.
• A page button on the left, where Chrome and Safari place it on the right. This should expose page related functionality (needed for the omitted menu bar).
• A tools button, similar to Chrome and Safari is placed on the right, this will allow access to UI options (needed for the omitted menu bar).

As you may have seen some standard stuff is missing in the mock-up, but that's why it's a mock-up. The scroll bar, status bar and personal bookmarks bar will probably re-appear in as (default) settings.

Mozilla has released the first maintenance build for Firefox 3.5 as promised within a week of the discovery of a security vulnerability. Suffice to say this is a recommended update.

One security issue has been addressed which is related to the new TraceMonkey engine, where a corrupt state in the JIT-compiler could be abused by malware. Other changes include stability fixes and a faster start-up for the Windows platform, due to directory scanning slowness.

As always, if you didn't get the automated message, try Help -> Check for Updates... or download the full installer from Mozilla's web site.

The next big release by Mozilla is upon us, Firefox 3.5 has been officially released for Windows, Linux and Mac and is one of the most anticipated browser releases of this year.

Following the release of Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 2 and Safari 4, the second most used browser in the world gets updated to 3.5. It may only be a zero-point-five addition, but this doesn't mean it's without any noteworthy feature, in fact, it's the opposite.

Performance
One of the major changes in this release is the inclusion of TraceMonkey, which makes JavaScript much faster in Firefox, following Chrome's V8 and Safari's Nitro engines. Although initial benchmarks have shown that it's not faster than either of the competitors, it does give them a solid third place, well beyond Internet Explorer and Opera. Other performance work has landed in for the rendering engine, which now uses speculative parsing for faster content rendering.

Standards
A lot of work has been put in doing HTML5 work, a standard which is still a work in progress. Similar to Opera, Firefox uses Theora for audio and video playback when the new <video> or <audio> elements are used. This means you won't need any plug-in installed in addition to your web browser to view movies, or listen music when browsing compatible web sites. Other new technologies include geo-location support, native JSON (a common way of representing data for JS), and web worker threads.

Further support has been added for: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles (the first after Safari!), and SVG transforms.

Privacy
And last, but not least is Private Browsing Mode, which offers similar functionality to Safari, Chrome and IE: visiting web sites without leaving any traces. No cookies, no history, no cache is left, which makes it all the easier to browse pr0n or finding a birthday present on a shared PC or Mac.

Summary
Mozilla Firefox 3.5 offers a compelling upgrade towards all existing Firefox users by bringing in a lot of features that the competition already had picked up. Although you might say that they've been playing a (partial) catch-up game, it still offers enough (technical and tweaked) enhancements to separate itself from the competition and remain the fierce competitor it has always been.

You can download Firefox 3.5, in 70 languages for several platforms from the official Mozilla web site.

We're almost there! The very second (we officially skipped the first for the public consumption) release candidate of the latest in the Firefox family has been released. Firefox 3.5 is set to invade the world (through robots) and offers enough stuff to fight the fiercer competition these days.

With Chrome 2 and Safari 4 already out, Mozilla is currently in pursuit of the competition, which has added features that Firefox 3.0 does not have. Two of the most important features in this release are: private browsing and TraceMonkey. Private browsing allows you to visit web sites without leaving a trace in your history, cache and cookies, which can be handy if you share your PC or Mac with others and want to hide your pr0n. TraceMonkey is the new JavaScript engine for Firefox that significantly boosts performance giving Firefox 3.5 a solid third place amongst the two fighting kings (Chrome 2's V8 and Safari 4's Nitro).

Other compelling features in this release include: a visual refresh for the themes as well as a new icon, ICC color profile support (on by default and with less CPU usage), geolocation support, native JSON, web worker threads support, Gecko's speculative parsing for faster content rendering, HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.

Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 2 is the first available test release that should be acceptable for end users, but may contain a bug or so before final release. If all goes well though, this might end up being the new final release, so be sure to report anything you find!

Update: A third release candidate has been released to address some remaining high priority issues and can be found either through Mozilla's site, or if you're using RC2 by Help > Check for Updates.

Ars Technica has an interesting article on a recent action done by JCXP, who wants to boycott Opera due to the EU lawsuit against Microsoft. They claim that Opera Software is solely responsible for pushing the EU to pursue the case even further, beyond the already announced Windows 7 'E' edition without Internet Explorer.

What the EU currently proposes as a solution is a dialog that appears where the user can select his or her web browser. One of the major problems is that a lot of people are still unaware of the full range of choices to browse the web. However such a solution does invite some questions: Which browsers should be included (what if browser X also wants to be there)? Should they be downloaded or really bundled within Windows? How do you make sure that people understand they won't ask Microsoft for support?

