The Mozilla Foundation today announced the launch of Mozilla China, a new non-profit that aims to help develop, promote and deploy Mozilla products in the World's most populous country. Mozilla China is backed by the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) and the Sun China Engineering and Research Institute (ERI). It will be co-chaired by Dr. Li Gong of Sun ERI and Mr. Mingshu Li of ISCAS. The group's steering committee will consist of the two co-chairs and Mozilla Foundation President Mitchell Baker.

Funded by the Chinese government, ISCAS conducts research into the fundamental theories of computer science and software technologies and their applications. Sun has a Mozilla development team in Beijing and remains one of the largest corporate contributors to the Mozilla project.

Mozilla China joins Mozilla Europe and Mozilla Japan to become the Mozilla Foundation's third international affiliate.

Daniel Glazman has made the first release candidate of Nvu 0.9 available for download. Nvu 0.9RC1 includes improvements to the Link dialogue, printing fixes and a new default theme. There are builds for Windows, Linspire 5.0, Fedora Core 3 and Mac OS X, with a source tarball also available. Any major problems, such as crashes, should be reported to Daniel.

Stephen Donner wrote in to tell us about the public release of Netscape Browser 8.0 Beta. Based on Mozilla Firefox 1.0, this beta of Netscape's newest browser offers support for both the Gecko and Internet Explorer rendering engines. A new Site Controls feature lets users enable and disable features like ActiveX, JavaScript and cookies on a site-by-site basis (the browser includes self-updating whitelists and blacklists of safe and dangerous sites). The new Multi-Bar functionality lets users have more on-screen widgets than ever before, including Live Content like RSS feeds, weather forecasts and map searches.

Netscape released a prototype of a Firefox-based browser last November to a group of registered testers; an updated version was circulated in January. Netscape planned a public beta for February but bugs caused it to be delayed and the build was only made available to the previously registered testers.

Read the Netscape Browser 8.0 Beta Release Notes for a list of what doesn't work right yet and download Netscape Browser 8.0 Beta from the Netscape site. It's only available for Windows 98 Second Edition or above; there's no Mac or Linux versions. Feedback can be left in the Netscape Browser Review forums (requires an AOL/Netscape/CompuServe ScreenName).

Last weekend saw the FOSDEM 2005 conference take place in Brussels. Mozilla was well represented with a series of talks in the Mozilla Developers Room. Organiser Axel Hecht has a report on the weekend's events. London-based mozilla.org staff member Gervase Markham made the trip to Belgium to give a talk on the Mozilla Foundation and a presentation about Bugzilla.

ZDNet UK dispatched reporter Ingrid Marson to Brussels to cover the proceedings. She filed a couple of Mozilla-related articles, including one about how companies are deploying Mozilla products but being very quiet about it. Marson reports that Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, said that "a few companies" have installed Mozilla Firefox or Mozilla Thunderbird on 100,000 systems. He also says that some parts of the French government are considering switching to Firefox. Based on comments from Gerv, the story reports that a US-based Fortune 100 company has rolled out Thunderbird to 50,000 PCs and is paying the Mozilla Foundation to customise it. According to Tristan, enterprises that are deploying Mozilla aren't shouting about it because they want to avoid damaging their relationships with Microsoft. Previously, organisations that have publicly announced a switch to open source have often found themselves on the receiving end of visits from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Marson's other report, about the relationship between Mozilla and Google, has attracted a lot more attention. Heavily quoting Gerv, the article states that Google pays the Mozilla Foundation a fairly siginificant amount of money as part of a deal that makes Google the default search engine and start page in Firefox. This money has helped to fund the salaries of a few new Foundation employees. However, Gerv stresses that the Mozilla Foundation has no plans to repeat the mistakes of Netscape and put the whole browser user interface up for sale. Slashdot has a discussion about the Mozilla-Google relationship to which Gerv has contributed several comments, including some corrections and clarifications. Furthermore, Asa Dotzler has a weblog posting that banishes some misconceptions about the Google deal.

Update: Axel has posted an account of Sunday's Mozilla FOSDEM events and a rant about GNU Project founder Richard Stallman that seems to be somehow related to the availability (or non-availability) of Mozilla builds with no non-free code. Tristan has posted some FOSDEM linkage.

