11 April 2008
I was just checking out Ameibo which was launched only yesterday. If I've understood correctly it is a legal, torrent based file sharing service which charges for downloads and pays users for uploads.
I haven't actually tried downloading anything yet. Since downloads cost money I'll only download stuff I really want. But everything was looking really promising and I got the feeling of Wow, finally someone has worked it out!
. How to provide legal downloads of films for a reasonable price.
But then I got a welcome
email, and I quote: (translated from Swedish)
To make best use of the service we recommend that you use Internet Explorer 6.0 and Windows Media Player 11 or higher.
Emphasis mine there. Well as you understand, that's a bit of a turn-off for a Firefox guy geek like me. At least there's the higher
which refers to IE7 I guess. That's better than asking for IE6 only, which would be plain crazy.
Don't they understand that their audience, people using (or willing to use) bittorrent, are much more biased towards using Firefox than the average internet crowd?
Then there's the fact that most of the films are DRM'ed, and therefore can't be burned and played on a DVD. But perhaps the film industry will one day understand (like the music industry now finally has done) that DRM is only a nuisance for the legal downloaders and no one else.
Labels: browsers, firefox, internet explorer
02 April 2008
As the title says ^^. Get it now. Or read a review over at Mozilla links first.
It's available in an amazing 45 different languages, simultaneously! I hear Vista SP1 in Swedish will be out some time during quarter two...
There have been quite a few nice little theme tweaks since beta 4. And I believe all the memory and javascript performance improvements that the Internets have been raving about are new for beta 5 as well.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
03 March 2008
Ok, so we all know Firefox 3 will be great. But what will it mean? What will it feel like?
Well it just hit me. Firefox 3 makes Firefox 2 feel like a beta. It's not that Firefox 2 is buggy or hangs, but there are just so many things in Firefox 3 that work better, easier, faster, simpler.
I guess all the Firefox releases so far have been like that. The improvements make you wonder: Why didn't they just do that in the first place? That might sound like criticism, but it isn't.
Instead it's a matter of the Firefox community and developers managing to think of more and more ways to streamline and simplify the browser for every release.
New location bar
For instance, take the new location bar: When you start typing, Firefox will start listing previously visited pages that match what you've typed so far. It will match against URL, page title and bookmark tags. Firefox will take into account how often and how recently you visited the pages in the list and order them accordingly.
The location bar search is very soft
, in other words it will find matches with the searched words in any order, and it'll also find parts of words.
Also, the location bar will learn how you think. Sort of. If you type in "news" and then choose http://www.cnn.com/ from the list of previously visited websites, Firefox will remember that combination of search phrase and web page. The next time you type "news", CNN will end up higher in the list, if not at the top.
Other new features
Here are a few other things that will make Firefox 3 easier to use and live with:
- A panel in the Add-ons manager for installing addons straight from within the browser.
- Another panel in the Add-ons manager for plugins. Makes it very easy to enable and disable plugins as you like in stead of mucking around in the installation folder.
- Pausable downloads - great for large downloads or if you're on a dialup connection.
- Searchable download history.
- Quick bookmarking - just click the star to save a bookmark! Click it twice if you want to place the bookmark in a particular place, or if you want to tag it.
- Per-site permission settings for images, cookies, popups and addons, all accessible in a new panel in the page info window.
- Full page zooming
- Saved bookmark searches. Allows you to automatically sort your bookmarks into folders based on tags, location (server/URL) or visiting dates. Great for the bookmark addict.
- New themes making Firefox 3 fit much better in Windows Vista, OS X and in Linux. I'm a little sceptical about the new XP theme though, but then it's not actually finished yet. See Wikipedia for some fairly up to date screenshots.
- Malware protection. In the same way Firefox 2 blocked known phishing sites, Firefox 3 will also block sites known to try installing viruses, spyware, etc on your computer.
- New manager for controlling how your downloads are handled. Similar to the file-type handler in Windows, Firefox lets you set if you want different file types to be saved, opened by a certain program or handled by a plugin.
Speed
One major advantage of Firefox 3 over 2 is its performance. Firefox 3 is quicker and uses less memory than Firefox 2. I haven't compared the two for speed myself, but the difference in memory usage is easy to see after a few hours of browsing.
I've always known Firefox was generally a quick browser, but I obviously hadn't understood quite how fast it was. Yesterday I did a quick test of various pages in Firefox 3 and IE7. Man, this thing flies! It just sucks the pages down off the net, while IE7 sort of sits there - waiting to be served... If you want to read more about Firefox 3's performance, see this article by Percy Cabello.
Well, I'm probably forgetting a few things now, but those are probably the main reasons to switch to Firefox 3. I'm predicting we will see a final version some time in July.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
29 February 2008
Today I submitted my third Mozilla bug, "Search using awesomebar locationbar doesn't always find history entries".
(The use of both locationbar and awesomebar is to make it easier to find using the search in bugzilla.)
Here's the description of the bug I posted to bugzilla:
When I type in a word into the location bar it doesn't always find the relevant
history entries.
For instance, in the past 60 days (my history cutoff) I have visited the
website "Helgessons kök", http://www.helgessons.se/. Now when I type
"helgessons" (no quotes) into the location bar I get nothing, even though it
should match both the URL and the page title.
When I do the same search in the History side-bar I *do* find the website. (Se
attached screenshot.)
I have previously submitted
one bug for Thunderbird and
one for Firefox.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
13 February 2008
20 November 2007
It's here!
So what's the big deal about Firefox 3? Well, many people who try new versions of Firefox (both version 3 and previous releases) complain that there aren't any major new features. But that's the thing with Firefox: It is constantly being refined and tweaked to improve your web browsing in subtle but great ways.
Here are some examples: (Copied from the official what's new list.)
