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Filed under: Mozilla, Browsers

Mozilla Jetpack contest winner harnesses GPU power to process data

by Lee Mathews Nov 6th 2009

Mozilla Labs has announced a winner of the Jetpack .5 contest. While Jetpack is known primarily as a framework for allowing coders with a web development background to put together add-on type enhancements for Firefox, the winner 's project wasn't your run-of-the-mill sidebar hack.

Alex Miltsev's submission was jetpack-to-CUDA, and it provides Jetpack developers with a simple way to offload intense processing tasks to GPUs. CUDA (demo video above) is NVidia's parallel computing architecture - and with CUDA-capable chips in more than 100 million PCs, Miltsev's handiwork could enable some seriously cool (and powerful) Jetpack add-ons to be developed.

The runners up (not to take anything away from them) were much more standard Jetpack offerings - a Google Translate extension, link shortener and sharer, and Twitter client.

Kudos to Miltssev for his creative entry! Here's hoping we see some truly awesome things in future versions of Firefox and Jetpack as a result.

Tags: add-ons, addons, cuda, extensions, firefox, jetpack

Filed under: Utilities, Browsers

Get a Firefox 3.7 feature early with Tab Progress Bar

by Jay Hathaway Nov 5th 2009

If you're gung-ho about upcoming versions of Firefox, you can start testing some of their features via add-ons. Firefox 3.7 is slated to introduce a new look for the progress bar, relocating it to the top of each individual tab but you can enable the feature in current versions of the browser right now, with Tab Progress Bar. This neat little add-on won't cost you much disk space, weighing in at a miniscule 6kb.

A new-look progress bar sounds like frivolous decoration, but it serves a practical purpose, too. If you often load bunches of tabs at once, It's helpful to be able to see the progress of each page you're loading at a glance. With this new design, you won't even have to change tabs to know whether those huge videos are almost done loading. One minor quibble: I've found that Tab Progress Bar best used with a theme that doesn't highlight your current tab in blue, as the progress bar tends to blend in with blue tabs.

Firefox 3.7 and 4.0 will certainly have bigger and better things to offer, but Tab Progress Bar is one small slice of the future that you don't have to wait for.

[via Lifehacker]

Tags: firefox, firefox 3.7, Firefox3.7, tab progress bar, TabProgressBar, tabs

Filed under: Social Software, Humor

Thumbs down! Firefox users can now "dislike" posts on Facebook

by Jay Hathaway Nov 5th 2009

You might have seen the various petitions on Facebook to add a "dislike" feature to the site, to complement the "like" option in the News Feed. Well, Facebook hasn't listened. However, if you're a Firefox user, you can add a thumbs-down feature to FB with (what else?) a Facebook Dislike add-on.

It sounds kind of silly to keep track of your own dislikes, but it turns out that the extension feeds them into a database, so they'll be visible to anyone else who has it installed. The dislikes blend in seamlessly with the Facebook News Feed, appearing right below regular likes. It looks as if the members of those pro-dislike Facebook groups should be downloading Firefox and checking this extension out.

[via CNET]

Tags: add-on, dislike, facebook, firefox, thumbs down, ThumbsDown

Filed under: Productivity, Browsers

Make your Firefox more like Google Chrome with Pin Tabs

by Jay Hathaway Nov 5th 2009

One of the slick visual elements of Google's Chrome browser is pin tabs. They're those compact tabs that're only as wide as a favicon, and they save a ton of space in your tab bar. You could point out that Firefox doesn't have this feature, but I'd give you the Firefox fanatic's standard answer: there's an add-on for that! For Chrome-style mini-tabs in Firefox, grab the Pin Tab extension.

Pinning a tab using ctrl-click shrinks it and moves it to the left of your tab bar. A pinned tab is preserved across all sessions, and you can't accidentally upset it using the address bar. If you enter a new URL while a pinned tab is selected, that URL opens in a new tab instead. You can pin tabs by dragging them to the left of the tab bar, and unpin them by dragging them to the right. Pinned tabs save a ton of space, since they're several times smaller than regular ones, so this add-on is ideal for those who have dozens of sites open at once.

[via gHacks]

UPDATE: The developer of this add-on seems to have taken it down for right now.