Especially the later one is a real problem. As we all know IE has dominated the browser market for a considerable amount of time. Ever since the fall of Netscape (Communicator 4) IE has been dictating the "evolution" of the web, rather than the W3C. And as such, even today, a considerable amount of web sites are still geared to IE primarily, using either sloppy code, or non-standard methods (including JavaScript). But what if a new user selects, well, for instance Opera, because it has many interesting features and mail and stumbles upon web sites that don't work? What if it's your bank site? Hmmm, yes, now to make sure that a user asks support from Opera Software, as most likely your PC manufacturer won't be able to answer it, nor Microsoft support. In the end, in a worse case scenario, that user will end up installing IE one way or another to get that site working. More or less it's a chicken-and-egg problem. You need more people to use different browsers (with proper standards support) to have more web sites become compatible, and you need more sites compatible to get more people. Mozilla's Firefox is one (and only?) case that shows with significant velocity by the community it has gained a considerable market share, possible caused by insecurity of IE (at that time) and attractive features.

Of course we've not addressed the part where the EU is forcing Microsoft to bundle multiple other browsers in their own product. Windows is made by Microsoft, as well as IE, similar to Mac OS X and Safari by Apple. Why a case at all? Why not both? In has to do with understanding monopolies. Apple is not a monopoly in the market of computers or smart phones. Therefore they do not abuse their position to dominate another market, even if they bundle their own software. Microsoft on the other hand has nearly the entire OS market for consumers, and has actively pushed other players out of the browser market in the old days of Netscape.

So why is the EU not happy with Microsoft's approach of removing IE from Windows and letting PC manufacturers chose? Well, first of all the EU cannot monitor if Microsoft may be pushing manufacturers to install IE anyway, and second of all a previous effort where Windows Media Player was removed from Windows (the 'N' edition) utterly failed. None of the manufacturers were willing to use a media player less Windows, nor willing to fussle around educating people of alternative choices.

So is Opera Software at fault? No, Opera Software did ask the EU to investigate the case, but Opera Software is not responsible for either Microsoft's or EU's behavior in this whole case. Also take note that both Google and Mozilla are interested third parties in this case to offer advise, as the solution everyone is looking for is a generic one, not in favor of just Opera.

The folks at Mozilla have released a new update to the existing 3.0 series, keeping up their promise of routinely maintenance.

In this release several critical security holes have been plugged in the areas of: JavaScript chrome privilege escalation, arbitrary code execution using event listeners attached to an element whose owner document is null, race condition while accessing the private data of a NPObject JS wrapper class object, and crashes with evidence of memory corruption. Besides these one high and several moderate and low issues have been fixed.

Stability is also of great concern, and Mozilla has been working delinquently to resolve any issues users might have, such as those related to SQLite and bookmark database corruption.

This release is, like all other releases, a recommended download for all Firefox 3.0 users and can be obtained either using Help > Check for Updates... or by downloading the installer from Mozilla's website.

In a somewhat odd move, Mozilla has released a preview release of Firefox 3.5 for beta users, dubbed b99.

Firefox 3.5b99 is a preview for the upcoming release candidate, which has been delayed a little in the wake of quality.

Besides bug fixes several fixes have landed, including some polishing work on the standard Firefox theme for Windows, Linux and Mac. The new Firefox icon hasn't landed yet, but I'm sure you'll forgive them and just enjoy testing this latest release, which is on a good track to become a good competitor on speed with Safari and Chrome, as well as introducing similar privacy browsing controls and ICC color profile support (on by default).

Beta users are encouraged to report on this preview, which is available simply through the automatic update system embedded in every release since long, long ago.

Microsoft has launched the beta version of their new search (decision) engine, called Bing. As you may know the fate of a search engine is connected with that of web browsers, how fast we'll we see Bing getting adopted by Firefox, Opera and Safari?

Whether Bing sounds better or worse than Google or Kumo (the previous codename for Bing) is not really an issue. It's short and easily remembered by. My own initial tests look positive. The results are a bit different than Google, but better than the old Live Search. Also the images search is much nicer than Google's, as it loads while scrolling. But what is more important is that none of the current browsers out there has Bing as an option in their search fields, so people have to implicitly go there, which at the moment hampers adoption.

With Google working on Chrome the relationship between Mozilla and them has changed a bit. My guess is that this leaves an option open to have Microsoft buy their position of standard search engine in the second most popular web browser. Opera also seems like a good candidate to add the search engine to, with Apple's Safari being a tougher choice (as Google has people in Apple's board of directors and Apple works on top of many Google services).

The question is when we'll see movement. Currently Bing is still in beta, and may not yet receive the full marketing force from Microsoft. But whenever it happens we might see a wave beyond Internet Explorer in additions of (default) search engines. For now Firefox users can add the search engine as an unofficial add-on, or just by adding it manually as with other browsers.

What did you Bing for today?

Update: Only a day later Microsoft officially launched the Bing search engine add-on for Firefox.