Get Firefox Now

Firefox Beta 3 has been released some days ago, I have installed it and made a little comparison with Firefox 2.0 to see some of the changes.

Here I am comparing them with screen shots, side by side when that is possible, because there are some features in 3 that are not present in 2.

Zooming

When you zoom with firefox 2 you can only zoom the text and not the images, but now with Firefox 3 the images are also zoomed, so you can zoom a page with text and images, or only images pages.

Firefox 2

Firefox 3

Bookmarking

One of the biggest changes on Firefox 3 is the way it manage bookmarks, and its interface also changed.

Firefox 2

Firefox 3

Check out that now, it s possible to use tags, what I have tried was to import my delicious directly to Firefox, to my concern tags were not imported, maybe a mistake considering how many people are using delicious out there.

By the way, and talking about delicious there is not yet a plugin for it, by the time I am writing this post, there is one for stumbleupon just released yesterday.

Other changes to bookmarking includes the stars, now as soon as you start typing the address you want to visit and when the visited (suggested) URIs appear you can easily check which one is already on your bookmarks, because of the star near to the URI.

Firefox 3

And once you are visiting a page, if you do not want to use the shortcut Ctrl+D, you can just click on the star near to the URI, and a dialog box will be displayed so you can easily add that page to your bookmarks.

Firefox 3

Places

This is something new in Firefox 3, that does not even exist in Firefox 2, it is a menu located upper left and as you can see, it helps you navigate in your “favorite” pages, the most visited, the most used tags, the recently visited, etc.

Firefox 3

Password Manager

The dialog box offering to remember your passwords now appears located in other position it certainly looks better, but I do miss the “not now” option, don’t you?

Update: Thanks for all of you that made me find it (sorry)

Firefox 3

Firefox 2

Add-ons

The add-ons dialog box (Tools-Add-ons) now has another option, which is Plugins, where you can manage the plugins installed on your Firefox, really a good addition.

Firefox 3

Firefox 2

Page Info

The page info dialog box (Tools->Page Info, or Ctrl+I) now has a real good option which is RSS discover, so you can easily find the rss links on the page to subscribe to it.

Firefox 3

Firefox 2

Originally found at:ZDNet

Firefox hits 400 million downloads
By David Meyer, ZDNet UK
Tuesday, September 11 2007 05:47 PM

The popular open-source browser Firefox hit another milestone on Friday when it passed the 400 million download mark.

The browser, distributed by Mozilla, appears to be enjoying exponential growth in terms of downloads. From its launch in 2004, it took one year to reach 100 million downloads. A year later, it hit 200 million downloads.

In a message posted on its Web site, Spread Firefox, Firefox’s community marketeers, thanked users for helping to achieve the latest download figures. “With your amazing efforts, Firefox has reached 400 million downloads and demonstrated that not even the world’s most powerful companies can keep people from a better, safer, and faster Web experience,” the team wrote.

It is difficult to judge the exact share of the browser market enjoyed by Firefox. The most recent statistics published by W3Counter suggest that Firefox holds a quarter of the market, but most other organizations releasing such statistics suggest a slightly lower figure.

According to figures released on Friday by US consultancy firm Janco and the IT Productivity Center, Firefox currently has 17.4 percent of the browser market–up 5.6 percentage points in the last year. Also within the last year, Microsoft’s market-leading Internet Explorer browser dropped 9.6 percentage points to a market share of 63.9 percent.

Originally found at: Schrep’s Blog

Mozilla and Mobile

People ask us all the time about what Mozilla’s going to do about the mobile web, and I’m very excited to announce that we plan to rock it. Here’s some information about what we’re planning to do with hiring, technology, partnerships, and products, and how you can get involved. Short summary: we are serious about bringing the Firefox experience and technology to mobile devices.

Why increase Mozilla’s presence in mobile?

* A large portion of the world accesses the Internet from mobile devices, and this will become increasingly true over time (mobile devices outsell computers 20-1). Each Firefox install is an individual choice by a person to download something that didn’t ship by default on their computer. Why not offer that option for mobile devices?