Tags: add-on, chrome, firefox, pin tab, PinTab, tabs

Filed under: Internet, Browsers

Old Man IE6 shakes fist as Firefox surpasses him in browser share

by Jay Hathaway Nov 4th 2009

Web designers and standards advocates have tried everything to kill Internet Explorer 6, but it just refuses to die. In fact, Microsoft has extended support for the aging browser until at least mid-2010, and longer for some versions of Windows. However, there is strong evidence that people are coming around to browsers that support standards, don't make web designers cry, and have frickin' TABS, for crying out loud ...

Firefox is now more popular than IE6.

That's right: according to October browser usage stats reported by Ars Technica, the old, incontinent granddad of the browsing world has finally been overtaken by the cool kid with all the rad accessories. Although IE6 still has 23% of the market - sadly, more than any other version of IE - when you add up the usage on every version of Firefox, you get 24.07%, enough to top that single old edition of Internet Explorer.

I assume the shift is accounted for by home web users shifting to newer browsers with the release of Windows 7, because corporate IT departments are still the last bastion of widespread IE6 use. As Ars speculates, high Windows 7 adoption rates could be the stake through IE6's cold, tab-less heart.

Meanwhile, in the Webkit browser wars, Chrome and Safari both made gains this month. Chrome is still growing faster -- right now it's closing in rapidly with 3.58% to Safari's 4.42%.

Tags: browser wars, BrowserWars, firefox, ie6, internet explorer 6, InternetExplorer6

Filed under: Utilities, Productivity

Tabberwocky is a slick tab management add-on for Firefox

by Jay Hathaway Nov 2nd 2009

Tired of accidentally closing important tabs in Firefox? Tabberwocky, a useful tab-manager add-on, lets you protect a tab, open a duplicate tab next to the original, and lots more. Tabberwocky can move the 'close tab' button to either side of a tab, highlight unread tabs, retain a tab's history when you open a link in a new tab -- and that's just the beginning! This tiny 25kb add-on has a list of options about a page long.

Tabberwocky's main competition is the popular Tab Mix Plus add-on, which offers very similar features. What Tab Mix plus has that Tabberwocky still doesn't is the session manager, so you can save and restore sets of tabs and windows, even after a crash. Tab Mix plus has been known to slow down Firefox's performance on some systems though, so Tabberwocky might be a lighter alternative to try if you've been having problems with TMP.

[via ghacks]

Tags: add-on, browsing, firefox, tabbed browsing, TabbedBrowsing, tabberwocky, tabs

Filed under: Design, E-mail, Google

Declutter your Gmail setup with Minimalist Gmail

by Jay Hathaway Nov 1st 2009

Minimalist Gmail is a Firefox plugin that gives you control over whether to hide or show each part of the Gmail interface. You can take out individual buttons and menus and, yes, even ads. There are Greasemonkey scripts that do similar things, but not every Firefox user has delved into userscripting, so this simple add-on makes a nice alternative.

One of the nicest things about Minimalist Gmail is the way it handles chat. You can hide the chatbox, but as long as you're signed into chat, you'll still see new messages if they come in. If you're using other Gmail skins, Minimalist Gmail might be compatible with those, too. It works with my favorite clean Gmail look, Helvetimail.

[via Lifehacker]

Tags: add-on, extension, firefox, gmail, minimalist gmail, MinimalistGmail

Filed under: Microsoft, Mozilla, Browsers

Firefox 3.6 has juicy Superbar integration with Windows 7 (and you can disable it)

by Sebastian Anthony Nov 1st 2009



Yesterday I told you about the new Firefox 3.6 Beta -- and today, I can show you a neat bit of Windows 7 integration. Windows 7 uses Microsoft's Aero window manager and theme -- you've probably heard about it, or learnt to hate it in Vista -- and in it there's a cool technology called 'Aero Peek'. As you can see in the screenshot above, in Firefox 3.6 Beta, Aero Peek is now fully enabled, and smoother than its implementation in 3.6b1pre.

Aero Peek lets you see what's going on in a particular program without having to actually click anything -- you can just mouse-over it on the alt-tab running-programs menu or on the Superbar. In Firefox 3.5 this works for the Firefox window itself, but not the tabs within. Now, in 3.6 Beta, you can see what's going on in any tab by hovering your mouse over the thumbnail. I do wonder if this requires massive disk-swapping though, or if it takes snapshots -- but I'm pretty sure Aero shows you the window contents in real-time. Either way, it's cool, and beats the hell out of tabbing through 20 different tabs to find what you're looking for.

