Easy Firefox

Firefox Home, a free app that syncs your Firefox browsing history, bookmarks and open tabs to your iPhone or iPod touch, is now available in 15 languages worldwide. Get Firefox Home in your language now!

We appreciate your feedback and worked to incorporate some of the top suggestions in this latest release.

What’s new in this release:

• Worldwide Availability: Use Firefox Home in 15 languages, including French, German, Japanese, Polish and Spanish. See all supported languages.
• URL Search Bar: Want to visit a website that’s not in your bookmarks or history? Only remember part of the URL? You can now type the site’s URL into the Search Bar and Firefox Home will take you there.
• Custom Servers: Advanced users can now set up Firefox Home to connect to their own custom Firefox Sync servers.
• Visit the release notes for full details.

Watch the demo to see the latest version of Firefox Home in action.

Setting Up Firefox Home
If you use Firefox 3.6 on your desktop, you’ll need to install the Firefox Sync Add-on and set up a Firefox Sync account to synchronize your desktop data with your iPhone. Watch this video on how to set up Firefox Home on your iPhone.

For more details

• Visit the Firefox Home website.
• Visit the Firefox Home forum to get one-on-one support.
• If you have an idea to make Firefox Home better, please visit the Firefox Home Ideas forum.

If you love using Firefox Home, go to iTunes and write a review to help us share the app with the world.

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I have made no secret about the fact that the one feature I am looking most forward to in Firefox 4 is the new Firefox Panorama tool (formerly known as Tab Candy).  Now, I have shown you why Panorama is really handy when it comes to getting rid of the extra browser windows, but now they are also introducing a very nice search feature too.

So lets say you have all your tabs grouped up, you have several websites loaded up – but you want to find your email in a hurry. You can click the little magnifying glass on the side, type the name of your email client (like Gmail) and it will be highlighted for you.

Here is a short video from Aza explaining more about how the new search feature would work:

Overall, this is one more thing that is making me want to get my hands on Firefox 4 even more. I love the fact that the search is so fast, and I can’t wait to start using Panorama in my everyday browsing.

Facebook Fan Page Come join the fun on the Firefox Facts Facebook Fan Page!

© Mitch Keeler 2010 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!

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In order to enhance security, improve redundancy, and facilitate upgrades for the Toronto office we will need to conduct a downtime at the Mountain View office that will take our test machines offline, requiring us to close all development trees. This will take place on Sunday, September 19th, and is expected to last for up to 7 hours, from 10am PT until 5pm PT, though if things go well we might be done much sooner.

We will notify the mozilla.dev.planning newsgroup as necessary of our progress during the day, and keep Tinderbox up to date with the tree status; this is our planned schedule (all times PDT):

• 1000 – Close all trees on Tinderbox
• 1015 – Release Engineering confirms systems are ready to go offline
• 1015 – Phase I: upgrade firewall, and wired switches at Mountain View

At this point all the infrastructure in the Mountain View office (performance and unit test infrastructure, as well as some builders) will lose their connection to the machines that report their progress. The trees will appear to be broken if people look on Tinderbox.

• 1230 – Phase I Complete
• 1230 – Release Engineering will prepare systems to come back online
• 1230 – Phase II: upgrade office wireless infrastructure

Infrastructure connectivity is expected to be restored within 1.5 hours, and the Release Engineering group will be on hand to bring the systems back up. They will wait for a full “green run” before re-opening the trees. This normally takes 2-3 hours.

• 1400 – Phase II Complete
• 1400 – Release Engineering will begin to bring remaining systems online
• 1700 – Release Engineering will re-open all trees

(originally posted in mozilla.dev.planning)

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There have been a number of questions about Zaphod and Narcissus.  Or perhaps just the one major question:

“Seems cool.  Why should I use this?”

For day to day browsing, Narcissus does not offer any real advantages over SpiderMonkey.  However, Narcissus is an ideal tool for developing new ideas for the JavaScript language itself.

What features should we add to JavaScript?  What should the syntax/semantics be?  What practical issues will come up that we have not considered so far?  With Narcissus and Zaphod, we can more easily answer these questions.

In programming language (PL) research, we like to write up fancy evaluation rules containing lots of Greek letters. Unfortunately, these rules tend to be inscrutable to anyone who isn’t a PL researcher. Even for PL researchers, there is something unsatisfying about seeing a bunch of rules on a piece of paper.

We want to be able to try our ideas out with a real implementation — kick the tires, so to speak. Also, we want to share our ideas as widely as we can.  This way, we can get feedback from programmers who experiment with our design.

Unfortunately, this usually means editing a sizable, constantly shifting C++ code base. Anyone who wants to test out our ideas has to build the browser from source, which can be a daunting task.

With Narcissus JavaScript, we have another alternative.  Narcissus is both a simpler code base, and also much less affected by the changing browser code base.  Once we have made our changes, we can easily distribute the JavaScript files and let others play around with the new feature.

But Narcissus does not by itself integrate smoothly with the browser. That is where Zaphod comes in.

