We've known for a while that Mozilla was working on a mobile version of Firefox. In fact, you can already download early builds of the web browser, codenamed Fennec, but at the moment it will only run on the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet.
But Mozilla says a Windows Mobile version of Fennec is on its way and that an Alpha release could come within the next few weeks. And now a few screenshots have surfaced which would seem to indicate that at least someone is already running Fennec on a Windows Mobile phone.
If the screenshot on the left looks rather crowded for a mobile browser, it's important to keep in mind that Fennec works in full screen mode most of the time. The location bar, tab menu, and even forward, back, and reload buttons are all designed to disappear when you're not using them. But Fennec does seem to take an interesting approach to tabbed browsing by presenting thumbnails of open pages, which seems both useful and like a potential waste of processing power on mobile devices.
One of the screenshots visible at the::unwired shows Fennec's score on the Acid3 test. The results? An 88. Not perfect, but not bad for a brwoser designed to run on a cellphone or PDA.
After spending some time in the beta tank, the Opera browser team has released Opera 9.6. The latest version of the Opera web browser adds a few new features, not all of which are related to the web. For instance, Opera has a built in email client. Opera 9.6 has a new low bandwidth mode that prevents attachments from being automatically downloaded if you have an IMAP account. For POP users, just the first 100 lines of a message are available unless you click on the message.
Opera 9.6 also has a new RSS feed preview feature that lets you see the contents of an RSS freed before you subscribe. In fact, the newspaper-style layout of the feed preview is so nifty that you might find yourself bookmarking RSS feeds to read in your web browser instead of the original web pages.
There are also a bunch of bug fixes and stability and performance improvements. Users can also synchronize their custom searches and typed history with Opera Link.
Adobe has announced that there is a known clickjacking vulnerability in the current Flash player. If you're looking to protect yourself, there are two possible remedies.
Firefox users would do well to install the NoScript addon, which has updated clickjacking defenses. "ClearClick" protection was added in version 1.8.2, but is now enabled by default. It's designed to prevent user with UI elements that are not visible. In layman's terms, it should keep you from clicking on a button that you didn't know was there.
Mozilla CEO says the first Alpha version of Firefox Mobile will be available in a few weeks. That's pretty exciting. But I wouldn't read too much into it at the moment.
It's not clear exactly what devices or operating systems will be supported by the early Alpha. Pre-alpha releases of the browser, code-named Fennec, are already available. But at the moment, they only run on the Nokia N810 internet tablet. The N810 is a pretty cool little device, but it's not as ubiquitous as say, Windows Mobile or Symbian powered cellphones.
Mozilla does plan to make a Windows Mobile version of Firefox Mobile available. I just don't know whether we'll see that version in a few weeks when Fennec hits alpha.
I've been using Foxit PDF instead of Adobe Reader for ages. I'm not a big user of PDF files, so I don't need whatever it is Adobe jams in to the 90-some-odd megs of disk space the new version consumes. Vuzit's online document viewer is a nice service, but I want single-click document handling. I don't want to download a file, open a new tab, browse to Vuzit, then browse to and upload my doc.
The Nodobe addon does exactly what I want, adding a new option Firefox's right-click menu. Find a file you need to open, right click it, and Vuzit's online viewer will display it in a new tab.
My one complaint is that it doesn't add an option to the download dialog, meaning it can't handle attachments from my Gmail. OpenItOnline, my document handler of choice, does provide that functionality.
Those with privacy concerns will want to read Vuzit's policy first, just to be on the safe side. I like to err on the side of caution with my docs, so anything really important I'll still be reading offline. For manuals, spec sheets, and the like, the Nodobe Viewer is a great alternative.
A year and a half after introducing an innovative web browser for Windows Mobile, Microsoft is killing the project. Back before there was an Opera Mini 4 or an iPhone version of Safari, the Deepfish web browser offered a way to display full desktop views of web pages on a tiny browser, allowing you to zoom in on the area you want to read.
