Filed under: Mozilla

One video depicts how Firefox might look when you're rearranging browser tabs in the future. The other shows what it will look like when you create a new tab. In a nutshell, it looks like Firefox 4.0's tabs might behave exactly like those in Google Chrome.

In Firefox 3.6, when you click a tab and drag it you see sort of a shadow of the web page you're currently viewing. You can drag it to the position on the tab bar where you want to drop it, and the tab bar will snap into place. Chrome and Firefox 4 feature smoother transitions.

(Can you tell that I'm trying to spice things up around here?)

We've actually been discussing how to 'sass-up' Firefox Friday Five. Interviews with Mozilla developers? Add-on creators? Perhaps we could even get a perspective from competitors -- how does Microsoft intend to combat Firefox? With Chrome and Firefox both being open source and effectively having a shared code base, can either one of them ever be dominant?

Anyway, another quiet week from Mozilla itself, but there's been plenty of news about Firefox -- so let's get going!

1. Firefox for Mobile is coming to Android, thank God

I think we all knew Firefox would come to Android eventually, we were just getting a little nervous -- what with the Nokia/Maemo version being released, and no news of any other version except a stillborn Windows Mobile alpha.

It's still early days for the Android version (it's just a full port of the desktop version at the moment), but one has to assume, with Android taking off and the Google Tablet possibly on its way, that Firefox for Android is now a priority for Mozilla.

Mozilla finally released version 3 of their Thunderbird desktop email client last December, and they now have their attention focused on a minor bump to 3.1. Last night the first alpha build was made available, and it sports the usual handful of changes and improvements.

Among the tweaks are enhancements to stability and memory usage, better IMAP access, fixes for smart folders, filters, and attachment handling. The Thunderbird interface is also being re-tooled -- so far the changes are fairly subtle.

Thunderbird 3.1 is also dropping support for Windows ME and older as well as Mac OsX prior to 10.4 Tiger. But hey, if you're still running an OS that old you're probably not too concerned with running up-to-date apps either...

Ready to take it for a spin? Testers can download alpha builds for Windows, Mac, and Linux from the Thunderbird early release page.

Mozilla's Firefox browser may not be available for Android yet, but they can prove they're working on it. Some screenshots of a pre-alpha version of the browser have slipped out, and they show the full Firefox interface instead of the mobile UI we've seen on Maemo devices. That will probably change, though, according to Moziilla developer Vladimir Vukićević. As you can see from the screenshot above, they're running the full Firefox UI right now to put the maximum strain on the Gecko rendering engine. If the full UI works in testing, the mobile version should have no problems.

As for progress on features, Vladimir reports that "mouse events sort of work, toplevel windows sort of work, keyboard doesn't work yet but shouldn't be hard to hook up. This is running in an emulator at the moment for ease of debugging, but it's working just fine on physical hardware as well." So, the Android version is in pre-alpha and the Windows Mobile version is in alpha, but there are no plans to bring to Firefox for Mobile to other platforms, according to Mozilla's wiki. Sorry, iPhone, BlackBerry and Symbian users!

[via AndroidCentral]

After the Deadline has been mentioned before here on Download Squad. In September of 2009, Automattic (the company behind WordPress) acquired ATD and promptly integrated it into their wildly popular blogging platform.

If you do any writing anywhere on the web and you're using Firefox, you'll be glad to know that the After the Deadline add-on has hit version 1.0 and should be shedding Mozilla's experimental tag very soon.

In case you're not familiar with it, ATD is a brilliant proofreading tool. It can handle everything from common typos to misused punctuation, redundancies, double negatives, and other grammatical gaffs.

Install the Firefox add-on and you can tap its proofreading powers virtually anywhere you can type. It's well worth adding to your writer's toolbox even if you are a master of the written word -- it never hurts to have backup, after all!

Curious what goes on behind the scenes? Check out this recent blogpost which describes in gloriously geeky detail how ATD comes up with spelling suggestions.

Want to see the ATD add-on in action? Take the jump, and check out the video from the WordPress crew!

Happy Friday everyone!

I suppose it's to be expected, after a flurry of activity from the Mozilla HQ over the last few weeks, that things would calm down a little. There wasn't much Firefox news this week I'm afraid, but I've done my best to scrape together five fairly-interesting tidbits.

Let's start with a neat tip:

1. Overriding the add-on compatibility/version check

Most of you have probably updated to Firefox 3.6 in the past week -- except those of you that are hanging on to old add-ons that haven't had updated versions released!

Fortunately, most add-ons that work in 3.5 also work in 3.6 -- you just have to override the function that checks. You run the risk of having less stability, but in most cases you'll be fine. Follow these simple steps:

• Type about:config into your address bar
• Create a New Boolean Value by right-clicking in any empty space (New>Boolean)
• Type in extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6 (copy and paste it if necessary). Click OK.
• Select false on the next dialog box. Click OK.

Voila!

So what won't Weave synchronize? Your addons, personas, search plugins, and under-the-hood customizations (like about:config tweaks). According to Mozilla, we just need to have a little patience -- they fully intend future versions of Weave to be able to sync everything which makes your Firefox truly yours.

Head on over to Mozilla Labs and grab Weave 1.0! Have questions you need answered? Check the Weave FAQ and Mozilla forums, or post a comment here!

The folks at Mozilla are on a roll this month: first, they got Firefox 3.6 out the door and onto the desktops of millions of users, and now they're delivering Firefox to the palm of your hand. That is, if you own a Maemo phone, like the Nokia N900. Firefox for Maemo just got its third release candidate, which indicates it's quite close to a final release. RC3 cleans up a few bugs and addresses an issue with plug-ins, especially Flash.

