Mozilla, we love you and all, but could you do us a favor? Could you please, please drop the RC from Firefox 3.5 already? Because, honestly, I think if I read another battery of "Firefox RC# Released" reports, I'm probably going to puke on my shoes.

On the plus side for Mozilla, all these releases are great publicity. Three candidates times the number of blogs reporting on Firefox equals...what? 16 billion blogs posts? Exaggerated, I know, but it seems like I can't open Google Reader without someone poking me in the eye with another update notice.

I know there are probably still some last-minute things that need touching up, and I want a Firefox 3.5 that's as close to perfect as possible too...but is this the only way to get it?

Little annoyances can always be patched after the release, right? Like they were with Firefox 3.0, remember?

On second thought, maybe that's exactly what they're trying to avoid this time. Well, carry on then!

One of the coolest features in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 is the way the web browsers treats each open tab or window as a separate process. That means if one tab crashes, the browser won't necessarily close. Plugins like Adobe Flash can also fail without crashing the browser.

Mozilla is working on bringing a similar feature to Firefox. It's not ready for prime time yet, and it won't be included in Firefox 3.5, which is due out any day now. But Chris Jones, one of the people working on the project, has posted a short video that shows an early version of the project (codenamed Electrolysis) in action. As an added bonus, if you click that link in Firefox 3.5 RC2, you'll be able to watch the video in your browser without any plugins.

The video shows what happens when a page goes bad and a process is terminated and restarted. Electrolysis should be ready for general consumption in mid-July.

[via Mozilla Links]

The Mozilla Jetpack "In the Wild" page seems to get a little bigger every day. Mozilla is rightfully proud of the fledgling project, and for good reason. Jetpack brings no-restart add-on installation to Firefox and it opens development to a huge base of coders since they need only know HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Any Webpage Slidebar is a good example of what Jetpack can do in a very limited amount of code. In 10 lines, the developer has created a way for you to embed, well, any page you want into the Slidebar.

Paste the URL into the Any Webpage generator and set your desired width in pixels, and submit. The install button will appear on the next page. Click install, and you can pop out your page at any time by clicking the blue Jetpack arrow.

To test, I used Dabr - a web-based Twitter client optimized for mobile browsing - which is well-suited to being crammed into a 300-pixel wide column.

It's not quite as slick as Opera's dead-simple click and drag to panels, but it's a simple, effective way to make better use of your widescreen real estate in Firefox.

I wrote about OperaTOR a while back as a portable option for simple TOR-enabled browsing on the go.

Maybe you'd prefer a single EXE that packages Firefox, TOR, Privoxy, and Vidalia? You're in luck - Paul O'Brien has combined those ingredients into a tasty privacy-enhancing stew.

He's created the package using Xenocode (and yes, it's a licensed copy) to help users avoid bothersome Internet roadblocks which prevent users in some countries from accessing websites that have been deemed inappropriate.

Unzip the archive, double-click the EXE to launch, and click the TOR button once Firefox has loaded. Your settings are saved into the sandbox subfolder on your launch drive so no data will be left behind on the host machine.

While the original version had some trouble with x64 Windows, Paul has already uploaded a new package that should work just fine for 64-bit users. It's available for download from his site and mirrored on RapidShare as well.

While it's still just a few weeks old, Mozilla is already working hard to get Jetpack ready for the future. Version 0.2 has been released, and it comes with several new API additions that make Jetpack development easier and provide access to features that will be baked in to future releases.

The most obvious addition is the Slidebar, which you can see in the screenshot above. It's a lightweight way to provide functionality much like the sidebars used by some current add-ons. Slidebars are still "full of quirks," as Mozilla's Aza Raskin puts it, but they're usable. The Facebook Chat jetpack works very well - I didn't experience any memory leaks or chrome oddities. Mozilla's Video Slide demo (check the video after the break), however, is a bit more touchy and started acting up after I tried to leave the video page from which I was adding clips.

Not a big deal - none of us should expect Jetpack to be perfect after two minor releases. It is what it is - an exciting, fun project that is going to launch a whole new rush of add-on development for Firefox.

One minor (but annoying) issue has been fixed as well. Jetpack icons no longer bleed over the top edge of your Firefox status bar. It's a minor touch, sure, but it's nice to see the attention to detail. Two more key additions: add-ons can now utilize the clipboard and persistent storage across restarts.

For more detail about the update, check Raskin's post on Labs.