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Mozilla delivered two things today: Firefox 5 for personal computers and Android phones, and the promise to deliver the browser just a few months after its predecessor.

The organization, once the leading challenger to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, faces new challenges--notably Google's Chrome, new versions of which arrive every 6 weeks. Adopting a similar philosophy, Firefox now revs on a three-month cycle, and today Mozilla met its first deadline.

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WebM and HD Video

As pioneers of HTML5 video standards, Firefox also supports the WebM format so you can watch open HD quality video.

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new 3D on the Web

WebGL brings 3D graphics to Firefox, opening the door for developers to create vivid games and new kinds of visualizations and experiences for the Web.

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Web Technologies

See how Firefox 4 advances the modern web with our big chart full of check marks.

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According to the release notes, the core Gecko rendering engine--the component that interprets Web page instructions and draws text and graphics on your screen--has seen major changes in the upgrade to the new version 1.9 used in Firefox 3. "Gecko 1.9 includes some major re-architecting for performance, stability, correctness, and code simplification and sustainability," the notes said. Those changes "put foundations in place for major performance tuning which have resulted in speed increases in beta 1, and will show further gains in future beta releases."

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The new corporation will draw the two or three dedicated Thunderbird programmers out from under their current Firefox umbrella and hire new staff, Baker said. As with its sister Mozilla Corp., the foundation set up the corporation as a convenient legal mechanism to meet overall Mozilla Foundation goals, not to be a moneymaking business, she added. The dynamic nature of the e-mail business was on display Monday when Yahoo, which operates a leading Web-based e-mail service, spent $350 million to acquire Zimbra, which develops open-source software that gives Web-based e-mail much of the feel of PC-based e-mail software. Zimbra also offers an offline version that lets people read and write e-mail from computers when they're not connected to a network, further blurring the boundaries between Web- and PC-based e-mail software.

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In the speech predicting how Apple would grow its market share, Jobs showed a slide with Safari dominating almost a quarter of the market--a market shared only with a single other browser, Internet Explorer. Lilly says he doesn't believe that this was an omission or simplification, but instead an indication that Jobs is hoping to steal the users of Firefox and other smaller browsers in order to run a "duopoly" with Redmond. "This worldview that Steve gave a glimpse into betrays (Apple's) thinking: it's out-of-date, corporate-controlled, duopoly-oriented, not the-Web-thinking. And it's not good for the Web. Which is sort of moot, I think, because I don't think this two-party world will really come to be," Lilly said in his blog.

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In her new role, Snyder plans to share Mozilla's security secrets with the world, strengthen ties with the security researcher community and rid Mozilla products of old, potentially dangerous, code, she told CNET News.com in a recent interview. Snyder is a self-described geek and the daughter of programmers. Before she was even a teenager, her mom taught her to program Basic on a Texas Instruments 99 computer. She went on to a career that included various security consulting jobs, such as at @Stake, which was purchased by Symantec.