Black Lab Linux 5.1 Alpha 2, a distribution that aims to rival Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, is now ready for testing.

The details were unclear back in late June, but it looked like Mozilla may have been playing some role in delivering a competitor to Google's popular Chromecast dongle, with Mozilla's based on the Firefox OS platform. The rumors abated shortly after they arose, but some people missed the fact that Mozilla confirmed the news in a recent blog post, noting the following: "Mozilla is working with Panasonic to develop next generation SmartTVs running Firefox OS, and Abitcool will launch an HDMI streaming device later this year that allows the user to fling content from compatible mobile or Web apps to an HDTV."

Mozilla is proving the Web is a powerful gaming platform by creating new technologies and developer tools that enable game creators to port their popular titles to the Web. One of the trailblazers using these technologies is Trendy Entertainment, which is leveraging Emscripten and asm.js to bring its highly popular Dungeon Defenders title to the Web. Trendy announced today it will release a version of Dungeon Defenders Eternity featuring the same visuals and gameplay as the native desktop version, but available on the Web at near native speeds. Later today, the full game will be available to buy on Steam.

The Firefox 31 web-browser is out this morning with new features.

New to Firefox 31 is improved download security by trying to block known malware (based upon Google's functionality in Chrome), a search box has been added to the new tab page, a new certificate verification library, HTML5 WebVTT support for video playback with subtitles, and various developer-focused improvements.

Users can download the Firefox 31 update from Mozilla.org

Mozilla has officially released Thunderbird 31.0, an email and RSS client, for all the available platforms, and the developers have actually made a number of improvements to the application.

The first version has been released in the Thunderbird 31.x branch, but unlike some of the previous updates, this one actually brings something interesting. It's been a while since Thunderbird received any real improvements, but that's not exactly Mozilla's fault.

Mozilla's Firefox OS continues its slow march across the globe, with carriers set to begin shipping devices running the open source, browser-based smartphone platform in additional developed markets this week.

Spanish telecoms giant Telefónica has previously sold Firefox OS phones in Spain, but the bulk of its efforts have been focused on its subsidiaries in Spanish-speaking emerging markets, including Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

Firefox OS has unlocked the mobile ecosystem and is quickly expanding across a broad range of devices and product categories in Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific. Just one year after the first devices were launched, Firefox OS is now available on seven smartphones offered by five major operators in 15 countries, showing strong signs of ecosystem momentum and widespread industry adoption.

We’re pleased to announce the release of mozjpeg 2.0. Early this year, we explained that we started this project to provide a production-quality JPEG encoder that improves compression while maintaining compatibility with the vast majority of deployed decoders. The end goal is to reduce page load times and ultimately create an enhanced user experience for sites hosting images.

With today’s release, mozjpeg 2.0 can reduce file sizes for both baseline and progressive JPEGs by 5% on average compared to those produced by libjpeg-turbo, the standard JPEG library upon which mozjpeg is based [1]. Many images will see further reductions.

"The ousting of Eich, the DRM problem -- all those imbroglios have tarnished the image of Firefox," said Google+ blogger Alessandrom Ebersol. So, on one side, "agnostic users left Firefox because they were told its new CEO was a conservative bigot. The folks who care about freedom, privacy and open Internet left Firefox because of the DRM module to play Netflix.

Mozilla organized two national events in India during the month of June this year: Indic FirefoxOS L10n Sprint 2014 and Mozcamp Beta 2014.

Indic FirefoxOS L10n Sprint 2014 was more of an implementation-based sprint with the goal to motivate Indic language localization teams to translate strings for its upcoming Firefox OS based $25 phone. Mozcamp India Beta was an event for meeting mentors, planning for the future, and strategizing Mozilla’s mission in India.

A Firefox OS evangelist and volunteer working as the platform's Early Feedback Community Release Manager, Kerensa will use his time on stage at this year's OSCON to wage a recruitment effort. Along with Alex Lakatos, Kerensa will present Getting Started Contributing to Firefox OS, an introduction to building applications for the operating system. Attendees will learn how Firefox OS embodies Mozilla's commitment to open web standards like HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

For KDE desktop users unhappy with the level of integration with Mozilla's Firefox web browser, the situation might finally be changing.