Camino developer Josh Aas took a job with the Mozilla Foundation about a week ago. In a weblog posting, Josh has clarified what he'll be working on. Much of his work will be on code that is shared between all the Mozilla applications for Mac OS X (Camino, Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird). He'll also be spending time on Firefox-specific Mac OS X code and be doing some work on the OS X version of Thunderbird. Josh notes that while he'll be spending less time working specifically on Camino, the standalone Mac OS X browser will still benefit from his improvements to the shared code.

So what can we expect from Josh? Cleaning up form widgets is one priority, as is making Gecko work better on OS X. This will likely involve moving from Apple's older QuickDraw technology to the more advanced Quartz. In addition, Firefox users can expect an application that fits in much better with the Mac user experience.

Lead Camino developer Mike Pinkerton has confirmed that Josh's new role is good news for Camino. In particular he notes that the embedding APIs — used by Camino but not by Firefox and Thunderbird — should break much less frequently than they currently do. He also reports that Camino 0.8.3 is on the way.

Last month, IT research and analysis firm Gartner issued a report entitled Firefox Usage Will Grow Until Microsoft Chooses to Respond. We're too tight to pay the US$95 required to view the full five-page report so all our commentary is based on articles from journalists who have seen the study. The best summary seems to be from smh.com.au, the online version of the Sydney Morning Herald, who summarise the report as Gartner caution on Firefox take-up.

The Gartner report states that the "growth in usage of Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser is driven by factors that are not inherently sustainable." There's been some disagreement on the Web about exactly what this means but our interpretation is that Firefox growth will slow (according to some stats, we're starting to see a growth slowdown already) and it will not replace Microsoft Internet Explorer as the dominant browser any time soon. According to Gartner, most switching is taking place on the individual, not the corporate, level and companies should be cautious about migrating wholesale to Firefox. In addition, as Firefox's market share increases, it is increasingly likely to be targetted by malicious code (other security experts agree that Firefox attacks are likely in the future).

The report concludes that it's possible that an environment where both Firefox and IE have significant usage shares may emerge and companies should prepare for such an eventuality. Gartner believes that the main factor affecting Firefox's growth is the response of Microsoft: an updated version of IE could stem the tide and stop the flow of switchers from IE to Firefox. We saw Microsoft's response late last month: since the report was written, Internet Explorer 7.0 has been announced.

Arthur Bicknell from US dictionary giant Merriam-Webster got in touch to tell us that his company has released a collection of dictionary and thesauraus search tools for Mozilla Firefox. Five separate tools are available, all of which allow you to search Merriam-Webster's online dictionary and thesaurus in a slightly different way. PR Newswire has a copy of the Merriam-Webster press release about the Firefox tools that Arthur sent to us.

First up is the Merriam-Webster Search Box Plug-in. This is a simple search engine plugin for the standard Firefox search bar that allows you to quickly look up terms in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. It works just like any other search engine plugin.

Next is the Merriam-Webster Right-click Search extension. On the face of it, this extension adds two items to the context menu for selected text: one to look up the highlighted term in the Merriam-Webster dictionary and another to query the thesaurus. In reality, the installation page simply walks you through installing the DictionarySearch extension and then customising it to use Merriam-Webster. We can't understand why Merriam-Webster didn't just adapt a copy of DictionarySearch to use its services by default and then distribute that. As it stands, Merriam-Webster is encouraging its users to install an extension that uses rival Dictionary.com by default.

The third tool is the Merriam-Webster Sidebar. This is just a standard Web content sidebar panel that loads a thin Merriam-Webster dictionary and thesauraus search page. It works well enough.

Merriam-Webster's penultimate tool is the Merriam-Webster Lookup Button. This is a really bookmarklet (a bookmark that executes a small piece of JavaScript code to do something useful). There are two ways to use it: either select a term on a page and then press the button to look it up in the dictionary or just thump the button and enter any arbitary term to get a definition.

Finally, we're invited to Add Merriam-Webster to the Firefox Toolbar. Much like the Merriam-Webster Right-click Search tool, this is just a case of downloading another third-party extension (in this case, Firefox UltraBar) and then customising it. The people behind UltraBar actually make custom versions of their toolbar for corporations but clearly Merriam-Webster declined to take them up on this offer.

Merriam-Webster have got a fairly comprehensive set of five tools for Firefox users. It just seems a bit of a shame that they didn't invest a little more effort to make the overall experience more streamlined.