- Easier password management: an information bar replaces the old password dialog so you can now save passwords after a successful login.
- Simplified add-on installation: the add-ons whitelist has been removed making it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer clicks.
- Resumable downloading: users can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting your network connection.
- Full page zoom: from the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images.
- Save what you were doing: Firefox will prompt users to save tabs on exit.
- Find toolbar: the Find toolbar now opens with the current selection.
- Star button: quickly add bookmarks from the location bar with a single click; a second click lets you file and tag them.
- Location bar & auto-complete: type the title or tag of a page in the location bar to quickly find the site you were looking for in your history; favicons, bookmark, and tag indicators help you see where results are coming from.
Firefox 3, alltogether, will be a huge improvement over Firefox 2. In my eyes there are two killer features:
- Rendering updated to Gecko 1.9. (If that can be called a feature.)
- Bookmarks and History combined into Places.
Once Firefox 3 has replaced most of the Firefox 2 installs (which should be sometime in april, thanks to Firefox's sleek update feature) web designers can seriously start playing around with semi-transparent colours. Also, soft hyphens will work in all the major browsers. (Although it is rather embarrassing that Firefox is the last browser to implement ­.)
Places is a very nice semi-revolutionary change in Firefox 3. If you want to, you can keep using bookmarks in the same old way you always used them. But if you have lots of bookmarks, chances are you will have a go at using the new tagging feature and use the location bar for searching your bookmarks and history.
Right now though, Places doesn't seem to work very well. The searching is slow, and sometimes doesn't find bookmarks that I just added a couple of minutes ago. This could be because I use a nightly build of Firefox which is newer than beta 1. (Can someone tell me if this works in beta 1?)
Anyway, give it a try!
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
25 August 2007
A lot of nice features are being added to what will become Firefox 3. The final release will probably be out sometime in November or December.
Here are some of the many improvements that have landed recently in the Firefox code:
- Colour management. Previously, if you saved a colour profile in a JPEG picture, only Safari would be able to interpret that information. Now Firefox will be able to as well.
- Improved Bookmarks and History: Places. Searchable, taggable bookmarks and history. To bookmark a page, just click the star in the URL bar.
- Plug-in manager. The add-ons manager gets a new tab for plug-ins. (Flash, Java, Acrobat Reader, etc.) Makes it easier to see which plug-ins are installed.
- Full page zoom. Together with bicubic interpolation of images, this can be quite useful. A website can for instance have a 800 pixel wide image and display it as 400 pixels wide. Then, if you like, you can zoom in to 200% and see more detail in the picture.
- Native audio and video support. Firefox 3 will support the new <audio> and <video> tags, which will make it much easier for website creators to include video and audio in their pages.
- Support for soft hyphens! All scandinavian web editors say yay!
I've downloaded a nightly build of Minefield and it is looking pretty good, even if the Places interface needs a bit of polish IMNSHO.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
07 March 2007
If you didn't know, Mozilla Links is the name of a brilliant new Mozilla news site.
They update often, with articles on stuff that happens on the Mozilla scene. Percy Cabello, who runs Mozilla Links, also writes reviews of interesting Firefox extensions and posts useful tips and tricks.
MozillaZine was for a long time the one-and-only website for Mozilla-related news. But around at the same time as they introduced the ads, things started to go downhill.
Now I feel that anything I read on MozillaZine I have already read somewhere else. And the comments after the articles are seldom very lively nowadays. (Perhaps because we don't get the bimonthly name-changes for the Mozilla products any more...) I don't actually think that the change has anything to do with the ads though. In fact, I'm not even sure that MozillaZine really has changed. It could just be that my news-gathering patterns have changed. I (obviously?) read many more blogs now than I did a couple of years back.
Anyway, for the Firefox aficionados, Mozilla Links is a great resource. Don't forget to add it to your RSS readers.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla, thunderbird
09 January 2007
The other day I was bored and searched for Firefox using the built-in keyword search in Netscape 7.01. (Somewhat outdated browser, I know... To make things better, this was on Mac OS 9.)
The search results were very interesting. You would have expected the top hit for a "mozilla firefox" search to be at least a page hosted somewhere on mozilla.org or mozilla.com, but no. Instead the first item (after the skilfully disguised sponsored links) was Download Netscape 7.2 Browser
.
That's just plain weird if you ask me. I could sort-of have understood if the first hit would have been Netscape 8, since that at least is based on Mozilla Firefox...
Searches for firefox browser
and opera browser
both result with the top search spot being filled with a specially designed ad for Netscape 8, while the previous number one has been pushed down to second:
In fact, any search including browser
will put Netscape's ad at the top.
Imagine the fuss that would arise if Microsoft did something like this! The fact that this hasn't caused a huge fuss just proves that Netscape means nothing these days.
Interestingly, though, a search for Microsoft Internet Explorer doesn't put Netscape in first position...
Netscape, you're fighting a losing battle. Even Microsoft is! :D Just move aside, and you might keep some dignity!
Labels: browsers, firefox, internet explorer, mozilla
19 December 2006
I love the fact that Firefox is still gaining on Internet Explorer even though MS just released version 7.
According to WebSideStory, Firefox is now at 10.7%, having increased by 0.89 percentage points between October and December. Internet Explorer meanwhile dropped 0.86 percentage points to 88.2%, even though version 7 is seeing increased usage.
IE7 holds 16.3% of the market, or 18.5% of IE usage. Firefox 2 meanwhile has 3.1% of the market, or 29.1% of Firefox usage. As usual, Firefox users seem to be more with it.
Keep in mind that nearly all other browser stats show Firefox at higher percentages than WebSideStory. XiTi, for instance, show that Firefox usage in Europe is at roughly 23% and 14% in the US.