* Firefox the most popular open-source browser on the planet with > 100 million active users. Bringing Firefox add-ons, the Mozilla platform (including XUL), open source, and a large and passionate community to the closed and fragmented mobile platform will do the world some serious good.

* Firefox and Mozilla give device manufacturers the best of both worlds: shared investment in the core open-source project plus the flexibility they need to customize the browser for their devices.

* You can already get a Mozilla-based browser for the Nokia N800 and Firefox is a key part of Ubuntu Mobile and the new Intel Internet Project, and most recently ARM has put serious effort towards Firefox on mobile devices.

* Through Joey, we’ve seen how the desktop and mobile browsing experiences can be bridged to build a better experience for both. Wouldn’t it be great if your bookmarks, history, extensions, etc. from Firefox on your computer just worked on your phone?

Just what are we announcing?

* Mozilla will add mobile devices to the first class/tier-1 platform set for Mozilla2. This means we will make core platform decisions with mobile devices as first-class citizens.

* We will ship a version of “Mobile Firefox” which can, among other things, run Firefox extensions on mobile devices and allow others to build rich applications via XUL.

* Mozilla will expand its small team of full-time mobile contributors to focus on the technology and application needs of mobile devices. In particular two new folks just joined:

** Christian Sejersen, recently the head of browsers at Openwave which has shipped over 1 billion mobile browsers, joined Mozilla Monday. He’ll be heading up the platform engineering effort and setting up a R&D center in Copenhagen, Denmark.

** Brad Lassey just joined Mozilla from France Telecom R&D. He’s already been an active contributor to our mobile efforts and can now focus on Mozilla mobile full time.

These folks will accelerate the tremendous work already done by Doug Turner, Chris Hofmann and the entire Mozilla community. The efforts in mobile will be magnified by all aspects of our kick-ass community in everything from testing, to UI design, to core engineering. Together we will accelerate the development and use of mobile-ready Mozilla technology.

Why now?

* Getting a no-compromise web experience on devices requires significant memory (>=64MB) as well as significant CPU horsepower. High end devices today are just approaching these requirements and will be commonplace soon For example, the iPhone has 128MB of DRAM and somewhere between a 400 to 600 MHz processor. It is somewhere between 10x-100x slower on scripting benchmarks than a new MacBook Pro and somewhere between 3-5x slower than an old T40 laptop on the same wifi network. But rapid improvements in mobile processors will close this gap within a few years. There are chips out there today that are faster than the one in the iPhone and integrate graphics, cpu, and i/o (wifi/3g/wimax) on one die. Intel has recently re-entered this market which will keep things interesting. Most exciting of all ARM has announced that by 2010 devices will be shipping with a processor 8x faster than what’s in the iPhone!

* The user demand for a full browsing experience on mobile devices is clear. If you weren’t sure about this before you should be after the launch of the iPhone.

* We’ve seen through Mozilla on the Nokia N800 and Minimo that it is possible to build a great experience on devices by using the Mozilla code.

* We are wrapping up work on Gecko 1.9 and there is room post 1.9 to make significant changes to the architecture for improved performance and memory use on devices. Things like reducing the use of XPCOM, unifying memory management under MMgc, and other improvements from Mozilla 2 will make Mozilla a great platform for all devices from mobile phones to your desktop. The use of a single source base gives us the leverage that makes OSS work so well.

Is this the right time?

Absolutely! Up until very recently device limitations required writing new mobile browsers from the ground up. Being able to leverage all the investments in the Mozilla platform across both desktops and devices is the right approach. There is far from a dominant player in this marketplace and even the best mobile browsers today have compromises in user experience, performance, and compatibility. There is still *plenty* of room for innovation.

When?

As mentioned above, Mozilla browsers are already available to N800 users and you can use Joey today to extend your Firefox desktop browsing experience to your phone. We’ll continue to invest in Joey and will work closely with partners who want to ship Mozilla browsers today. Mobile Firefox will arrive later (certainly not before 2008).

What about Minimo?

Minimo was an experiment in mapping the desktop browser experience to a specific mobile context. While we don’t currently plan to develop that project further, it has already provided us with valuable information about how Gecko operates in mobile environments, has helped us reduce footprint, and has given us a platform for initial experimentation in user experience.

