With A Widespread Launch Looming, Mozilla Rolls Out Firefox OS Simulator 3.0

Simulator-overviewMozilla was keen to talk up the 3.0 version of its Firefox OS simulator back in March, but didn’t have much to share about when eager developers could start fiddling with it. Thankfully for HTML5 buffs, that six-week quiet period is over — the team just announced on the official Mozilla Hacks blog that the newly updated simulator is now available to download.

Blink, Servo And Rust: A Good Week For Browsers

chromium_logoIt’s sure been an interesting week for this of us who cover browsers. Last weekend, we heard that Internet Explorer 11 will probably support WebGL and SPDY. Then, on Tuesday I got an email from Mozilla, asking if I had time to get on the phone with Mozilla’s CTO Brendan Eich to talk about the organization’s next generation browser engine Servo and the Rust language it is written in. Turns out, Mozilla Research wasn’t just going to work on this alone, but managed to get Samsung to help out with bringing this new engine that’s optimized for multicore and heterogeneous computing architectures to Android and ARM. Given that Mozilla had remained relatively quiet about Servo until now, it was a bit of a surprise that it was now ready to put it into the spotlight. Interestingly, I had heard from Google’s Chrome team earlier in the week and they, too, wanted to talk on Tuesday. Oddly, the PR team was unusually wary about giving me any details before the call (often they’ll give you some background to make sure you can prepare for the call). When Linus Upson, Google’s VP of Engineering, and Alex Komoroske, the product Manager for the Open Web Platform team, told me that Google was going to fork WebKit and launch its own rendering engine Blink based on WebKit, I had to backtrack a few times to make sure I had really heard this right. Outside of a few WebKit insiders, few people expected Google to do this. WebKit is generally seen as a major success and given its dominance on the desktop (thanks to Chrome) and mobile (thanks to Safari), few would call it anything but a massive success. It’s Okay To Blink Google’s WebKit is fork is obviously the most controversial of last week’s announcements and leaks. Google says the reason for its fork is essentially technical, but given that WebKit was, at this point, one of the few projects where Apple and Google were working together relatively closely, it’s hard not to think that there were some political motivations behind this, too, especially given that Google was quite a bit more active in sharing its code back to the project than anybody else. We’ll still have to see what the ramifications of this move are, but I’m pretty optimistic. Sure, it means web developers will have to test their code against yet another

Mozilla Launches Open Badges 1.0, A New Standard to Recognize and Verify Online Learning and Education

Screen shot 2013-03-14 at 11.54.19 AMAs web-based learning platforms proliferate, and education increasingly happens in formal and informal settings and in both real and virtual classrooms, there is a growing need for a new form of credentialing that reflects these changes. Traditional, paper-based diplomas and certificates are no longer enough, but designing a meaningful, universal replacement for the old standard doesn’t happen over night. Luckily, Mozilla is on the case.

Back in September 2011, Mozilla announced that it was seting out on a mission to create an easy way for to both issue and share digital learning badges on the Web. The “Open Badges Infrastructure Project,” as it was called at the time, grew out of Mozilla’s own development of badges for its School of Webcraft, but it soon realized that it wasn’t alone in its plans to design and implement digital badges.