Thunderbird 2 beta 1
Mozilla have just released the first beta of Thunderbird 2. There are many great new features and enhancements:
- Message tags - sort your emails using tags instead of folders, or both if you like.
- New theme, which uses the every-second-line-is-light-grey scheme for the message list.
- Improved performance of saved search folders, which btw is a wonderful feature.
- Improved information popup when you receive new mail.
- Session History Navigation - New Back and Forward buttons which work like back and forward in your web browser.
- Improved filing tools. Remembers folders that you recently copied or moved emails to and makes them easier to find in the context menu.
- Several others, but the above are my favourites.
Finally a word of caution. If you are planning on reorganizing your emails in Thunderbird 2 beta 1, make a backup of your profile first.
I found a nasty data loss bug, which drops
some messages if you try to move too many in one go from one folder to another. (It seems to depend on message size.) A simple and seemingly safe workaround is to copy your messages and then delete the copy in the first folder.
I haven't been able to find a bug for this at bugzilla.mozilla.org, so if you're good at searching bugzilla and feel like helping me (and everyone else) out, I'd be very greatful.
Labels: browsers, firefox, internet explorer, mozilla, thunderbird
24 October 2006
Just like last time Mozilla did a big release, addons.mozilla.org is getting a facelift.
The fact that plug-ins and search engines also are listed as add-ons
indicates that they will be merged in future versions of Firefox. That's to say, extensions, themes, search engine plug-ins and regular plug-ins will all be managed using the add-ons manager (which now in version 2 contains only themes and extensions).
The You're firefox has been updated
page has been given a similar design, so I presume they will be redesigning the main Firefox page too. A good addition they've made to the you-have-updated page is a link for installing spelling dictionaries. Great thinking there – a great way to promote one of the main advantages of Firefox 2 over IE7.
Update: Yeah, Firefox 2 has now been released and the main mozilla site has also had the redesign.
Labels: firefox, mozilla
23 October 2006
Mozilla Links just posted a great (=detailed) review of Firefox 2. Some of its new features are hard to live without once you've got used to them...
- Spellchecker
- Undo closed tabs (Ctrl+Shift+T)
- Session saving
Then it has been improved and polished in loads of ways, but those are the main addictions.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
I got a bit inspired this evening and decided to create a slightly tweaked version of the original Firefox 2 theme. Here's how it turned out:
This is basically what I wanted the new Firefox 2 theme to look like. I think they made it a little too pale (which was a concious decision), but thanks to the wonderful nature of Firefox I can just change it any way I like! Also, I can share my changes with anyone who wants them.
Edit: Here is the original theme for comparison:
So, to all of those who think that the default Firefox 2 theme is too pale, I give you...
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
21 October 2006
Some of these CSS3 previews show just how far behind Internet Explorer is when it comes to the latest and greatest in CSS3. Nice features such as HSLA colours are already being implemented by other browsers!
HSLA colours are a very nice thing indeed. Instead of defining a colour as Red, Green and Blue, web designers of the future will be able to choose Hue, Saturation and Lightness, as well as Alpha, an opacity value.
That means it will be much easier to guess-pick colours when you're coding. Also, making a colour semitransparent will be a very nice possibility for backgrounds. (No more semitransparent 1px png graphics!)
Then we have rounded borders, which is already being used around the web, since it degrades nicely (into square corners).
Another promising feature of CSS3 is columns. Currently, only Mozilla browsers (Firefox 1.5+) support this in any way. The idea is that you will be able to set a column width as well as spacing, and the browser will calculate how many columns to fit across the screen. Alternatively, you can define how many columns you want, and the browser will adjust their width to fit the space provided. A List Apart has a very nice article on the subject.
If you're really intersted, have a look at what the W3C are working on right now, the different modules and their specs. CSS3 is still work in progress, so only a couple of the modules are even close to the recommended status. (I.e. implement now!
status.
Labels: browsers, CSS, firefox, internet explorer, mozilla, web design
I guess I was just a little curious to try out IE7, so I have now installed it, although I said I wouldn't... :-)
But before doing so I created a system restore point so that I could go back properly, if necessary. (I believe IE7 is uninstallable, restoring IE6, but I wanted to be safe – not sorry.)
To begin with, I've somehow got the feeling that some think we should just be kind to the IE devs and like IE7, since they are very nice people and they have worked very hard, and after all, IE7 is very much better than IE6. But I don't buy that. In 2001, Microsoft messed up – and even five years later with IE7 they haven't caught up with the competition on some major points.
Sure, the individuals in the IE team have worked their gluteus maximuses off to get IE into it's current shape, and deserve credit for their work. Keep it up! But the fact remains that it is not yet on par with Firefox et al., and I believe the leadership that killed IE development back then should hear that.
Anyway, lets start with the goods.
The Goods
Internet Explorer 7 feels snappier than version 6, which is a positive surprise. I was really expecting it to feel more bloated.
They've done a good job in maximizing the website canvas. And the strive to maximize the canvas was probably what made them remove the menus and put those commands
over to the right. There's been a lot of whining about those changes, but frankly, I think they work quite well.
Tabs have been made discoverable in a very nifty way. There is always a tab visible, but without stealing a whole bar of screen space. The new tab waiting at the end is sort of cool, but I think Firefox's button is more practical, especially if you want to open more new tabs in one go.
The Bads
I did say IE7 was quicker than IE6. Sadly, IE6 hasn't been a benchmark for browser speed for quite a few years. So IE7 is still quite a way behind Firefox. (And that's comparing to a Firefox installation with a ship-load of extensions.) The most annoying slowness in IE7 is when opening new tabs: Hit Ctrl+T, and there are two discrete phases until your cursor is actually sitting in the URL bar waiting for you to type. First a tab is opened in the background, saying Connecting...