The browser was developed by the Microsfot Live Labs team and was never released to the general public. But I wouldn't be surprised if some Deepfish code has found its way into the upcoming Internet Explorer Mobile 6.
In a blog post, the developers behind Deepfish say the goal was never to build a complete browser, but rather to show that an innovative user interface could make for better mobile browsing. The team also implies that Deepfish helped inspire the development of full desktop views in other browsers like Safari, Opera Mini, and Opera Mobile.
You can check out a video shot early last year of Deepfish in action after the jump.
Online auction site eBay has launched a a new tool that makes it easy to find out how much an item is selling for on eBay even when you're visiting another site. It's called Browser Highlighter, and here's how it works. You download and install the tool, and then when you're searching for items on selected sites, a "compare on eBay" button will appear. Click the button and a window will pop up over the web page you're currently reading with a list of eBay items matching the term you were searching for.
Browser Highlighter doesn't work with every site on the web. But it does work with Google and Yahoo! search pages, Google and Yahoo! shopping pages, Amazon, and Nextag. Say for example, you're searching for an iPod. You can search Amazon for iPods, and see a list of items matching your query on Amazon. Then you can click the compare on eBay button to see if you can find a better deal on ebay before making your purchase from Amazon.
The plugin also comes bundled with the Skype browser extension that lets you click any phone number on a web page in order to initiate a call with Skype. This plugin's been available as a separate download for a while. While you can uninstall the Skype plugin once it's installed, there does not appear to be a way to opt out of installing it in the first place if all you want is the Borwser Highlighter.
Browser Highlighter works with Firefox and Internet Explorer and is available for Windows only. eBay plans to release a Mac version that works with Safari soon.
Does it frustrate you that even though you can add HTML links in the content of your email when creating it in Gmail, you can't add an HTML link to your signature? It sure frustrates me. Many webmail services have very limited signature editors, making it difficult to create a compelling signature.
If you would like to use more than just plain text in your signature for your webmail account, give WiseStamp a try. WiseStamp is a Firefox add-on that gives you a rich text editor to create your email signature, and gives handy links to instant messaging services or social networks that you can add in to personalize your signature further. WiseStamp supports Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, and Hotmail.
If you frequently find yourself browsing on a low-bandwidth connection, you can potentially speed up your browsing experience by using the compressing proxy server at Toonel.net. The concept is simple: install their application on your computer (versions are available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Sun Solaris, and even Windows Mobile and Symbian), then set your proxy settings to point to your localhost IP address on port 8080 (127.0.0.1:8080). Once you do, all of your web traffic is routed through Toonel.net's server, which compresses it before it gets to you.
The compression used is lossless, which is required to ensure the pages show up as expected, though there are image-specific options that allow you to change the compression that is applied to JPEG and GIF images. This is likely only worthwhile on a very slow network, since it takes the server a bit of time to recompress images before your browser can download them, but could be handy on a struggling network.
I wouldn't recommend running Toonel.net full-time, or even at all if you're always on a broadband connection, but if you find yourself struggling with a lack of bandwidth, this is a great trick to have in your back pocket.
Microsoft will be rolling out the first major upgrade to its mobile version of Internet Explorer since... well, practically ever. The version of Internet Explorer that ships with Windows Mobile devices is based on code from Internet Explorer 4. The new version will be based on the desktop version of Internet Explorer 6 and should be able to handle pretty much any web site you can view in IE6.
The::unwired got a handful of screenshots of Internet Explorer Mobile 6. And it looks like a pretty major upgrade. First, you can choose between desktop and mobile browsing modes. In desktop mode the browser will squeeze full web pages onto your PDA or Smartphone's small screen. In mobile mode, you'll get the mobile version of any web page that's optimized for mobile browsers.
There's certainly still room for improvement. Full desktop mode on the iPhone version of Safari or on the Opera Mini web browser manages to squeeze large pages onto small screens without the need for scrollbars. Yet Internet Explorer Mobile 6 requires a bit of side to side scrolling action.