Those of you that are already using 3.6 might have noticed another neat thing: when you have a bunch of tabs (10+ in our testing) open, you get a "buttonized" list of favicons and page titles, instead of thumbnails. You can still jump straight to a tab or see a preview from the Superbar.

Don't like the Aero Peek integration? You can easily disable it -- if you're worried about the potential performance hit -- just whack about:config into your Firefox address bar and set browser.taskbar.previews.enable to false.

[Download Firefox 3.6 Beta here]

Tags: aero, beta, firefox, superbar, windows 7, Windows7

Filed under: Linux, Mozilla, Browsers

Mozilla release mockups for upcoming Firefox Linux releases

Linuxby Brad Linder Oct 31st 2009

Firefox 4.0 Linux mockup
The folks at Mozilla have released the first mockup showing what Firefox 4.0 may look like on Linux... and it looks an awful lot like the Windows version.

Firefox 4.0 isn't due out for another year or so, but the developers have already stated a few goals for the project. One idea is to move the browser tabs above the location bar. Another is to consolidate the menus into a few tabs that will hang out next to the location bar. Both movies will free up space, allowing more of the browser to be dedicated to displaying web pages.

If the end result looks familiar, that's because it looks an awful lot like the default layout in the Google Chrome web browser.

Mozilla has also released some mockups of Firefox 3.7 for Linux. One of the most notable changes is that the interface will be more consistent across platforms. Firefox 3.7 for Linux will use the same Forward/Back buttons as the Mac and Windows versions, for example. The edges of the browser, tabs, and other elements will also be curved rather than angled, which will make the browser look more like the mac and Windows versions.

At this point, both the Firefox 3.7 and 4.0 mockups represent proposed changes and not finished products, so things may change by the time these browsers are actually released.

[via OMG! Ubuntu]

Tags: firefox, firefox-3.7, firefox-4.0, linux, mockups, web-browsers

Filed under: Internet, Mozilla, Browsers

Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 now available!

by Sebastian Anthony Oct 30th 2009


Let's not beat around the bush: Download the new version of Firefox now.

With that out of the way, here are the new features that debut with Firefox 3.6, straight from the release page:
  • Users can now change their browser's appearance with a single click, with built in support for Personas.
  • Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
  • Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
  • Support for the WOFF font format.
  • Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
  • Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.
These new changes mostly come from an upgrade to version 1.9.2 of Gecko, the HTML engine that does most of the rendering work in Firefox (and its light-weight sister Camino) -- and as with all version revisions, you will have to update most or all of your add-ons (there's even a compatibility checker!)

Developers should check out the notes for 3.6, if they haven't yet updated the add-ons they administer.

If you've heard enough, here are some direct download links to get you upgraded to the Beta ASAP:

Tags: beta, firefox, gecko

Filed under: News, Mozilla, Browsers

Congrats, citizens of Mozilla! Firefox population surpasses that of the United States

by Lee Mathews Oct 27th 2009

Over the past two months, Mozilla has been hoovering up new users with reckless abandon - nearly 4 million people per week. At 330 million, the projected number of Firefox users has actually outstripped the population of the United States (which is currently around 305 million).

There's a little numerical kung fu that Mozilla uses to calculate that figure, and while it might not be 100% accurate the bottom line is that there are a crapload of Firefox users out there. And all those little foxes keep chewing away at Internet Explorer's browser-share pie.

Mozilla Europe honcho Tristan Nitot was understandably enthusiastic about the recent growth. Fall typically means an uptick for Firefox. Nitot told ZDNet, "Usually it's a mixture of back-to-school and people getting new computers and installing the latest version. This boosts our numbers every year."

Clearly, the next logical step is for Firefox users to form an organized state and start drafting up a constitution and electing officials. We'll also need a flag. There's already a Mozilla army, right? That'll save some time and resources.

*hastily Photoshopped chart sort of courtesy Wikipedia - though they have yet to officially recognize Mozilla as a country.

[via ZDNet]

Tags: browser share, BrowserShare, firefox, population

Filed under: Mozilla, Browsers

Firefox 3.6 might become a pretty major "minor update"

by Jay Hathaway Oct 23rd 2009

Firefox 3.6 is due to be the next major version of Mozilla's popular browser, but some people inside Mozilla are pushing to reclassify it as a "minor update." It's not that 3.6 isn't a big deal, it's just that users adopt minor updates at much higher rates than major new versions. That's because Firefox prompts users to install minor updates when they come out, but you're on your to download and install a major one.