. (Why??) Then focus is switched to the new tab, which changes title to Welcome to Tabbed Browsing
. All of this takes roughly one-mississippi, while in Firefox you get a new tab in about one-
.
Having the stop and reload buttons at the right end of the URL bar does not make sense. They are both buttons that you want within quick reach if there's to be any point in having them at all.
It beats me that you can't rearrange the buttons as you want. (So we could move the stop and reload buttons to a more practical position, perhaps.) In 2006, you'd have thought rearranging buttons would be possible in any old browser. Even stranger is the fact that if you right click within the top toolbar, you get the alt+space menu popping up where you clicked. Makes it feel like a beta... or an alpha, by Firefox standards.
Quick Tabs is mentioned as the feature that Firefox doesn't have. If you're asking me, it's cool, but not in a usable way. It's only cool in a wow, look what you can do!
kind of way. I can't think of any situation when it would actually be quicker to use the Quick Tab feature than to navigate the tabs in the traditional ways. Even if I open loads of tabs, I don't get the feeling that Quick Tabs actually saves me any time. But as I said, it does look cool:
For some obscure reason they've chosen to stick the off-by-default menu under the URL bar, if and when you switch it on. It strikes me as ironic that no other software company brakes the UI design guidelines for Windows as often and as seriously as Microsoft...
Another weirdness is that the Tools command
and the Tools menu contain slightly different menu items, and because of that use different accesskeys. I expected them to be identical.
While IE7 was a positive surprise when it came to speed, it was a disappointment when it came to standards. I was under the impression that the IE Team had basically fixed the CSS stuff that web devs wanted. When I checked my blog design yesterday, I realized they haven't. Max-width for instance, which is a very useful CSS property, has not been implemented. This will probably be my main reason for letting Firefox stay in charge of my http transfers.
Firefox 2 advantages
So, if you don't believe in the ideological reasons for sticking with Firefox, you might like to know that Firefox 2 will have some very real advantages over IE7. And it's only days away.
I already mentioned the speed, and the rendering engine being in an entirely different league. Firefox 2 can also undo closed tabs. This, folks, is a very usable feature. Just hit Ctrl+Shift+T and you're back at the page where your brain had a temporary glitch and made your fingers hit Ctrl+W although you didn't really want them to. You can also find recently closed tabs on the history menu.
Firefox also has a built in spell checker for forms. This is another feature in the list of Firefox features which just work
, and work very well. Incorektly spellt wordz are underlined in red, and Firefox almost always gets the first spelling suggestion right.
Then we have the Firefox extensionsphere. If you ever catch yourself thinking Oh, I wish Firefox could do such and such a thing
, you can bet there'll be an extension at addons.mozilla.org which will do exactly what you want. One-thousand-eight-hundred-and-ninety-six free extensions, just waiting for your imagination to find them.
In a me-too spirit, Microsoft have launched ieaddons.com. But if you look at what it actually contains, you'll see that it is basically just a showcase of the toolbars and add-ons for IE6 which made people switch to Firefox in the first place...
- Half the stuff they list is paid stuff.
- They have a whole page of pop-up blockers, even though IE7 supposedly includes one. (And half of these cost money, too... $30 for a pop-up blocker anyone?)
- A whole page of form-fillers... shareware, naturally
- A whole page with bookmark managers.
Admittedly, there are a few useful things there too, but very few are as simple and pure as Firefox's extensions.
Wait a minute... um ... bookmark managers? Is that a freudian slip of the tongue from Microsoft? :-)
The End – Finally
Finally &ndash The End
Phew! I didn't intend for this thing to get so long... Sorry! Anyway, you get the idea: I'm sticking with Firefox, and if you're ever planning on visiting my websites again, I hope for your eyes' sake that you do to!
Labels: browsers, firefox, internet explorer, mozilla
19 October 2006
The two Doodle themes for Firefox have now been updated to work with Firefox 2. Get them here:
New Features
The two new main features that needed themeing were...
The RSS feed skin
, to make reading raw RSS a nicer experience:
The phishing filter:
New Supported Extensions
We've also added support for IETab and Undo Closed Tabs:
Oh, and I believe we've added support for Sage too.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
Gervase Markham has a well-written blog post on why you should stick to Firefox as opposed to switching to IE 7.
I think he really nails it. To cut a long story short:
- Firefox stood up for the user when Microsoft/IE stood down.
- Microsoft's only motive to produce and update IE is control over internet access.
And I'd like to make an additional point: a heterogeneous web is a healthy web. If everyone uses the same web browser, we're all more vulnerable to virus attacks and similar stuff. It's simple logic.
Labels: browsers, firefox, internet explorer, mozilla
12 October 2006
With Firefox 2 just around the bend, Ogirtd and me have got cracking on updating the Doodle themes – Plastik and Classic. There are quite a few changes that need to be addressed, such as the new RSS behaviour and a few changes to the extension system.
We are also adding support for a few more extensions: FireFTP, Sage and Undo Closed Tabs.
Might also add support for IETab. Actually, I think I'll get to it right now. Edit: IETab is a great extension which embeds the IE rendering engine into Firefox (gasp!) for those websites which use stoneage layout techniques, etc.
Update: Added the Undo Closed Tab
and IETab
icons.
Labels: browsers, firefox, internet explorer, mozilla
29 August 2006
Just found my favourite extension! Googlepedia. This is a simple yet wonderful plugin which gives you a relevant Wikipedia article alongside your Google search results. Something like this:
I'm speachless! Googlepedia, where have you been all my life?
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
07 August 2006
I've just noticed that Prisjakt.nu, a commercial Swedish website, is using -moz-border-radius to make their design look a little more 21st century. That's the first time I've seen that on a major website.