Asa Dotzler writes: "Yesterday, we tried to launch update for Firefox 1.0 Windows users and ran into the problem that we were serving the Windows update to Mac and Linux users.

"Today, we've fixed the problem so that the Windows users of Firefox 1.0 will receive the update notification and the Windows update package and Mac and Linux users won't (which is the intended behavior since we don't have update ready for those platforms).

"We're rolling out this update to tens of millions of users and currently serving about twenty thousand update downloads per hour, so if you see any weirdness, please let us know and we'll look into it right away.

"For Mac and Linux users, please visit www.mozilla.org to get your 1.0.1 update."

Both EndersGame and Daniel Sandbecker wrote in to tell us that Copernic has announced Copernic Desktop Search 1.5, which supports Mozilla Thunderbird. The new version of desktop search application indexes Thunderbird emails, attachments and address book contacts and makes them available for easy searching. Version 1.5 also adds support for Eudora. Last year, Copernic released Copernic Desktop Search 1.2 with support for Mozilla Firefox.

OneStat.com is reporting that the global usage share of Mozilla is 8.45 percent. The prose in their press release implies that this figure refers to all Mozilla browsers but the included table states that the total is just for Mozilla Firefox. Given OneStat.com's previous figures and their statements about growth (Mozilla's share has increased by more than one percentage point since November), we think that the former interpretation is more likely to be correct. In addition to the ambiguity, OneStat.com's press release also contains spelling mistakes and mixes both English and European decimal separators. If we were cynical, we'd suggest that it's a rushed response to the publication of rival WebSideStory's February statistics.

The usage share of Microsoft Internet Explorer has continued to fall and now lies at 87.28 percent, compared to 88.9 percent in November. OneStat.com co-founder Niels Brinkman suggests that IE5 users are switching to Firefox instead of upgrading to IE6. Meanwhile, Safari's usage share has increased from 0.91 percent in November to 1.21 percent now, placing it ahead of Opera's 1.09 percent.

WebSideStory has published some February 2005 United States browser usage figures as part of its latest Data Spotlight. According to the statistics, Mozilla Firefox's growth is slowing. "Firefox's market share grew just 15 percent in the five weeks leading up to Feb. 18, 2005, the latest benchmark available. In the previous six weeks before that, the browser grew at 22 percent clip. These figures compare with a 34 percent increase between Nov. 5 and Dec. 3, which coincides with the release of Firefox Version 1.0 on Nov. 9."

WebSideStory CEO Jeff Lunsford says the slowdown is "probably to be expected as we move beyond the early adopter segment." He's now more cautious about Firefox's goal of a ten percent usage share by the end of the year. "Back in December 2004, it seemed Firefox was a lock to reach 10 percent by mid-2005, ahead of the reported year end goal of the Mozilla Foundation. Given the latest growth rates, the year end target still appears attainable, but a mid-year achievement is unlikely unless we see increased marketing activity from the Mozilla Foundation."

WebSideStory has Firefox's usage share on Friday 18th February at 5.69 percent, up from 4.95 percent on Friday 14th January (we reported on WebSideStory's January figures at the time). The usage share of non-Firefox Mozilla and Netscape browsers is now 2.47 percent, down from 2.64 percent. Meanwhile, Microsoft Internet Explorer is now at 89.85 percent, the first time it has declined to below 90 percent in WebSideStory's figures. Rival Web statistics firm OneStat.com had IE falling below 90 percent in November (note that OneStat.com's figures are global whereas WebSideStory just reports on the US). In December we reported that Microsoft seems to prefer WebSideStory's numbers to OneStat.com's.

Note to people who don't understand statistics: Firefox's growth is reported to be slowing down. That still means that it's still gaining users, just at slower rate than before.

The Mozilla Foundation today released Mozilla 1.8 Beta 1, the first beta of the 1.8 cycle after a record-breaking six alphas. The Mozilla 1.8 Beta 1 Release Notes have more information about this latest development milestone. While there's no major new features, there's several minor improvements detailed in the 1.8b1 readme and the rough 1.8b1 changelog. Web developers may be interested to hear that this release has partial support for ECMAScript for XML (E4X), which adds native XML support to JavaScript (Jon Udell wrote an introduction to E4X last September). Download 1.8b1 from the Mozilla Releases page or the mozilla1.8b1 directory on ftp.mozilla.org.