Does this mean that Firefox 3 will run on my phone?

No. This project is focused on Mozilla technology that will ship after Firefox 3. We’re at least as excited as you about getting Mozilla’s great web capabilities into your hands, literally, but it’s a big undertaking, and won’t be something that we can wrap up in time for Firefox 3.

What mobile devices will Firefox run on?

We haven’t yet determined what our target platforms will be. If you’re a mobile device or software-stack developer, your insight and support will be very helpful in determining which configurations we can and should support in our initial efforts.

How can I get involved?

Join us on IRC at #mobile, in the newsgroups, or ping me. We need your help!

Squarefree.com

Firefox memory usage and memory leak news

Many Mozilla community members, including both volunteers and Mozilla Corporation employees, have been helping to reduce Firefox’s memory usage and fix memory leak bugs lately. Hopefully, the result of this effort will be that Firefox 3 uses less memory than Firefox 2 did, especially after it has been used for several hours.

Memory usage

Federico Mena-Quintero submitted a patch to make Firefox discard decompressed image data after five seconds (bug 296818). ImageLib module owner Stuart Parmenter experimented with a competing idea in bug 386377, but now he plans to help with Federico’s patch. The patch will make image data join text runs in using time-based caching rather than traditional space-bounded caching.

Aaron suggested having an “about:memory” page showing a breakdown of Firefox’s memory use (bug 392351). When I pointed out the bug to Brendan Eich, he excitedly assigned the bug to himself.

Eli Friedman discovered that nsFloatCache was no longer necessary and eliminated most of it (bug 381385).

Memory leaks

David Baron checked in a patch for the last bug that contributed to RLk on Linux, bringing the number of XPCOM objects leaked during this test to zero. Since this test runs on Tinderbox, it’s likely that regressions will be noticed quickly, even if they don’t turn Tinderbox orange.

Robert Sayre created a script to load random pages and see whether they cause leaks. The random URLs come from the Yahoo directory (biased toward older, top-level pages), del.icio.us (biased toward newer, geeky pages), and AltaVista (biased toward pornography). The script detects leaks using trace-refcnt, the same test used by RL; future versions might use trace-malloc in order to catch additional leaks. Robert has caught at least 6 distinct leak bugs using this script, 3 of which have already been fixed. See LeakingPages and bug 394517 for details.

David Baron created a series of patches to the cycle collector to aid in debugging leaks. With this code, DEBUG_CC builds of Firefox can notice when an object “expected to be garbage” is not collected and then explain in detail why it was not collected.

Steve England tested the top 500 web sites, finding two leaks. Later, he tested the top 20 Firefox extensions and found leaks in several of them.

David Baron recorded seven leak debugging screencasts, which you can watch to see how David Baron debugs real leaks.

Kris Zyp found a leak in the JavaScript Engine when using the watch method (bug 394709). Igor Bukanov responded quickly with not only a patch for the bug but also a leak detection patch to enable regression testing of JavaScript Engine leaks. I asked him to modify his patch so I could use jsfunfuzz to test for JavaScript Engine leaks, and he did. (This led me to find several bugs in evalcx, but no additional leaks.)

David Baron got the stack walking code and the stack fixer working on Mac, making it possible to use trace-malloc and the refcount balancer on Mac (bug 336517, bug 392118).

How to help

You don’t have to be a C++ programmer to help find leaks in Firefox.

If you’re a Firefox user, an easy way to help is to browse with a trunk nightly build wrapped in a script that calls leak-gauge.pl when Firefox exits. If it reports that documents or windows leaked, try to figure out how to reproduce the leak and then file a bug report.

If you’re an advanced user, you can do something similar with with trace-refcnt, which detects leaks of all reference-counted objects, not just windows and documents. Build Firefox with the .mozconfig option “–enable-logrefcnt” (or build debug) and run your build with XPCOM_MEM_LEAK_LOG=2. When Firefox exits, it will print a detailed but understandable summary of what types of objects leaked.

If you’re are a C++ programmer and want to help diagnose or fix bugs, check out Performance:Leak_Tools along with David Baron’s screencasts, and hang out in #developers on irc.mozilla.org.

