Mozilla has been receiving positive feedback in the Latin American countries where is has launched the Firefox mobile OS given that users can access more applications on the open web than in a closed OS.

We tested Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Beta (Trusty Tahr) with the Firefox Marketplace and we managed to get a few games and applications running. To top things off, users can even lock the apps to the Unity launcher, making them permanent.

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Firefox OS, currently available in version 1.3, has never been known for its good looks. However, it has jumped out to an early, if modest, lead among mobile Linux operating systems for other reasons. For example, it has already shipped in commercial phones, and is quite usable. It’s dead simple, and re-imagines mobile phones from the start as browser devices. It also manages to squeeze every ounce of power from modest, earlier generation Snapdragon processors.

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The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.2.3 which is available for free download. The foundation says “LibreOffice 4.2.3 ‘Fresh’ is the most feature rich version of the software, and is suited for early adopters willing to leverage a larger number of innovations. For enterprise deployments and for more conservative users, The Document Foundation suggests the more mature LibreOffice 4.1.5 ‘Stable’.”

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Firefox OS 2.0 plans include copy and paste support, a new mechanism for launching apps and switching among them, a more useful lock screen, a find-my phone system, and more. Those features will be crucial to the success of the nascent OS, which lags Android and iOS by years but which is critical to Mozilla's continued relevance.

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There have been a lot of interesting developments surrounding Mozilla's Firefox OS platform and smartphones built on it. Mozilla made clear at the recent Mobile World Congress conference that it wants to seed a market for $25 phones based on the platform, putting smartphones in the hands of many people who haven't owned mobile phones before. And, a while back, I covered Geeksphone's concept for a high-end Firefox OS phone called Revolution that would purportedly run both Mozilla's platform and Android. Now, the Geeksphone Revolution, an Android smartphone on which it is easy to install Firefox OS, has gone on sale in France, Germany and the U.K. Some reports say that it will also go on sale in Italy.

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Two of the communities that lay claim to being among the most tolerant and inclusive have shown intolerance of a very high order, acting like a lynch mob to ensure that a top technologist was forced to leave his job as chief executive of a well-known software group.

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This weekend, North America Mozilla Reps gathered in the not-so-sunny Portland, Oregon. We worked from the Portland Office during the weekend, where we collaborated on plans for North America for the next six month period. We also tackled a number of topics from websites and refined our priority cities which will help us be more successful in moving forward in our mission to grow contributors in North America.

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Today in Linux news saw two main themes. Several more articles turned up suggesting Linux for abandoned XP users. In addition, outrage ensues after Mozilla CEO and javascript author is forced to resign his position in response to pressure from activist groups and Mozilla employees. Additionally, The Register is running an article explaining how Microsoft is trying to sabotage Linux.

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Mozilla and the Rust community are pleased to announce version 0.10 of the Rust compiler and tools. Rust is a systems programming language with a focus on safety, performance and concurrency.

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While Mozilla has mostly been in the headlines this week for news related to contributions made by its new CEO Brendan Eich, another piece of meaningful news regarding the company is largely being ignored: Google Chrome has moved past Firefox to take second place in desktop browser market share, according to web traffic stats from Net Applications. In March, Chrome grabbed 17.5 percent of desktop brower traffic, while Firefox sat in third place with 17.2 percent. This is a first for Chrome, according to Net Applications' data, and is possibly driven by Google's extensive advertising for Chrome and Mozilla's new focus on Firefox OS and mobile technology.

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If you've ever done any web development work, you are probably intimately familiar with the fact that what you build on the web may show up fine in one browser, yet be completely broken in another. It used to be that this problem simply meant testing sites and pages across popular desktop browsers, but in the age of mobile technology, you now have to test your creations across mobile devices, too.

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In an exciting collaboration with Mozilla and Google, Intel is bringing SIMD to JavaScript. This makes it possible to develop new classes of compute-intensive applications such as games and media processing—all in JavaScript—without the need to rely on any native plugins or non-portable native code. SIMD.JS can run anywhere JavaScript runs. It will, however, run a lot faster and more power efficiently on the platforms that support SIMD. This includes both the client platforms (browsers and hybrid mobile HTML5 apps) as well as servers that run JavaScript, for example through the Node.js V8 engine.

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Ubuntu 14.04 Beta was released and OMG!Ubuntu! has a What's New. Red Hat stock took a bit of hit today and Forbes.com is reporting oversold conditions. And finally today, Jack Wallen has a look-see at GNOME 3.10 stable in light of yesterday's GNOME 3.12 release.

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Thimble is actually a subset of Mozilla’s Webmaker project, which is aimed at teaching all kinds of web literacy and development skills.

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Canonical published details about the Thunderbird vulnerabilities in its Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 12.10, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems and made a new version of the email client available.

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Many, many people have noticed that if we had a way to reliably record program execution and replay it later, with the ability to debug the replay, we could largely tame the nondeterminism problem. This would also allow us to deliberately introduce nondeterminism so tests can explore more of the possible execution space, without impacting debuggability. Many record and replay systems have been built in pursuit of this vision. (I built one myself.) For various reasons these systems have not seen wide adoption. So, a few years ago we at Mozilla started a project to create a new record-and-replay tool that would overcome the obstacles blocking adoption. We call this tool rr.

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You'll soon be able to stream and play highly realistic three-dimensional video games from within the Mozilla Firefox browser. Mozilla recently announced that the most recent version of its Firefox browser can run games developed with the Unreal Engine by Epic Games, which forms the backbone of many major 3D video games.

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Mozilla, the company behind the popular Firefox Web browser, has been searching for a new CEO since Gary Kovacs, who came on-board in 2010, decided to leave almost a year ago. Mozilla has finally picked a new leader, former CTO Brendan Eich. With him comes change. Mozilla's job number one will not be its Web browser, but its mobile operating system: Firefox OS.

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Also: Why Mozilla's Brendan Eich Is the Right Choice for CEO

Firefox 28 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android has been released.

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