There's been a bug going back to early 2002 about properly integrating Mozilla with KDE, "Mozilla has 'Windows Integration' on win32, I believe it should have such a thing on KDE as well (gnome folks, feel free to file your own bug). We should at least provide an icon in the KDE menu, perhaps we could even tell KDE that some file types can be opened with Mozilla..." That bug, Mozilla Bug 140751, has been open for the past twelve years and finally now might be inching closer to being resolved.

The Deepin Desktop Environment is written using Google's Go language and makes use of heavy HTML5. DDE also uses Compiz as its compositing window manager. As in the past some desktop environments / window managers have impaired the full-screen Linux gaming performance, I ran some simple Linux gaming benchmarks on Sunday to see if the Deepin 2014 performance differed at all from upstream Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Ubuntu 14.04 was tested with the stock Unity 7.2 desktop using Compiz, GNOME Shell 3.10.4, and Xfce 4.10 all from the stock Trusty Tahr archive.

At this year's Great Wide Open conference, Steve Klabnik gave a talk about Mozilla's Rust programming language. Klabnik previously authored an introductory Rust tutorial entitled Rust for Rubyists, and this talk serves a similar purpose. However, instead of being Ruby focused, this talk was aimed at programmers in general. Hence the talk's title: Rust for $LANGUAGE-ists.

This is a maintenance release that fixes major bugs discovered and reported by the community from the previous stable version, antiX MX 14.1.1, and updates various packages.

According to the quite small changelog, antiX MX 14.2 updates the powerful LibreOffice suite to the latest stable version, 4.2.5, updates the documentation, and adds support for Broadcom wireless devices on the CD image.

Folks from Collabora and Red Hat have been working on making Firefox on Gtk+ 3 a thing. See Emilio’s blog post for some recent update. But getting Firefox to build and run locally is unfortunately not the whole story.

I’ve been working on getting Gtk+ 3 Firefox builds going on Mozilla build infrastructure, and I’m proud to announce today that those builds are now going through Mozilla continuous integration on a project branch: Elm, and receive the same automated testing as mozilla-central.

And when I said getting Firefox to build and run was unfortunately not the whole story, I meant it: if you click on the Elm link above, you’ll notice that there’s a lot of orange, when it should be all green.

The issue we had to solve is that GTK+ 2 and GTK+ 3 cannot be loaded in the same address space. Moving Firefox from GTK+ 2 to GTK+ 3 isn’t a problem, as only GTK+ 3 gets loaded in its address space, and everything is fine. The problem comes when you load a plugin that links to GTK+ 2, e.g. Flash. Then, GTK+ 2 and GTK+ 3 get both loaded, GTK+ detects that, and aborts to avoid bigger problems.

If you work with web content at all, you're probably familiar with doing debugging and content editing directly from within a browser. If you're a Firefox user, you may also be very familiar with tools such as Firebug, which lets you do extensive debugging and development from within Firefox.
Now, Mozilla has announced a new toolset to take these kinds of capabilities to the next level. Firefox Nightly release channel users can start testing WebIDE, a development environment for HTML5 apps built into Firefox.

Mozilla cites two major advantages of using WebIDE as compared with developing apps for competing platforms. In-browser development tools are already familiar to the enormous number of Web developers that exist, so using them for application development minimizes the number of new tools and new skills that must be learned.

Second, they're extremely lightweight as development tools go. The substantial size of downloading tools such as Xcode or Visual Studio, in addition to the cost of developer licenses on other platforms, can limit their appeal and usability, especially in emerging markets. Putting the tools into the browser means that Mozilla's reach is near universal.

Mozilla took the world by surprised when it announced that it was developing a Firefox operating system that would be used for mobile phones, especially in developing markets. Now, there are already a few devices out there, but it seems that this isn’t the last step for the company whose name is still associated with the famous web browsers.