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As of this writing, the latest Firefox version officially supported by Mozilla, is Firefox 2.0.0.5.

Some of the key features in the latest Firefox are:

• Interface Upgrades: Many aspects for the Firefox UI (User Interface) have been improved to provide a better overall experience, as well as notable speed improvements.
• Phishing Prevention Tools: When users attempt to access a page that appears to have malicious Phishing code enabled, users are warned by Firefox and offered to return to the previous page. By default, the anti-Phishing tools are enabled in the latest Firefox version.
• Better Search Experience: When user searches are typed within the built-in search box, results appear as they are typed (at Get-Firefox-Now.net, we love us some AJAX in action!). Although Google is the default search engine, users may easily add their own search engines of choice, as well as re-order existing search engines to their liking.
• Improved Tabbed Browsing: Gone are the days of obnoxious multiple browser windows. With Firefox’s improved Tabbed Browsing, new links (by default) are opened in their own tab, within a single instance of Firefox. Links can still be set to open in a new window (either per-link, or as the default action). Tabbed browsing makes it easy to open multiple sites on loading Firefox, and even easier to close several pages at once.
• Browsing Session Restore: When Firefox is restarted, user’s are offered the ability to resume their last “session”. Basically, choosing “Restore Session” will reopen tabs that were previously closed, and also navigating Firefox back to the sites that were previously loaded within those tabs. We like this feature; when the boss interupts your browsing, it’s a snap to restore your timewasting when the boss leaves.
• Better Spell-Checking: In the latest Firefox, when data is entered into forms, it is automatically checked for proper spelling. There is no longer a need for a 3rd party add-on to accomplish this. Splling is vry importantt.
• Tons of little things: We could go on and on about every one of the great features in the latest Firefox, but check it out for yourself. You can download Firefox here.

Softpedia reports that work is under way to give the widgets in web page forms a more Mac-like look in Firefox. The look of all other aspects of a web page is under the control of the designer of the page, but the appearance of the buttons and other widgets that make up forms depends completely on the browser. In the case of the latest Firefox, which runs under a number of different operating systems, the look of form controls also depends on the OS.

For your convenience, I’ve collected an example using five different browsers in the image to the right: Mosaic 2.0.1 from 1995, Firefox, a preview of Firefox with Aquafied widgets, Camino, and Safari. (I couldn’t test Netscape 3 because the current Netscape homepage crashes the browser when it loads upon startup.) The current Firefox seems closer related to its 12-year-old ancestor-of-sorts than to any of the newer browsers as far as form rendering is concerned, but the preview (now also available for PowerPC) nicely fixes that. The new code is supposed to go into Firefox 3, so as of that version all Firefox users can enjoy the better-looking widgets.

However, for those of us who want to couple most of Firefox’ power and standards-compliant rendering prowess with Mac-appropriate good looks, there is another choice: Camino. Like Firefox, Camino is supported by the Mozilla Foundation. Interestingly, the improved Aquaish widgets in the Firefox preview don’t look completely identical to the Camino ones, so apparently there is more (or less) going on than simply borrowing the Camino code.

(originally posted at http://www.protrade.com/content/DisplayArticle.html?sp=Sfcecf902-3939-11dc-bb15-ad4d09b7b838)

Hey guys,

If you’re like all of my friends, then you probably use Mozilla Firefox instead of Microsoft IE. It took me maybe two minutes to figure out, but I found a way to quickly access the Protrade search from anywhere on the internet.

For example, say I’m listening to the game on the radio while browsing something completely unrelated. I hear some player news and want to access the player’s stock page quickly. Let’s say I hear that Ted Lilly is having a monster outing, getting 13 K’s. Rather than logging on to PT before I can do the search, I can just open a new tab (Ctrl+T) and immediately type “pt lilly” and I’ll get the classic search results page. There, I can click on his name and be taken straight to his player detail page so that I can buy him, short him, etc. I know this doesn’t save a whole lot of time, but I assume there are probably a lot of you out there who are like me and love keyboard shortcuts whenever you want to do something.