Although it may disappoint some users, Mozilla has pulled plug-in support -- not add-on support, mind you -- from this latest release, because Flash apparently performed horribly in the browser. Some sites, like YouTube, worked well, but Mozilla decided to take the Apple route and leave Flash alone altogether. Firefox isn't as closed as MobileSafari, though: you can manually enable plugins again via about:config if you really want Flash. Apart from the Flash situation, RC3 has managed to speed up page load times significantly and introduce more responsive panning and zooming.

Phew! What a week for the Firefox!

With this flurry of activity things, you'd expect things to calm down for a little... but no! Mozilla will try to capitalize on their new fleet-footed approach to updates and minor revisions. With Chrome now barking at its heels and Microsoft's IE9 likely to arrive this year, it's never been more important for Firefox to keep its lead.

Let's start with the best one:

1. Government warnings about Internet Explorer cause massive influx of Firefox downloads

Lee, like the great impartial reporter that he is, pointed out that there were lots of Firefox and Opera downloads -- but as always when talking about Opera, it's on the same scale as a tiny, uninhabited Pacific island, so let's just go with the Firefox statistic.

Basically, the governments of Germany, France and Australia told its citizens to dump Internet Explorer... and that's what they did! From Firefox's usual 50,000 downloads a day, they spiked up to 200,000!

(It's worth noting that IE has now been patched and is safe again... but for how long?!)

A lot of people use the Internet to find porn.

A lot of people use Firefox (go download Firefox 3.6!)

In fact, I'd go as far to suggest that porn surfers -- or at least the search for naughty, illicit, adult-only material -- account for Firefox's biggest market demographic. The 'young' Internet -- blogs, social networks, porn -- is predominantly ruled by the spotty teenagers of the browser world: Firefox and Chrome. Internet Explorer's total market share is larger, but corporations, geriatrics and aging family computers -- i.e. the non-porn world -- account for most of that.

I'm not expecting you to raise your hand or even nod your agreement, but let's face it: most of us, at some time or another, will search for porn. It makes sense to be prepared for such an eventuality -- I think we all know the perils of loud, auto-playing sex music or aggressive pop-ups of hairy, German MILFs that just. won't. close.

Note: all of the links in this feature are safe. Don't worry: you should be fine to read this at work.

Happy Firefox 3.6 release day! In honor of the official release of the latest and greatest version of Mozilla's browser, I thought I'd highlight one new feature in particular: Personas. Firefox 3.6's Personas support allows you to change the look of Firefox with a single click, no restart required. If you've used themes in Google Chrome, you're already familiar with the idea.

The Personas gallery features a daunting 35,000+ themes already, but I took on the challenge of combing through them to separate the good and usable from the just-plain-ugly. I ruled out Personas that lacked contrast or otherwise made the Firefox toolbar tough to read (note to Personas designers: there were way too many of these), and then picked the most visually pleasing candidates from what was left.

I hope you enjoy these Firefox skins, but my list is by no means definitive. If you find a Persona that puts mine to shame and deserves a top place on the list, leave me a comment!

Take the jump to explore the gallery!

I find the thought of Google tracking my everyday searches rather disturbing; I'm sure I'm not the only one.

GoogleSharing is an experimental Firefox add-on which selectively routes Google searches through an anonymizing proxy. Searches remain very snappy -- and Google is none the wiser.

GoogleSharing is very selective, and anonymizes only your search traffic. GMail, Google Reader, and other such services keep working normally since you don't have to be logged out of Google for it to work.

One side effect worth noting: by default you'll get results from Google.com itself in English, and not from a country-specific Google domain (like, say, google.co.il).

GoogleSharing is currently experimental, so you need to be logged on to addons.mozilla.org to install it. It also warned me about compatibility with my Firefox 3.6 but worked flawlessly anyway.

[via gHacks]

It's finally official! Mere days after it hit Release Candidate 2, the finished version of Firefox 3.6 comes out tomorrow. It's been confirmed over at Mozilla's official blog, where there's also an intro video from Mike Beltzner, Director of Firefox. (Or, you can watch the video after the jump.)

Beltzner runs through all the new features in 3.6, including quick theming with Personas - which is up to a whopping 35 THOUSAND themes now. Firefox now also scans for plugins that need to be updated, for extra stability and security. Beltzner also focuses on designer features like CSS gradients, accelerometer support and web standards support.

The timing of this release is perfect, since IE is currently shedding users thanks to its role in China's attack on Google. If Firefox is going to take a bite out of IE and hold off the WebKit contenders like Chrome and Safari, now's the time to do it. So, along comes Firefox 3.6, marketing itself as the best choice for security and stability ... looks like a good sales pitch to me, even if you're not in love with add-ons.

Recently, Internet Explorer has taken a lot of heat. This time, however, it hasn't been coming from disgruntled web devs or tech-savvy folks like our readers. No, this round of 'ditch IE' requests came from the governments of Germany, France, and Australia.

The result: their citizens ditching IE en masse.

As you can see in the chart, nearly 300,000 Germans have downloaded Firefox in the last four days. Opera has seen a significant jump as well, reporting that downloads in Germany have doubled. In France, the uptick seems to have primarily benefited Mozilla, with Opera reporting only a slight increase. Mozilla won't have stats ready for a few days, but they've said the change was noticeable.

Opera also reported that downloads in Australia jumped 37%.

There's every reason to think Google Chrome is getting in on the action as well - but Google's not keen to make with the numbers. They suggest we sit tight and check third-party reports at the end of the month.

ed: if you're not up to speed about why this happened, check out Sebastian's post regarding the critical patch issued by Microsoft today!

[via The Register]