However, it doesn't look like they're using the to-be-standardized border-radius... But then again, I guess that doesn't have any effect in any browser as of today... Or does Safari understand border-radius?
The website is similar to Froogle et al.; it compares prices from different shops for whatever product you may be interested in.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
31 July 2006
There have been some great improvements to the Firefox 2 Beta nightlies lately. I've already told you about the improvement made to the tab overflow solution.
Yesterday the keyword handling was improved. Previously, if you typed some keywords into the URL-bar, Firefox would do a Google "I'm feeling lucky" search. Now it will do a Google "Browse By Name" search, which means that if there isn't a clear top match, you will get to the Google search results instead. This is a great example of a good feature which just works without getting in the way.
They've also added a keyboard shortcut for "Undo Close Tab", Ctrl+Shift+T. This was necessary, since that functionality previously wasn't reachable if you had closed all tabs but one. (You had to open a new tab, and then right-click the tab area.) However, I can't see that the keyboard shortcut is listed anywhere... It has to be if people are to find out about it. I also just realized there is a list of recently closed tabs on the History menu, which is very usable.
Another improvement, which it seems I can't verify, is that the textbox spell checking now shouldn't underline URLs. While writing this post, though, Firefox still seems to be doing just that.
Then, of course, there is the yet-to-come Visual Refresh, which you already know about.
The Options window is getting a makeover (again), to improve the categorization, and to better include the new options for Anti-Phishing. For instance, the Tabs
tab has been moved to position 2, since it deals with one of Firefox's main features. The networking options has been moved to Advanced
, and the download location selector has been moved to tab number 1, named Main
(previously General
). Also, many prefs are renamed with easier-to-understand labels.
A small detail to finish off with: The close button has been removed if there is only one tab open (and you have chosen to not hide the tab bar).
As I've already said, many times: Firefox 2 will be a very nice update from 1.5!
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
23 July 2006
The planned method of handling tab overflows in Firefox has been revised. Until now, the Firefox nightlies have had scroll buttons which have appeared at both ends of the tab bar. Those of us who have tried them know that they aren't exactly wonderful to use...
Anyway – now the Firefox devs have thought up a better method of dealing with too many tabs
. Instead of the scroll buttons, it seems like Firefox is getting a drop-down button at the right end of the tab bar, with a list of all open tabs. The tabs which are currently visible are meant to be highlighted in some way. Here's a screenshot for you:
For the full details and developments on this feature, see bug 343251. It also seems like IE7 has a very similar solution.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
13 July 2006
How on earth has this slipped by without me noticing? Firefox 2 is apparently getting a fairly serious visual polish (for beta 2). The whole browser interface will look more modern, and will fit in better with Windows Vista, as well as the other OSes. See more at the Firefox 2 wiki.
Firefox 2 will be getting quite a few other new features, too. I've covered some of them previously, but not all. Other changes in Firefox 2 beta 1 compared to version 1.5 are...
- Session restore. After a crash, Firefox will open the pages you had open before the crash.
- Undo Close Tab. Sits in the context menu (right-click menu) of the tab bar. However, there doesn't seem to be any way of accessing this if there is only one tab open.
- Tab Overflow Scroll Buttons. If there are too many open tabs, scroll buttons appear at the left and right end of the tab bar. In the nightlies a few days ago, this feature was very annoying because the scroll buttons appeared if there were no more than about eight tabs. Now it has been adjusted – I can open 20 tabs without them appearing, which is a much better limit.
More info at the Mozilla Dev Blog and at Mozilla Links.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
15 May 2006
The latest alpha of what is to become Firefox 2 is out. Mozillalinks has a great review of it, covering all the new features.
Writing this, I'm using one of the new features - spell check for text-boxes. It works great! This is a feature I will have a lot of use for, since I often post to forums and comment on blogs... Thank you Mozilla!
Another feature I love is the integration with online feed readers, such as Google Reader. I can set the feed handler in Firefox to automatically open feeds in Google Reader when I click an RSS link, or the RSS button in the location bar.
Of course, the new search engine manager is a welcome addition. The lack of this feature was one of the major drawbacks of earlier versions if you ask me.
The safebrowsing feature (phishing protection) which is intended to be added for Firefox 2, hasn't yet been implemented. It will be in alpha 3.
All in all, I'm really looking forward to the final release of Firefox 2, hopefully sometime in august or september. (That's just my guess.)
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
05 May 2006
Found another great Firefox Flick. This one is teh funni3!
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
04 May 2006
Ogirtd has done it again! For all of those who have been missing the Doodle Classic theme for Firefox - cry no more! Get it right here.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
18 April 2006
29 March 2006
I've been thinking for a long time that I should increase the size of the photos on display at my web gallery. So, a few days back I went ahead and did a whole lot of batch resizing of the originals using Photoshop. (Having tired of the Gimp and it's useless UI...) The photos should fit 1280x1024 screens perfectly. Any smaller sizes will have to scroll to see the full photos, or perhas hit F11 for fullscreen mode.
I also removed the (evil, 90's-esque) javascript popup links for the larger view of the photos. Instead they open in the same window now, with a link back to the gallery. Much more user-friendly, especially for Firefox users. Not to mention search-engine friendly.
I've noticed that some photos now have severe jpeg artifacts. My local copies look fine, so something must be going wrong when I upload them. Has anyone got any of idea what might be causing these strange artifacts? I use FileZilla, set to automatically detect binary/ASCII files.
Labels: firefox
26 March 2006
My old theme Doodle has been updated by ogirtd. He's done some great work to make it work with Firefox 1.5. Go and get it over at addons.mozilla.org.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
18 March 2006
Thanks to ogirtd (of whom I know very little) the Doodle theme has now been updated for Firefox 1.5! Thanks again, ogirtd!
