Firefox
| Google launches web browser: Google Chrome
Wow, what can I say. This surprised me. Google is launching it’s own browser called Google Chrome. They created a comic book to announce it to the world, which is summed up at Google Blogoscoped. It’s based on the WebKit engine also used in Safari, and includes Google Gears by default. They’ve taken bits from Safari and Mozilla and included it in this project, which they’ve also open sourced. It’ll be interesting with another browser in the space. It launches tommorow when us web developers can finally have a play with it and see what it’s like. | |
| Firefox 3 Victory, Release on June 17 Mozilla Developer News announces that Firefox 3 will be released on Tuesday June 17. Take part in the Download Day to break a world record (the server admin for Mozilla must be pretty brave to encourage everybody to download all at once). To celebrate, the guys at Mozilla have created an absolutely awesome movie-style Victory poster:
See a larger version. Apparently there will be a limited edition 18×24″ poster at the Mozilla Store soon. I absolutely love the Firefox 3 robot branding! | |
| Opera Market Share Eclipsed by Unreleased Browser Net Applications has just released their browser usage statistics for May 2008. The statistics show a 73.8% market share for Internet Explorer, 18.4% for Firefox and 6.3% for Safari. Opera is stuck on 0.7%.
An in-depth analysis shows something quite interesting. The unreleased Firefox 3 already has a market share of 0.78%. With the quite addictive Awesomebar, fresh new interface, revamped bookmarking system and lower memory use, that’s not such a surprise. Firefox 3 is simply a fantastic product. Opera 9.x, first released in June of 2006 (that’s 2 years ago) has only managed to accumulate a market share of 0.73% in that time.
That’s right: Opera 9 has had it’s market share eclipsed by a browser which hasn’t even been released yet. Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler says:
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| Personas for Firefox Personas for Firefox is a really nice extension for Firefox which adds lightweight theming without having to restart your browser.
I’ve been using it several months now and it’s really nice so I really recommend having a look. There are a dozen Foxkeh themes which are pretty cute too. Personas was recently updated so the theme could be dynamic web content. People have started to play around with this feature: for example theming the browser with a live webcam from Germany. Find out how to create your own Personas. The team hope to release the final version of Personas in time for Firefox 3. | |
| Effortless Good Effortless Good is a fantastic idea and great extension. Simply, Amazon runs an affiliate system which gives webmasters a fee for every purchase they refer. Effortless Good is a Firefox extension adds a referral code to when you visit Amazon so that the referral fee is collected and then split between four causes: the Rainforest Alliance, Save the Children, Grameen Foundation and the Participatory Culture Foundation. A fantastic idea and some great causes too (although I’m not too sure about the last one) | |
| Reflection.js in Firefox 2.0.0.10 The latest security update to Firefox, version 2.0.0.10 breaks Reflection.js as well as pretty much every other similar script which uses <canvas> to manipulate images. Have a look at the Mozillazine Thread and Bug #405584. I’m surprised that Firefox QA missed this one. It looks like version 2.0.0.11 will be released to fix this bug. Thanks to everyone who told me about this and/or submitted a bug to Mozilla. | |
| Firefox 3 Feature Plan The Mozilla Wiki has a page of Firefox 3 Requirements. It’s an interesting insight into what we may see in the next version of Firefox. Just a glance at the document indicates the following features labelled as "mandatory":
In the highly desirable priority 2, we have features such as:
With the integration of a serverless and open source search and instant messaging tool, Firefox would be taking a bit of a step away from the philosophy that it just provides a browser and no more. However, if done correctly, it could be a really powerful force to make the web just a bit more democratic. An instant messaging tool could open up a lot of new possibilities especially with the "social web" and "Web 2.0". We could see all kinds of new applications exploiting the social networks and connections such as "web of trust" and social bookmarking. Of course, I’m extrapolating a lot from the feature plan, but Firefox 3 could be Flock "done right". | |
| Firefox 3 Alpha 1: Acid2 Alpha 1 of Gran Paradiso, or what will eventually become Firefox 3.0, has been released. This release is not for end users; it only consists of backend and rendering changes.
Acid2
This means that Firefox finally passes the Acid2 test. Here’s a screenshot I took:
It is true that other browsers such as Opera and Safari managed to pass the Acid2 test. The Acid2 test actually came at a bad time in the development cycle for Mozilla. Gecko 1.8 was stabilized and trying to get Acid2 to work on it would have been extremely risky. And the next Gecko update after that, 1.9, won’t be used in a Firefox release until version 3.0. Acid2 also contained a load of useless stuff which web developers are unlikely to need anyway, so not trying to pass the Acid2 test until Firefox 3.0 was a smart move. Other ChangesAccording to the release notes, this is what’s new:
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| Planet Mozilla – Blog of the Week Planet Mozilla isn’t a blog in the traditional sense. It’s an aggregation of all things Mozilla including build updates from The Burning Edge, the Mozilla Developer webwatch, discussions about the internals of Mozilla Corp., MozillaZine news, Mozilla Labs and posts from Mozilla developers. These range from posts about Thunderbird to Songbird, from XULRunner to Addons. For anyone with an interest in browsers or Mozilla technologies in general, this is a fantastic aggregated blog to subscribe to. The number of off-topic posts seems to be pretty low and all the stuff there is pretty interesting. It also means you are the first to hear about Mozilla developments and straight from the mouth of the developers. If you don’t want to subscribe to the full deal but just specific Mozilla blogs, check out the list of blogs on the right hand side.
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| More on Firefox Tabs Further to my post on Chromatabs, I decided to investigate a few other Firefox tabbed browsing related extensions. ChromatabsChromatab was an interesting extension. Although it’s a really nice concept, I didn’t really like it so much in practice. It made it really hard to identify the active/selected tab and as the vast majority of sites I had open I had never visited before, I didn’t form a connection between the site and the colour. Additionally, various sites ended up with very similar colours. See also: Colourful Tabs Aging TabsAging Tabs is a really nice extension which stays out of the way. Its unobtrusive but it manages to display useful information. I love it on it’s default configuration. When I’m developing or designing I may often have about 6 or 7 tabs open – only two or three of which I use. Aging Tabs makes it really easy to identify those tabs pertaining to the current task. If you are the kind of person who visits Slashdot or Digg and opens up 10 tabs and then spawns even more tabs for interesting links found on those pages, Aging Tabs could come in really handy. I experimented with the options of Aging Tabs and adding colour, but I found it worked fantastically on it’s default configuration. FaviconizeTab
I haven’t tried this extension yet but it looks quite cool. It could come in handy if you have a few tabs open and you want to keep them open, but don’t plan on using them for quite a while. |
