If you are a fan of Foxkeh’s monthly desktop wallpapers, you will be happy to know that Mozilla Japan has taken a huge step forward and has made available Foxkeh’s Wallpaper Creator, a cool web application you can use to create your very own desktop wallpaper: choose a size, a Foxkeh design, a background, add a Firefox icon, resize and move whatever you want, change transparency, then save and set your masterpiece as your wallpaper.

As easy as it gets, all powered by the open web: JavaScript, canvas, and SVG. Enjoy!

Via Mozilla Hacks

After several months in development Aza Raskin has finally announced Tab Candy, an important update to tabbed browsing. Originally implemented as a low profile extension (the project page asked not to blog about it), it implements several ideas submitted for last year Mozilla Labs’ Design Challenge that asked people to reimagine tabbed browsing.

You definitely need to see the video to really understand what it does. In plain words it brings a visual way to organize large number of tabs into logical groups so that you can easily find what you are looking for, mimicking the way we usually sort things in the real world: assigning a space to them.

An Introduction to Firefox’s Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

The future is just as promising as the present: quick searching, tab sharing, and most interesting auto-grouping. For example tabs opened from a web search are most likely related and could make a group on their own, or adding tabs to existing tab groups based on keywords. I would also like to see Firefox capable of identifying communication sites like blogs, web mail, forums, lists, etc. It shouldn’t be hard to see where I tend to frequently submit large amount of text, or small chunks which would signal microblogging, for example.

You can try Tab Candy in this experimental Firefox build (based on Firefox pre-Beta 2 code). Note that there’s no official word on whether Tab Candy will be part of Firefox 4 or not.

Mozilla has released a new update for Firefox 3.6. Among the 126 bug fixes, this release patches 14 security vulnerabilities, 8 labeled as critical.

So, don’t take any chances and update right now: select Check for Updates… from the Help menu, and get the latest and greatest in just a couple of minutes.

Many years have past since Winamp’s golden years when Justin Frankel and company scored hit after hit with every release (save Winamp 3), but it’s still my favorite music player (no media player favorite yet), and I’m pleased to learn it has just become the latest WebM supporter, adding its important user base as potential consumers of the open video format.

Firefox Home, Mozilla’s iPhone application that brings your browsing history, bookmarks, and tabs from any computer or mobile device to your favorite closed device, is now available for free from the App Store.

Firefox users will need to install the Firefox Sync extension to synchronize their personal data to Mozilla’s Sync service. Once your data is there, you can access your data from your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad.

While you won’t get a full Mozilla browser, you get the awesome bar quick search power, and an option to preview the web page within the app. Unfortunately, your Safari browsing is not synchronized back.

Firefox for Maemo 1.1 is now available for download for Nokia Internet Tablets.

This is the first upgrade for a mobile edition of Firefox, and comes just a few months after its initial release early this year.

It brings however, an important number of improvements:

• Portrait mode upon rotate
• New smart-tapping system that makes clicking on links, fields, and buttons easier
• Form assistant improvements, including autocomplete
• Redesigned start page
• Automatically updated add-ons
• Open links in a new tab and save images via our new context menus
• New web content theme for website forms
• Improved Site Menu
• Use volume keys to zoom
• Save page to PDF
• Built in Crash Reporter

Check the Firefox for Maemo 1.1 Field Guide for a nice description of all new and updated features.

Maemo 5 users can get it from Firefox for Maemo download page.

Mozilla keeps putting pieces in place, this time in the mobile front.

Firefox Sync, Mozilla’s Firefox extension and service that stores bookmarks, history, tabs, passwords, and preferences so you can access them all from any computer or device running Firefox has been updated. Firefox Sync 1.4 dismisses the status bar icon and is now only accessible from the Tools menu.

According to Mozilla Lab´s announcement, the new release will synchronize more frequently so it could be too distracting, also it will be better aligned with Firefox 4´s clean UI approach. Firefox Sync has already started landing to Firefox 4, and will be available for all 400 million Firefox users later this year.

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Mozilla’s Dave Townsend loves fractals. So much, one of his works was selected to decorate Mozilla’s Mountain View office.

And here you can download it as wallpaper I quickly made for those who want to make their office/room look a little like a Mozilla office!

Mozilla has released a quick update for Firefox to increase the time Firefox waits for a plugin to respond before considering it hung up.

For older slower machines, the default 10 seconds is not enough and could cause Firefox to terminate a plugin prematurely, particularly some heavy Flash based games like Zynga’s Farmville, Mafia Wars, and others.

Preference dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs now defaults to more conservative 45 seconds. To set it to a value that better suits your needs, go to about:config and edit it. You can set it to -1 to disable the feature completely.

This is not an urgent update if you are not experimenting false crash detections, so you may want to wait to be prompted. If this affects you, select Check for Updates… in the Help menu.

For more details, check the Firefox 3.6.6 release notes.