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
05 March 2006
It looks like Firefox 2 may be getting an anti-phishing feature based on Googles Safe Browsing extension.
While it's not yet certain that this feature will make it into Firefox 2 (as I read it anyway), it seems to have become just a little bit more likely. The Firefox 2 Feature Draft Plan has the anti-phishing feature listed as a class 3 priority. I don't know if the current events change that, but... Anyone in the know... er ... who knows?
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
27 February 2006
Some guy has successfully installed 100 Firefox extensions. A nice test of Firefox's extension mechanism. Turned out it was pretty stable...
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
20 February 2006
The bug for rgba and hsla css colours has just been fixed on the Firefox trunk
. That means it will be released with Firefox 3, in about a years time.
Can't wait till we can start playing around with semi-transparent colours... Also, the hsl colour model is very nice – making it possible to think in hue, saturation and lightness when choosing colours. Very nice :-)
It's just a shame that Firefox 3 is so far away.
Edit: Fixed an error. (Had written brightness instead of lightness.)
Labels: browsers, CSS, firefox, mozilla, web design
15 February 2006
Svenska Dagbladet, or SvD for short, are using Firefox's RSS icon on their website:
Actually, come to think of it, this is the IE7 version of the icon. Typical. At least to me, they don't look 100% identical. The Firefox version stands out more – the IE7 one looks flatter.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
07 February 2006
This is not a full review of Opera 9 (TP2). Just a little pointer to a few things I like about it, things I think Firefox should have too. :-) Alright, alright, Opera fans, it's all about copying features.
- Autoscrolling is much slower in Opera than in Firefox. That's great, since it means that you can actually set it to scroll the text slowly enough for you to be able to read it. (This may not be new to Opera 9.)
- BitTorrent support. A great and logical addition to the web browser. Non-geeky people shouldn't need to worry about separate BitTorrent software, they should just be able to click a bittorrent link and have it download the file there and then. Just like we don't (usually) use separate software to handle our normal ftp/http downloads. Azureus and other BitTorrent clients will be around for those of us who like to fiddle around with settings and/or are serious file sharers. For instance, I've got four episodes of the CommandN tech show being uploaded in Azureus right now. I like to have full control over what happens with my torrents, and having something constantly on the task bar (like I would have were I using Opera instead) is not an option. I guess what I'm trying to say is that having built-in, simple BitTorrent support is in line with the philosophy of Firefox.
- New keyboard shortcuts. I'm not sure, but I think Ctrl+L for the location bar is new for Opera 9. I know Ctrl+T for new tab (not page, as in Opera 8) and Ctrl+N for new page are new for Opera 9. It must have hurt Opera to make that change, but I think it was the best thing to do in the long run, seeing that both Firefox and IE7 are using those combinations.
- The Tab Preview feature is definately nice. But I think it would be even nicer (cleaner) without the information displayed to the right of the (anti-aliased) thumbnail:
The title is visible at the top of the tab, and the other informations doesn't feel essential enough to outweigh the clutter it creates. I doubt that this is something that should be in the default Firefox install though.
The improved content blocking à la adblock initially seems to work fine. Does anyone know how it remembers what to block? If a different ad is displayed in the position where I blocked an ad a few days ago, will that also be blocked? If not, this is useless. If it is, this is useful. Adblock still has a slight edge on Opera though, with the ability to import a ready-made filter. Also, Opera doesn't seem to be able to block Google Ads, should you wish to do so.
As for the widgets, I'm not entirely convinced of their usefullness. At least the widgets available now seem to be of limited value. Maybe the possibilities go far beyond the present ones. I get a feeling this whole widget thing is a bit overrated - a fad or a craze if you like.
All in all, Opera 9 looks very promising. I almost thought Wow!
and This is something I could use permanently!
. But I just can't get used to the behaviour of Ctrl+Tab. I want it to be instant, as in Firefox. Not a big issue, but I just can't quite get used to it.
Edit: Fixed a typo in the title.
Labels: browsers, firefox, opera
After having stuck with Acrobat Reader 5.0 (the golden version in my eyes) I decided to try to update to version 7. Version 7 is supposedly faster than version 6, which was a real nightmare. You know: you're out surfing, click a link, and then boom! You've just suffered the PDF death. Your computer grinds to a near standstill while Acrobat starts to load. The time it takes you'd think it were a 3D CAD application or something.
Anyway. My first thing to rant about when it comes to version 7 is the download website. It's really slow. I mean, really slow. You start wondering if you've lost your Internet connection. Then, when you finally get the file you want, it turns out to be one of those silly little things that in turn downloads the real installer data, 25 odd megabytes of it, in this case. That means that you can't simply burn it to a CD for when you're fixing up your friends' and family's computers. Also, that setup is pretty annoying when something goes wrong with the installation and you have to reinstall...
That happens to be what happened to me. Admittedly, I had used Acrobat Reader SpeedUp on my previous installation, but I believe the Acrobat installer should be able to handle a few disabled plugins. So, I had to download the whole thing again, making me loose more work time. The whole thing made me so annoyed I had to blog about it, making me waste even more time on this non-essential issue. :-)
Seriously though, stub installers (I believe that's what they're called?) offer no benefit to the user. Quite the opposite in fact. Especially when you have to click your way through the ususal OS/OS version/Language menus to get the thing. (It'd be a slightly different matter if there were only one stub installer, served to you immediately, which then handled those options.)
No, stub installers only exist because (I presume) they make it easier for the company distributing the software. Well, the software companies should start thinking a little more about their users.
The vast number of light-weight PDF readers that are popping up all over the place are doing so for a reason. People want small, quick and simple software! Sadly, I haven't yet found one (for Windows) that works 100%. Foxit, for instance, had a slight display issue:
Those red blobs are supposed to be round, and Adobe Reader (as they apparently call it these days) displays them correctly, so there's presumably nothing wrong with the PDF.
