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The Mozilla Calendar Project released Lightning and Sunbird 0.5 today, a major update to their free, open source calendar extension and calendar client. Lightning and Sunbird 0.5 offer a major user interface update, event invitations, printing improvements and better integration with Mozilla Thunderbird.

Lightning and Sunbird 0.5 are immediately available for Windows, Mac, or Linux operating systems in 22 languages as free downloads from the Calendar Project homepage.

(From marketingvox.com)

Firefox had a nearly 28 percent average use rate in Europe in the beginning of July, with growth in marketshare in all 32 European countries studied by XiTi Monitor - though Internet Explorer remains the dominant browser in Europe, albeit steadily losing users - writes MarketingCharts.

Between July 2 and 8, 2007, the average visit share of a European country for Internet Explorer was 66.5 percent whereas it was 73.3 percent a year earlier, from July 3 to 9, 2006, accoding to XiTi. Opera was third with a visit share of 3.5 percent.

Globally, Firefox use is highest in Oceania, which gained 4.1 percentage points from March; it is the largest Firefox user with a use rate of 28.9 percent, ahead of Europe’s 27.8 percent.

Firefox is also gaining ground in the other continents, growing to nearly 19 percent in North America, and growing 30 percent in South America to account for 15.5 percent of the browser market.

MarketingCharts provides more data from XiTi, including the latest results from the battle between the most recent browser versions: Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.

(from Wired.com, by Michael Calore)

The morning’s executive briefing sessions are underway here at OSCON. Tim O’Reilly just led a discussion on stage about Firefox add-ons — what they’ve achieved, how the open source model has shaped their development and what they contribute to the web.

Sitting on the panel were Mozilla’s Mike Shaver, who oversees the Firefox extension developer community, as well as two of the ecosystem’s most successful developers in terms of sheer user numbers: AllPeers CTO Matthew Gertner and StumbleUpon’s Garrett Camp.

One of Tim’s first questions was a biggie: Why does Firefox’s performance suffer when I install extensions? Shaver handled that one, explaining that the browser’s architecture lets developers interact with any of the services within Firefox. Ultimately, it’s a trade off. Developers get the infinite access which allows them to shape the user experience of the browser, but that sometimes results in a performance hit.

O’Reilly also asked what happened to Netscape creator Mark Andreesen’s original vision of the browser as a platform. Is that where we’ve arrived? The panelists agreed, saying that Firefox extensions are building upon that vision. Shaver gave his view of the browser’s position as a way to access “the best software platform we’ve ever developed as an industry — the web.”

Another interesting note came from Camp. Illustrating to the passion of free software users, he said that when StumbleUpon changes features in its Internet Explorer toolbar, he hears near silence. When a change happens on the Firefox side, the company gets flooded with e-mail about every little detail.

The final question drew some laughs: Are we moving into a world where Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are just device drivers for Firefox? An interesting topic, but the clock had run out and none of the panelists really had time to answer that in full. I guess the question will remain rhetorical.