I have been meaning to write this post for a while now. I have found a few new favourite extensions for Firefox. Mainly they help me make the most of the space on my screen.
Here’s what my screen looks like right now:
Download Statusbar cures one slight annoyance with Firefox. Instead of opening the Download Manager whenever I save something from the web, the Download Statusbar will appear at the bottom of the screen. Kind-of the same thinking as with the neat Find bar that Firefox has. You can make it hide automatically when you’ve opened your downloaded files too.
Hide Caption Titlebar Plus lets you get rid of the titlebar at the top of the window. As you might have guessed. This gives you more space for web pages. Works really well with the next extension.
Tabs On Top puts Firefox’s tabs at the top of the window. Used together with Hide Caption Titlebar Plus above, this makes them easier to target with the mouse.
Link Target Display is another great extensions which indirectly increases the space left over for web pages. With this extension, you can hide the status bar, and still get to see the URLs that links point to.
I didn’t start blogging until December 2004 so I have no historical blog post to link to.
Back in 2004 I’d already been using Firefox since version 0.6, released in May 2003. And I’d been a fan of the Mozilla Suite for roughly 2 ½ years. (Mozilla 1.0 was released 5th June 2002.) And before that I was happily using Netscape 6 since its release in November 2000.
Imagine being a web developer in 2009, with almost 93% of the browser market being CSS3 compliant.
Hah, that’s a laugh. It turns out things don’t move quite that fast. Still, we’re basically rid of the IE6 plague and IE7 is heading in the same direction – down.
Here’s to another 5 years of Firefox gaining market share! In 2014 it should have at least 50 percent. IE will be a minority player.
Tonight I’m meeting Mozilla Sweden, i.e. David Tenser and Patrick Finch at the Bishop’s Arms for a … beer? Naw, a coke maybe.
When you fill out a form in a web page, the autocomplete suggestions are now ranked based on how recently and how frequently you use the different words (aka frecency).
If you middle-click or Ctrl+click a link to open it in a new tab, the new tab will be created directly to the right of the current tab instead of at the far end. This makes it easier to switch to, and related tabs are kept together.
Videos embedded in a page with the <video> tag can now be shown fullscreen.
I just tried the Ubiquity add-on for Firefox for the first time. This thing is incredible! I just typed in weather and somehow it already knows where I am?! Almost scary!
I was obviously expecting it to do better than beta 2 in both tests, but that didn’t quite turn out to be the case. Below are averages from three runs of each combination of browser and benchmark, using a clean Firefox profile. (Not safe mode, since that will reduce Javascript speed in beta 3!)
Edit: I just added the data from my previous test for the non-Firefox browsers, for comparison. I also made a nice new graph.
To make the two benchmarks more comparable I’ve normalized the scores (inverting the time data from Sunspider, turning it into speed). The winner of each benchmark is given 100 and the others are given relative scores.
And here is the raw data (averages for three runs):
Browser
Sunspider (lower is better)
V8 (higher is better)
Firefox 3.1 b2
1,737ms
133
Firefox 3.1 b3
2,150ms
201
Opera 10 a
6,188ms
137
IE 8 rc1
7,994ms
47
Safari 4 b
1,633ms
1,056
Chrome 1.0
1,761ms
1,136
That’s pretty weird stuff. Beta 3 runs the V8 benchmark 51% faster than beta 2. But it chugs through the Sunspider benchmark 19% slower. (Or taking 24% longer, if you wish … 2150/1737 = 1.238 and 1/1.238 = 1-0.192)
Does anyone happen to know why this is the case? Was this a strategic move from the Firefox developers? I mean, did they introduce this slight performance regression knowingly, intending to fix it for final release?
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