If anyone knows of a good, solid (& free!) light-weight PDF viewer (with Firefox support), please let me know!
Labels: firefox
06 February 2006
Ben Goodger has written an interesting article about what happened before Firefox, and what led a few developers to basically scrap the whole UI of Mozilla and start again.
I didn't know (until now) about the serious conflicts between Mozilla engineers and Netscape leadership over user interface. This was back before Mozilla Foundation was created.
The following bit was also interesting:
There was and remains much resentment towards Firefox and its development model. At its creation, there was much shouting about how the many were not always smarter than the few, the merits of small development teams with strong centralized direction, the need to adhere strictly to Mozilla's module ownership policy. In practice, these statements resulted in effectively locking everyone but the Firefox team out of the Firefox source code. We railed against the inefficiencies of past UIs. We were unnecessarily harsh, and polarized opinions. We had been badly wounded by the Netscape experience and the disorganization that had followed. I don't think a lot of people understood that. It wasn't something we could easily communicate.
I remember there being a clear division between Suite devs and Firefox devs, when I was hanging at MozillaZine. I knew that the division was because of the tight control that the Firefox leads maintained, but I didn't know the underlying reasons behind that tight control – other than wanting to optimize the user experience.
Since they had worked on a browser that looked like this...
...their concerns were understandable.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
31 January 2006
I just noticed that IE7 beta 2 has been released. Sounds like the IE team know their stuff. It has (almost) everything that I love about Firefox. The only things I can think of are...
- Less standards support. Did anyone say SVG?
- Extensions, extensions, extensions
However, even if IE7 were just as good as Firefox on every point, or even slightly better, I would still stay loyal to Firefox. Simply because Firefox gave me this perfect mix of simplicity and features way before anyone else did. Why walk out on the guy that saved you, just because the guy who left you out in the cold for four years says he's going to be good again?
If I only could get SP2 to work properly on my computer I would install IE7 in order to test this site and others. Since SP2 had a habit of drawing random turquoise lines across my screen, I won't be doing that. So I'd like to ask anyone reading this in IE7 to report back to me about how things look. This is what things should look like:
Labels: browsers, firefox, internet explorer
22 December 2005
MSNBC has published a great review of Firefox 1.5. It raises a few good points:
It [Firefox 1.5] incorporates useful improvements without forcing users to learn anything new.
The users more likely to stumble across a malicious site are often least likely to remember to install security updates that would protect them from the bad site's break-in attempts.
If security issues lead people to Firefox, tabbed browsing tends to keep them there.
Firefox 1.5 makes only two changes to its implementation of this concept [tabs], both unobtrusive but helpful.
It also talks about a few of Firefox 1.5's weaknesses.
And you can't easily remove search engines from the list of shortcuts in Firefox's search bar.
You can't ask it to tell you what sites you visit most or least often or at particular times of the day.
I know* at least those two issues will be fixed in Firefox 2.0.
They also claim that Firefox's bookmarks managing system is no good. Not sure that I agree with them there. It maybe isn't optimal yet, but it sure is lightyears better than IE's and at least as good as any of the other bookmark managers out there.
*) Based on the Firefox 2.0 Product Plan Draft.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
18 December 2005
I'd like to show a list of my favourite extensions, beginning with my absolute favourites:
- Searchbar autosizer. A great extension which automatically increases the width of the searchbar if you type something too long into it. This should be a default feature of Firefox - it's very useful, and doesn't get in the user's way.
- AdBlock Plus. Makes the web so much nicer to browse and look at. Especially combined with the Adblock Filterset.G Updater.
- SessionSaver. It's wonderful to be able to just close your browser and know that everything you've got open (including half-finished forum/blog posts) will be there when you fire it back up again (pun intended).
- Answers. Lets you alt-click any word to instantly look it up on answers.com. Very nifty and slick.
- Search Engine Ordering. Allows you to order your search engines as you want them. Very useful – this should also (and will?) be part of basic Firefox functionality.
The great thing is that everyones favourite extension list looks different. Firefox extension system allows you to add just those cool/useful/slick features you yourself like.
There's also a whole bunch of other extensions that I've got, but which I use less regularly. These are maybe also slightly less interesting to the broad masses:
You often hear (as a reason to use Opera instead of Firefox) that Firefox's extensions will interfere with each other and won't play nice.
Well, if you install extensions sensibly – that is, don't install several extensions which attempt to do the same thing, then you're extremely unlikely to run into any problems. (For instance, there is a huge number of extensions which enhance Firefox's tabs. If you install several of these you're bound to run into problems.)
All my current extensions work perfectly together. In fact, I can only remember having one slight problem with extensions treading on each others toes since I started using Firefox 1.0 one year ago: The Web Developer and Tab Sidebar extensions use the same keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+Shift+T, which resulted in only one of the extensions responding to it.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
16 December 2005
Well, we've only just been given Firefox 1.5, so people maybe think I should just be happy and use it. But now I caught a glimpse of the Firefox 2.0 product plan (draft)...
There are some nice tweaks in there, which we should have in our hands for next autumn possibly. (Their release plan, which says 2.0 final by late june sounds, as always, completely unrealistic.)
Some things to look forward to:
The session saver could become a bit of a feature hurdle for novices, but I trust the Firefox engineers will make sure it won't be.
Oh yes: the new code name is Bon Echo
.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
The Microsoft RSS Team has just announced that IE7 will be using Firefox's feed icon. How many people would have thought that a year back? A week back?
It's really cool that MS are working so cooperatively with their competitiors at the moment. Maybe they have to? Who knows.