Internet Explorer Mobile 6 is expected to be available as a free upgrade for Windows Mobile 6.1 users soon. But if you just can't wait, you might want to check out the Skyfire web browser for Windows Mobile. It's available today and supports the desktop version of Flash, which means it can handle YouTube videos and other Flash content all within the browser.
There's been more than enough hullabaloo about Google Chrome lately. Hell, Michael Arrington even thinks it's a "Microsoft Killer" and is "nothing less than a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows." Oh wow.
If Chrome is so great, then how is it that K-Meleon beats the pants off it in all my testing? Even as I compose this post in Blogsmith I notice the difference. For one, all my WSYWIG buttons appear. Chrome can't manage that.
For starters, you'll only be downloading the K-Meleon install file or a 7-zip archive (yes, it's portable!). There's no updater/downloader/manager application that does the isntalling for you. K-Meleon launches fast, renders pages quickly and accurately, and uses less memory with a half dozen tabs viewing the exact same pages as Chrome.
Iron, developed by German software company SRWare is Chrome stripped of all the user ID information that gave the German government cause for concern.
I don't speak German, but the guys at the Incomplete-News Project have helpfully published an English translation. According to them, Iron is essentially the Chromium source code, with the following modifications:
No unique user-ID
No user-specific information is sent to Google
No alternative error messages
Crash information is not sent to Google
No Google updater
I personally don't have a problem with having my search data transmitted to Google (as I'm sure it is in Safari and Firefox with my search bars now), but I do understand the concerns about data-collection potential.
I downloaded Iron, and other than featuring the same squished blue logo that CodeWeavers uses in its version of Chromium on the default tab page, everything worked exactly as expected.
Firefox users looking to stay up-to-date can download the beta version of 3.0.2 from Freeware Files . Though Mozilla has release notes posted, I was unable to find a link to the download itself on their site.
The update addresses several security issues, bugs, and rendering issues, and new SSL Extended Validation roots have been added (if you've seen your address bar turn green, it's likely from a EV-enabled SSL host). Check the notes for a complete list of fixes, and stay tuned to Download Squad for the official download link once it's available.
Joel Spolsky's name is well known and highly respected in the software community. When he talks, people listen. So it was with a bit of interest that I noted his blog post about his truly cross-platform password management method.
Joel uses the recently-graduated-from-beta DropBox on each of his Windows, Mac, and Linux machines to share files amongst them. He then uses Password Safe on his Windows machine, and Password Gorilla on his Mac and Linux machines, since it is compatible with Password Safe files. He stores the encrypted password file in his DropBox folder, making it available on every machine, and even better instantly synchronized on every machine.
This looks like a slick approach to an age-old problem, and it's great to see an accomplished developer hacking together a useful approach out of existing tools rather than feeling the need to go to the drawing board and write their own solution.
There are plenty of things that set Google Chrome apart from Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer. It uses a different rendering engine. It places tabs at the very top of the screen, not under the location bar. It has a single location/search bar. And each browser tab is treated as a separate process by your operating system. Another thing that separates Chrome from the competition? It's not as extendable... yet.
You can install add-ons for web browsers like Firefox that do everything from turn the browser into an FTP client to provide email notifications. And there are user scripts that will let you change the way you interact with web pages. Google Chrome doesn't currently support either type of extensions. But it will.
At the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, Google's Ojan Vafai indicated that Chrome wll support both eventually. But first, the developers want to make sure that add-ons don't cause the browser to become unstable. Firefox add-ons, for example, can bog down the application, making it take longer to launch and more likely to crash.
While you're waiting for Google to figure things out, there are always workarounds that let you install user scripts or block ads in Chrome.
If you frequently find yourself browsing on a low-bandwidth connection, you can potentially speed up your browsing experience by using the compressing proxy server at Toonel.net. The concept is simple: install their application on your computer (versions are available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Sun Solaris, and even Windows Mobile and Symbian), then set your proxy settings to point to your localhost IP address on port 8080 (127.0.0.1:8080). Once you do, all of your web traffic is routed through Toonel.net's server, which compresses it before it gets to you.
If you want to use 