The argument for 3.6 as a minor update is that it doesn't bring any UI changes or other high-profile feature updates, but it does do a lot under the hood for stability and compatibility with the latest web technologies. Keeping up with changing web standards makes quicker browser updates a good thing, but Firefox is a special case because of all its add-ons. 3.6 is going to require add-on developers to write updates, and they won't have as much time if it's a minor update.

[via CNET]

Tags: firefox, firefox3.6, mozilla

Filed under: Mozilla, Beta, Browsers, Mobile, Android

Mozilla makes its mobile move, brings Firefox 3.6 to Android

Androidby Jay Hathaway Oct 20th 2009

In the mobile browser wars, Webkit-based browsers seem to be pulling away from the pack. Don't count Firefox out yet, though, because the CEO of Mozilla says that Firefox has put together "the most advanced mobile browser," and it's due to hit Android phones soon. Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, is based on Firefox 3.6, which is a generation ahead of the current desktop version of Firefox. As CEO John Lilly told Om Malik of GigaOM, this browser does "everything - Javascript, CSS, Flash, SVG, video and audio."

Like the desktop version of Firefox, the mobile version uses the AwesomeBar, which provides quick access to bookmarks and browser history, right from the address bar. Mozilla also plans to support add-ons for Firefox's mobile version, which would make it the first mobile browser to do so. Add-ons might be the sole factor keeping Firefox competitive on the desktop. In the mobile space, they'd give it an edge. Along with Android, Mozilla is also developing for Nokia's Maemo OS, which isn't too widespread in the US, but is growing in global popularity.

Tags: android, fennec, firefox, mobile, mozilla

Filed under: Mozilla, iPhone, Browsers

Mozilla getting ready to roll the dice on Weave for the iPhone?

by Lee Mathews Oct 19th 2009

Om Malik waxed poetic over the weekend about a chat he had with Mozilla CEO John Lilly. Among the topics that came up: a Mozilla submission to Apple's App Store.

Don't go getting all excited about a Fennec port for the iPhone. We're all well aware of Apple's stance on apps that compete with duplicate functionality of their own apps or offer choice "potential confusion for users." Fennec most certainly would stomp all over Safari's toes, so that's pretty well out.

Malik mentioned something based on Weave as a possibility, and he received a Nudge-Nudge style knowing grin from the Mozilla crew. Could it be true? Is Weave about to run the gauntlet that is Apple's approval process?

While it's a sync app and might step on MobileMe's toes ever so slightly, Weave for the iPhone should be able to wrangle an approval. After all, the only functionality they would likely share is bookmark syncing.

And what about Apple preferring not to let app out of the sandbox? Vic and I kicked this around, and a simple Safari-based front end to your Weave data in the cloud could very well be a workable solution. Mozilla's actual plan remains a mystery for now.

While I'm sure all Firefox fanatics with an iPhone are pulling for Mozilla, we probably shouldn't hold our breath. Apple's rejected plenty of apps on fairly tenuous grounds before, after all.

Tags: app-store, apple, fennec, firefox, iphone, mozilla, weave

Filed under: Microsoft, Mozilla, Browsers, Op-Ed

Dear Microsoft, please keep your lousy mitts off my Firefox install

by Lee Mathews Oct 17th 2009

This isn't the first time Microsoft has taken liberties with Firefox users. There's that whole .Net thing that happened back in May of this year.

So what gives, Redmond? Why - especially after the fallout from the last incident - would you go and push a Windows Presentation Foundation plugin on my Firefox install? I didn't ask for it, and I don't really want it. Plenty of people consider software that installs in this kind of underhanded way to be malware.

Not to mention a security risk. You know, the same way you (Microsoft) consider Google's Chrome Frame to be a security risk for your own browser. I'll need someone to explain to me how MS figures the situation is different when the shoe is on the other foot.

I'll clear something up for you right now - and this goes for all software companies, not just Microsoft. I expect control over what gets installed on my system and what doesn't. Go ahead and offer me updates, add-ons, and plugins. But please, give me the choice to install.

Heck, I can choose to put off Windows updates forever if I want and some of those are pretty critical patches. So why should I not be given the choice to opt out of something as trifling as a WPF plugin for my non-IE browser?

Get your filthy hands off my browser, you damn, dirty ape!

Tags: firefox, malware, microsoft, plugin, unwanted-software, wpf

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