I only wish they would do something along the same lines with their rendering engine. Either use Gecko (I can always dream, right?) or make Trident as standards compliant as the best (the rest).
Edit: Oh, and thanks jer for the nudge!
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
10 December 2005
When I'm reading things on the Internet I always come across words that I don't understand. Wheat I've done up until now is to select the word, righ-click and do a web search
for that word. That has taken me to google, upon which I've clicked [definition] to get me to answers.com.
I've been thinking for a long time that it would be great if that context menu search went straight to answers.com to save me the wait and extra click. I just didn't know how or if it was possible to change that search URL. Well, since this is Firefox we're talking about - of course it is:
In about:config, filter for search
and then simply change the value for browser.search.defaulturl
to http://answers.com/
.
That's a huge improvement, at least to me! I don't seem to be able to use Wikipedia here though, since the search term placeholder %s
doesn't seem to work. Anyone know of a workaround?
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
06 December 2005
This sounds really cool. Can't wait to try it out, or at least to read some real reviews of it.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
30 November 2005
Firefox 1.5 has just gone live over at mozilla.com. Go and get it while it's hot - take those servers done once and for all. ;-)
Yes, that's mozilla dot com - not org. The new website has been set up to better display/promote the mozilla products, without having all the projects and foundation stuff getting in the way. It's looking pretty sleek if you ask me:
The mozilla addons website has also had a nice refresh:
A search engine plugins section has been added too, even if the selection available still isn't very large. (Maybe 30 odd search engines are listed, with a pointer to mycroft for a larger selection.)
Now I'm just waiting to see what they are conjuring up at spreadfirefox.com:
Edit: Added a Firefox 1.5 graphic to the left column.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
24 November 2005
Judging from the ironic tone in this post by Tritan Nitot of Mozilla Europe, Firefox 1.5 will preusumably be released on 29 November. That's tuesday next week – nice.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
22 November 2005
Rob Franco has written about the plans for IE7's secure/insecure website user interface over at IEBlog.
The current suggestion is to have three different background colours for the address bar indicating different statuses for the current website. Red - the website is blocked by the phishing filter and an informative message is displayed instead. Yellow - a suspicious website, showing signs of being a phishing scam but not confirmed by the list of known phishing websites. Green - sites that meet future guidelines for better identity validation
.
So here's the problem: Firefox and Opera today both use the yellow background colour, together with the lock icon, to identify secure (https) websites:
If Microsoft were to implement their three colour system it might cause major confusion, at least for the digitally impaired.
Thankfully (and surprisingly!) Microsoft's IE developers have sat down together with devs from Opera, Mozilla and KDE and talked the matter over. Hopefully this will lead to some kind of mutual agreement on this issue. (Although I believe they were mostly discussing ways of selecting and identifying properly identified websites.)
Two possible solutions to the colour problem popped up in the comments:
- Microsoft makes their yellow some shade of orange instead to minimize the confusion.
- The browser UI developers together agree on some standard colour system and apply it in all browsers. Either the system proposed by Microsoft, or some variation of the system used today in Firefox and Opera.
The latter would obviously be better for the user, but the question is – can these big browser players really reach an agreement here?
I still can't quite grasp that they actually sat down together and talked about this, like we were moving towards some kind of... er... I don't know – Web 2.0?
Labels: browsers, firefox, internet explorer, mozilla
15 November 2005
As any returning reader may have noticed, I like making PNGs with transparent backgrounds.
I have been thinking for some time that I should write a short guide to making these images. I will do this using the GIMP, but I'm sure this basic method works in Photoshop too.
Sadly, though, there is no one perfect way of removing a background from a photo, not even if it is single-coloured as in this case. The following method is what I have concluded to be the best after testing numerous different variations. The resulting images work fine on both light and dark backgrounds, but the edges become a little jagged on darker backgrounds. Maybe I'll work out an even better method in the future...
As an example I thought I'd use a product photo of the Slim Devices Squeezebox 2, which I think is a beatiful piece of HiFi/WiFi equipment. Check it out if you haven't already. Anyway, here's the original photo that I'll be working on:
The first thing to do is to select the area which is to become transparent. This is easily done using the wand tool. You may have to adjust the threshold value a bit to make it include any gray (shadow) areas too. For this photo I had it set to 50. (You'll find the threshold in the tool options window – Ctrl+Shift+T.) Here's what we're aiming to get:
The next step is to increase the size of the selection very slightly to include the whole border area around the object. In my experience, increasing the selection by 1 pixel is usually best. (If you have a very large photo you could always try 2 or maybe 3 pixels.) Click [Select] > [Grow...] and choose the amount you want. (I'm not sure of the English wording of the commands, I'm just guessing based on my Swedish version.)
Then we create a layer mask by clicking [Layer] > [Mask] > [Add new mask...]. In the dialogue that pops up, select [Grayscale copy of layer], and tick the [Invert mask] option. That should give us something like this:
As you can see, this makes all light parts of the image transparent, including any highlights on the object we want to be fully opaque. To fix this, invert the selection (Ctrl+I) and bring up the layers window (Ctrl+L). Here, select the inverted miniature on the right, representing the layer mask:
Then choose the fill tool (Shift+B) and set the foreground colour to white. Bring up the tool options (Ctrl+Shift+T) and check the option to [Fill whole selection]. Then simply click inside the selected area, and your object should magically become opaque:
After that, invert the selection again (Ctrl+I) and select the miniature on the left in the layer window, i.e. the layer itself. Now change the foreground colour to black and use the fill tool in the current selection, to make the shadows visible:
That's pretty much it. Now just remove the selection (Ctrl+Shift+A) and apply the layer mask by clicking [Layer] > [Mask] > [Apply layer mask]. Save the photo as something.png, put it on your favourite background colour and enjoy looking at it:
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