So anyway, how do you do it? Here’s the step-by-step guide:

1. Create a new bookmark in Firefox (Bookmarks > Quick Searches > right-click, and hit “New Bookmark”)

2. Under “Name,” call it something like “Protrade Quicksearch”

3. Under “Location,” type “http://www.protrade.com/athletes/Search.html?sp=S%s” (without quotes.) This was the tricky part to figure out, as the regular search box on the PT site is based in Javascript or something, not a direct http link to the search page.

4. Under “Keyword,” type “pt” (or whatever you want to type into the address bar to indicate to Firefox that you’re going to do a protrade search.)

5. Hit OK.

Now, whenever you type “pt xxxx” into the address bar of Firefox, it will take you to the Protrade search results page for “xxxx.” Note that this will appear in the active tab, so you may want to open a new tab with Ctrl+T.

Hope that some of you guys find this little tip useful.

We’ve reviewed Firefox before. It’s a great browser, and I personally use both Safari and Firefox every day. Safari is fast and agile, while Firefox’s plugins add functionality I can’t browse without.

Since Firefox is open source, at least two people (that I know of) have taken the initiative to tweak Firefox specifically for Mac OS X, making these optimized builds even faster than the regular Mac version of Firefox. You can download a version specifically for your browser (G3, G4, or G5.)

This version of Firefox has the best icon of the Mac-optimized versions. Tomorrow I’ll review another Mac-optimized version that works with Intel chips.

Editor’s Review - Mozilla FireFox for Mac

Firefox is a Web browser featuring tabbed browsing, plugin support and extensions support.

The 2.0 release of this popular web browser is finally here. I’ve been waiting for it since the first preview of this version, the Release Candidate 1. After the third release candidate Mozilla managed to announce the big hit.

This version comes with some new features that in the previous stable releases of Firefox (1.5.x) were available only by using certain extensions. This is a good thing because in this way you will get a stronger browser than the previous versions.

The producers said there are new features in this release. Here is a list with those new features: Visual Refresh, Built-in phishing protection, Enhanced search capabilities, Improved tabbed browsing, Resuming your browsing session, Previewing and subscribing to Web feeds, Inline spell checking, Live Titles, Improved Add-ons manager, JavaScript 1.7, Extended search plugin format, Updates to the extension system, Client-side session and persistent storage and SVG text.

I think every FireFox user will like the fact that the Session Saving functionality is an option and not an add-on like it was before. You will have to enable that options from the preferences panel though. You can find it in the ‘Main’ tab under the drop-down menu named ‘When FireFox starts’.

I like the fact that the producers implemented a single add-ons panel in this version. You will be able to manage your Extensions and Themes from the same window. Another nice thing is the possibility to disable an extension, rather than uninstalling in in order to make it cease function.

I need to say a few words about the Web standards too. Since all current browsers are trying to comply with the W3C standards I had to test the browser with the well known Acid2 test. This build of Firefox failed again the test. You will be able to see how it is rendering the image in the screenshots I took during the testing. Programmers of Mozilla have been making gradual efforts in order to pass this test.

Pluses: it has an improved tabbed browsing and other new features in this build, it has a little better rendering speed that the previous release. The ‘Preferences’ panel and the ‘Add-ons’ panel looks better.

Drawbacks / flaws: so far I didn’t get any but if you do get a crash you can always use the TalkBack engine in order to help the Mozilla to improve FireFox by uploading the crash log.

In conclusion: the product looks like an evolution, not like a revolution but you can’t have them all. It is a better implementation and the producers already have plans for a third version. In fact, if you would like to take a peek to an alpha build of Firefox 3.0 you can take it from the download section. Please remember: the alpha builds are only for testing and sending feedback to the producer, and they aren’t recommended for daily usage. An interesting thing is the fact that the 3.0 Alpha 2 version passes the Acid2 test. A strong alternative for this product is Opera, a Web browser that is improved by its producers with every new version.

Publisher’s Description:

Mozilla Firefox project (formerly Firebird, which was formerly Phoenix) is a redesign of Mozilla’s browser component, written using the XUL user interface language and designed to be cross-platform. When you download Firefox, it includes a popup blocker, tabbed browsing, a smarter search, hassle free downloading, and improved privacy and security.