Mozilla is letting you try out its new mobile operating system on the computer. The test versions of the Firefox Mobile OS have been released as desktop builds that will help developers put it through its paces on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

The HTML5-based mobile platform is expected to launch in early 2013 as Firefox Mobile OS and take on the fiercely competitive smartphone market. Codenamed Boot 2 Gecko, the Firefox OS will use Open Web Standards and has the backing of leading telecom companies.

In a recent blog post, Mozilla’s Tony Chung mentioned the latest that has come out of the project, “We’ve been culturally challenged to build up an interested community of testers, but limited to our distribution of builds due to legal contracts. However, the release engineering team was able to get Daily desktop builds created and published online for anyone to play with.”

Setup instructions are available on the Gaia/Hacking site. App developers can use these nightly builds to build and check their own apps, so that they can hit the ground running when the Firefox OS is launched in 2013. Even if you are not a developer, you can participate in the project by testing it and letting the team know about bugs.

To get involved with development and testing, visit the B2G page on the MozillaWiki to get started. Feel free to come back here and tell us about your first impressions.

Source: Dknite’s Lair

Mozilla today launched Firefox 14, the latest version of its popular browser. As usual, this new version doesn’t introduce any major new interface redesigns or other radical changes, but it does come with a number of welcome new features that should make the browsing experience a bit more pleasant and safer. The most interesting change from a user perspective is probably that Firefox now automatically uses a secure HTTPS connection for all your Google searches using the location bar, search box and right-click menu. This should make searching with Firefox safer on public and shared WiFi networks. According to Mozilla, “Google is currently the only search engine that allows Firefox to make your searches private, but we look forward to supporting additional search engines with this feature in the future.”

With this release, Firefox users can now also configure their browser to only load plugins on click. This opt-in activation of plugins does take a change to Firefox’s about:config page, however, so it’s not something the Firefox team thinks is quite ready for primetime just yet. Mozilla promises that one of the next versions of the browser will offer a more complete integration of this feature.

Mac users will be happy to hear that Firefox 14 now supports native full screen browsing for OS X Lion. While Firefox always featured a full-screen mode, this wasn’t integrated into Lion’s native ability to run apps full screen, though. The advantage of Firefox’s old approach, however, was that you could still use a second screen while in full-screen mode. This isn’t possible using Lion’s native full-screen mode.

For developers, this new version includes a new API that can prevent displays from going into sleep or screensaver mode, as well as a pointer lock API that gives developer the ability to hide the cursor and lock it to just the browser screen, for example. This may sound like a minor feature, but is actually quite useful for games and 3D apps.

The full release notes are available here.

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