Archive for July, 2009
July 30th, 2009
I have really liked using some of the former Google Chrome-like themes for Firefox, so coming across Chromifox Extreme 3, I just had to give it a shot. If you were one that was tempted to give Chrome a shot, but didn’t want to leave Firefox behind, this theme is for you.
As you can see, the idea here is to make it look as much like Google’s browser as possible. You have tabs on top, you have those happy go lucky chrome icons, what else could a Google loving web citizen want? I also highly suggest you pick up the Chromifox Companion add-on for Firefox if you want to be able to customize the interface and get that real Chrome look and feel.
By far, Chromifox Extreme 3 has to win praise for being one of the best browser interface translations from one browser to another, don’t you think?
Add me on Twitter! Come follow my daily antics, links, tips and more @mitchkeeler on Twitter!
© Mitch Keeler 2008 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!
July 30th, 2009
Weave Sync is a prototype that encrypts and securely synchronizes the Firefox experience across multiple browsers, so that your desktop, laptop and mobile phone can all work together. It is part of the Weave project, which aims to integrate services more closely with the browser.
Major Features
What is Weave Sync all about? In short, Weave Sync lets you securely take your Firefox experience with you to all your Firefox browsers — including our mobile browser, codenamed Fennec. It currently supports continuous synchronization of your bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs. For example:
- Get the same results on the Smart Location Bar on each of your Firefox browsers, so you can get to your favorite sites with just a few keystrokes
- Continue what you were doing: have the ability to open any tab you have open on any of your Firefox browsers
- Keep the same list of bookmarks on all of your Firefox browsers
- Easily sign in to all your favorite sites using your saved passwords (this is especially handy on mobile phones, where it’s hard to type in complex passwords)
- Do it all securely: Weave Sync encrypts user data before uploading it to Mozilla’s servers, so that only you can access your data
What’s new in 0.5?
If you have not looked at Weave recently, now is a great time to jump in and try it out! In this release we’ve made a bunch of improvements in terms of reliability and performance. A few of the major changes are:
- Major performance improvements during upload and download
- Sync waits until you’re not actively using the browser
- Improved support for bookmark tags and smart folders
- Support for changing passwords and passphrases
- Support for Fennec on Windows Mobile and Firefox on x86 OpenSolaris
- Better error handling and reporting
Getting Involved with Testing and Development
- Install Weave 0.5 (requires Firefox 3.5 or higher)
- Learn more about Weave
- Discuss, debate, and add to the design in the Weave forum
- Join us in #labs on irc.mozilla.org
– Mike Connor, on behalf of the Weave development team
July 30th, 2009
The URL Lister add-on for Firefox gives you the ability to grab all the open tabs you have, and collect them as a series of links, formatted in three different formats, so that they can be copied easily.
To use, all you need to do is right-click on one of the tabs, and select URL Lister. Next, you will see a box (like the one above) that will give you URLs (one per line) for each tab you have open. This makes it super easy to copy and save the links for later. You also have the choice to save the list as plain text URLs, a HTML coded list (for use in a web page), or a Linked List, which would give you the list of links with both HTML code around them an the traditional “list” HTML tags too.
This extension will also open a number of links. So if you have a list of links you need to open in bulk, paste them into the text box, and hit the “OK” button. After doing so, you should have each URL open up in its own tab.
You can grab the URL Lister add-on at the Firefox Add-ons site or learn more about it at the author’s official site. If you love lists and links, you will love this browser link lister.
Add me on Twitter! Come follow my daily antics, links, tips and more @mitchkeeler on Twitter!
© Mitch Keeler 2008 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!
July 29th, 2009
Editor’s note: The Bugzilla Project released Bugzilla 3.4 on Tuesday, July 28, 2009. Check out the official announcement for more details.
The Bugzilla Project released Bugzilla 3.4, which brings a lot of great enhancements for Bugzilla over previous versions, with various improvements to the user interface, lots of interesting new features, and many long-standing requests finally being addressed.
The release contains many new features, including:
- A greatly-simplified bug-filing page.
- A new front page for Bugzilla.
- Users’ email addresses are now hidden from logged-out users (helps prevent users receiving spam)
- Emails can be sent in the background (which greatly speeds up editing bugs)
- URLs of searches are now much shorter, so they can be more easily shared.
- Exciting new custom field enhancements
- A field that allows you to refer to bugs in other Bugzillas.
For complete details on all the new features, check out the release notes. If you’re upgrading, make sure to read Notes On Upgrading From a Previous Version. If you are upgrading from a release before 3.2, make sure to read the release notes for all the previous versions in between your version and this one, particularly the Upgrading section of each version’s release notes.
Check out Max Kanat-Alexander’s blog, one of the main developers in the Bugzilla Project, for more information on the release.
July 28th, 2009
It is no secret I am a big fan of Gina Trapani’s line of “better” add-ons for Firefox, so I can tell you I was more than excited to see that they had been rolled together as an add-on collection, so you can grab them all at once.
Which extensions make the list?
Better Gmail 2 – Add useful extra features to Gmail, like hierarchical labels, an unread message icon on your browser tab, file attachment icons, and more.
Better Amazon - Highlight Amazon listings with free shipping, automatically enlarge product images, clean up book pages, shorten URLs and more on Amazon.com. Enhances Amazon.com with a compilation of user scripts and styles. All scripts copyright their original authors. Click on the script homepage in the Help tab for more information.
Better Flickr - Adds collapsible header and sidebar, event title text wrap, colored weekend days, week numbers, and skins to Google Calendar.
