The Flock guys have just released a fashion oriented edition of its namesake Firefox-based browser labeled Flock Gloss Edition.
From People to Cosmopolitan to The New York Time’s fashion section, it comes with a thick bundle of fashion, health, and gossip links and feeds framed in a girlish lavender theme to please fashion lovers cravings (well almost).
Flock has released the second beta of its forthcoming Flock 2, the Firefox-based web browser that features tight integration with most of the most popular social web services including Flickr, Facebook, digg, YouTube and many others.
Flock 2 beta 2 is based on Firefox 3 (3.0.1 actually) code base bringing along all the performance improvements and new features including Places, tagging, malware protection, the new location bar, web content and protocol handlers among others.
Other features include an option to manually update a web feed or group of web feeds and notifications when one is updated.
Exactly one month after the original Firefox 3.0 release comes its first security and stability update labeled Firefox 3.0.1, the first also to feature the new three digit versioning instead of previous 4-digit scheme.
The update includes fixes for three critical vulnerabilities including the one reported through TippingPoint’s Zero Day Initiative program, the same day Firefox 3 was released, that could lead to remote execution.
As announced before, tab switching is getting a dramatic update for Firefox 3.1 in both visual and behavior.
Press Ctrl + Tab (or Shift + Ctrl + Tab) and you are presented with tab thumbnails and titles with the most recently visited ones first so you can more easily determine which tab you want to go, have the one you most probably want to go closer, and as a result get to it faster. Hold Ctrl pressed and keep pressing Tab to see the thumbnails smoothly scroll to the left while the status bar displays the tab web address.
Firefox 3 features an overhauled Page Info dialog (Tools menu, Page Info) that while provides some valuable security and content information it also lacks some elements like the Links and Forms pages many users are already missing.
Links and Forms, a Firefox extension developed by Florian Queze, restores both pages to the Page Info dialog just as they were in Firefox 2 and previous versions. Read the rest of this entry »
On June 17th, the day Firefox 3 was released, it got a mention in The Colbert Report during an interview with Johnathan Zittrain about his recently published book The future of the Internet - and how to stop it, referring to the many threats polluting it.
Stephen Colbert: Believe me, I’m all in favor of scaring the shit out of public. But I don’t understand. You give me the tools to frighten them.
Johnathan Zittrain: I don’t mean to be too alarmist…
SC: Oh! No, no, no! Please!
JZ: But it’s true. If you visit the wrong web site with the wrong browser, that could be it.
SC: What’s the right browser?
JZ: Well, Firefox 3 was just released today.
SC: OK.
(Public applause)
JZ: You may want to give it a shot.
SC: Firefox 3 gets the Colbert bump.
(Public applause)
The Colbert bump, -sort of a small digg effect or being slashdotted- actually spiked Firefox 3 download rate for a few minutes, according to Mozilla’s Ken Kovash, based on in his analysis of Mozilla download logs.
Sudoku fans rejoice! Petr Blahoš has created a fun Firefox extension that brings sudoku headaches and frustration to Firefox.
To play, just select Your SUDOKUs sidebar from the View/Sidebars menu. Select a puzzle from the sidebar and click on >> to open it in a new tab. To place a number, you click on it from the bottom number bar and then on an empty space. The selected number will be highlighted on the board to help you avoid errors. If you’re not sure, right click to place the number as a hint instead.
While the awesome bar, download pause and resume, malware protection, the new themes, and serious performance improvements are perhaps the most representative features introduced with Firefox 3, here are some other useful ones you may not be aware:
As you may know, Firefox 3 introduces three different themes for all the officially supported operating systems: Firelight on Mac OS X, Tango on Linux, and Strata on Windows, which even comes in XP and Vista variations to better blend with Luna and Aero respectively.
If you are feeling envious of what the other platform or style got or just want to try a different look and have a couple of minutes to spare, you may want to give these themes a try.
Do you know Mibbit? It’s an awesome web based IRC client. IRC, for those not old enough to recall, meant chat long before instant messaging entered the scene and is still a very reliable option for group and peer-to-peer text communication.
You can take advantage of Firefox 3’s support for web-based protocol handling to make it your default IRC client and handle irc:// links whenever you found one.
Mibbit added the necessary interface short before Firefox 3 final release and I’ve proposed it to be included with Firefox by default. But you can add it right now.
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