Zaphod looks for scripts with a tag of “application/narcissus” (which SpiderMonkey will ignore) and parses those scripts with Narcissus.  This setup allows us to demonstrate a few examples using the new feature.  Here are a few simple pages using this technique. Using this, you can show some examples of how your new feature could be used.

But we might also want to see how the implementation would work on a pre-existing page. Click on the mozilla icon in the bottom right corner and Narcissus will be set as the default JavaScript interpreter. After experimenting, click on the icon again and SpiderMonkey will be reset as your JS implementation.

Zaphod/Narcissus cannot yet handle some of the more JavaScript-heavy pages, but it can handle enough to be a valuable research tool for JavaScript language hackers.  I hope you enjoy.  And if you use it for some cool experiments, let me know!

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Today we are launching Zaphod, an addon for integrating the Narcissus JavaScript engine into Firefox 4.

Narcissus is neither as fast nor as feature-rich as SpiderMonkey, BUT it is substantially easier to read, understand, and (critically) modify.  If you have a new feature idea, Narcissus is an ideal tool.  With the Zaphod addon, you can also integrate Narcissus into the browser as your JS engine in order to do some real meaningful tests.  Also, since your changes will be separate from the browser code base, you can more easily share your ideas with others.

Zaphod will process any script tag with a type of “application/narcissus” using the Narcissus engine.  Since SpiderMonkey will ignore script tags of an unknown type, it won’t interfere with Narcissus.  Also, you can specify the script type of the page as Narcissus with a meta tag:

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Script-Type” content=”application/narcissus” />

Doing so will cause Narcissus to execute the various on* listeners specified for different elements.  (Unfortunately, SpiderMonkey will also execute them, which may or may not cause issues).

However, Zaphod also provides an additional alternative.  Click on the Mozilla icon in the bottom right of your browser window, and it will disable SpiderMonkey and use Narcissus for parsing all JavaScript on any page you visit.After you are done experimenting, click on the icon again and SpiderMonkey will be reset to your JavaScript engine.

At the moment, Zaphod does not work well with the more JavaScript-heavy sites like GMail, but we have several examples available for experimentation.  Enjoy!

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Thunderbird 3.1.4 and 3.0.8 are now available as free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://getthunderbird.com/. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Thunderbird, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version.

• Thunderbird 3.1.4: http://getthunderbird.com/
• Thunderbird 3.0.8: http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/all-older.html

We strongly recommend that all Thunderbird users upgrade to these latest releases. If you already have Thunderbird, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. You can also manually fetch this update by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

These releases fix stability problems affecting a limited number of users. For a list of changes and more information, please review the Thunderbird release notes:

• Thunderbird 3.1.4 release notes
• Thunderbird 3.0.8 release notes

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Firefox 3.6.10 and 3.5.13 are now available as free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux from www.firefox.com. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version. If you already have Firefox, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. The updates can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

These releases fix a stability problem affecting a limited number of users. For a list of changes and more information, please review the release notes:

• Firefox 3.6.10 release notes
• Firefox 3.5.13 release notes

Note: All Firefox 3 and 3.5 users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.6 by downloading it from www.firefox.com or by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu and clicking on “Get the New Version”, then checking for updates again once Firefox 3.6 is installed.

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For those of you using Windows 7 or Windows Vista, you probably have already noticed that by default, Firefox does not have the cool glass effect that some of your other programs might have.  You can make Firefox a little more transparent though, with the Glasser add-on.

Now, I’ll be honest – I didn’t think it would make that much of a change for me.  Sure, some more of Firefox is transparent – so what?  However, after giving this add-on a try finally, I might decide to keep it.  I like the fact that it gives the bookmarks toolbar a little ‘bit more highlight and makes it stand out a ‘bit more too.

Overall, I think it does make the Firefox 3.5/3.6 interface a lot sleeker.  You can pickup this interface changing extension from the Firefox Add-ons website.

Facebook Fan Page Come join the fun on the Firefox Facts Facebook Fan Page!

© Mitch Keeler 2010 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!

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Today we’re releasing an update to the Firefox 4 Beta to resolve two issues that have been causing problems for some of our testers:

• a stability issue on Windows,
• an issue with plugins on Mac OS X which made it difficult for users to type in some web pages, and showed white boxes over other web pages.

It’s thanks to our hundreds of thousands of beta testers and their continued feedback that we were able to identify, diagnose and address these issues. Existing beta users will be updated automatically, but of course we also welcome anyone to download the latest version from the beta website. Other than these bug fixes, today’s release has the same features and functionality as the previous beta update. The beta schedule hasn’t been impacted by this additional release, and we expect the next version of the beta in the coming weeks.

• Download Firefox 4 Beta
• Not convinced? Learn more about the features
• Got an opinion? Submit your feedback
• Short, to the point FAQ
• Long, technical release notes

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Editor’s note: On Sept. 14, Mozilla released a new JavaScript benchmark named Kraken. For more details, check out Rob Sayre’s announcement, reposted below.

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