Better GReader - Preview web pages inline in Google Reader, collapse the header and sidebar for more reading area, add favicons to feed subscriptions and more with Better GReader.
Better YouTube – A compilation of some of the best Greasemonkey user scripts for YouTube in one interface.
Go pick up the Better Pack of Firefox Add-ons and find out what is so great about them yourself.
Add me on Twitter! Come follow my daily antics, links, tips and more @mitchkeeler on Twitter!
© Mitch Keeler 2008 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!
July 27th, 2009
Looking to make drag and dropping a little more functional in Firefox? The Firefox add-on QuickDrag will let you load URLs, do web searches and more just by highlighting text, grabbing it and dragging it to the right location.
Here is what QuickDrag looks like in action, as well as more details on how you can use this great extension for Firefox to speed up your browsing.
Now, some might look at this add-on and say that is not much, however after you start using it, you really start to realize how much more functionality this adds – just be adding a few tweaks to the browser. For more help, you might also check out the author’s FAQ.
You can pick up the QuickDrag add-on via the Firefox Add-ons web site.
Add me on Twitter! Come follow my daily antics, links, tips and more @mitchkeeler on Twitter!
© Mitch Keeler 2008 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!
July 25th, 2009
Microsoft and the European Commission have announced they are discussing a proposal for Microsoft to include a browser ballet in European versions of the Windows operating system. The ballot approach has many positive possibilities. However, the precise implementation will determine if the ballot approach is likely to be a useful remedy. For example:
- Does the ballot apply to the copies of Windows that go through the “OEM channel” (approximately 95%) and are installed by the OEMS on computers when people buy them?
- Will Microsoft’s update service present this ballot choice to people who already have PCs ?
- Microsoft’s statement says their proposal will allow people to “easily install competing browsers from the Web.” It’s not clear yet if the user can set another browser as the default browser — that is, the browser that opens up when one selects a URL. If the ballot screen doesn’t allow one to make something other than IE the default then the so-called “remedy” looks pretty flimsy.
- Can Microsoft impose terms and requirements on products or providers listed in the ballot?
The answers to these types of questions will have a huge impact on the number of consumers who actually see a choice.
It is also critical that Microsoft respect the choice of people once they have chosen other browsers, and that neither Windows nor IE nor the Windows update system are used as tools to undo the choice of another browser. We would like to see a commitment to respecting these choices as well.
July 24th, 2009
We released the first prototype of the Open Web Tools Directory just over a week ago. The goal is to allow the community to track the landscape of tools. The landscape is large, and you have already stepped up to help flush it out. Within a couple of days we received about 200 additions to the tools database, and it continues to grow. In the current design, you can slice and dice the data based on the high level workflow elements of code, design, debug, test, and deploy as well as searching the data. Each item has tags associated with it which enable pivots in many directions.
We have released a new version of the tools directory and in this post we discuss the new version, as well as thoughts for an Open Web Dev Center.
We are using the tools directory as a way to observe what is out there, and thus what is needed. One of the gaps that we have found is getting detailed memory and performance data from the browsers. As we create richer and richer true applications on the Web we need visibility into the runtime. To get that data you often have to probe deep into the browser. To experiment in this area we created an add-on that does just that to track the JavaScript heap. This was just announced as the browser memory tool prototype.
We talk about the high level vision for the tool:
And then we also showcase the tool itself:
Atul Varma has written, in some detail, how he uses the various JS APIs to access detailed information from SpiderMonkey.
There is a lot of detail in those two posts, and there will be more to come. We are releasing these tools as early as we can to get your feedback, and hope to create new ways to work together to make the Web better through tooling and beyond.
– Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith on behalf of the Developer Tools Lab.
July 23rd, 2009
When we launched the Fastest Firefox campaign last month, our goals were to help spread the word about Firefox 3.5’s performance upgrades and give the broader Mozilla community a chance to have a little fun by showing off their own speediest talents.
With that in mind, I’m happy to report that we received almost 250 videos from Firefox fans around the world and, with the help of our friends at Nobox, have put together a compilation of our favorites. As an added bonus (and a follow-up to our videos from the world’s fastest clapper, sport stacker and banjo player) it features an introduction from Fran Capo, the world’s fastest talking female.
So, if you want to see the Mozilla community in full speedy action, head over to the Fastest Firefox page and watch the video (and, if you’re so inspired, help us tell others about it by tweeting, posting to Facebook, etc).
Lastly, big thanks to everyone who took the time to send us a clip, and especially to those whose clips we used. I don’t have everyone’s names, but here are the ones I do have: Fran Capo, William Blanc Dit Jolicoeur, Channy Yun, Charlie Bright, Daniel CJ Cruz Chan, Brandon Woo, Luke, Nicholas, Joshua Z, Chris Hofmann, Luke Anderson and Refael Ackermann. Your help is very much appreciated, and your t-shirts are on the way!
July 22nd, 2009
Editor’s note: Mozilla released a security and stability update for Firefox 3.0.x users on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at 4:41 pm PT. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement, reposted below, for more details.
As part of the Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing security and stability process, Firefox 3.0.12 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users as a free download from firefox.com.
We strongly recommend that all Firefox 3.0.x users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.
For a list of changes and more information, please see the Firefox 3.0.12 release notes.
Note: Firefox 3.0.x will be maintained with security and stability updates until January, 2010. All users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.5 by downloading it from firefox.com or by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu when using Firefox 3.0.12.