February 5, 2010 9:41 am
Mozilla has released the first alpha of its forthcoming Thunderbird 3.1, code named Lanikai after a Hawaiian beach.
Alphas are very early development releases and should only be tried by developers and testers. Among other improvements, Lanikai Alpha 1 includes:
- Several improvements to IMAP.
- Several fixes for Smart Folders, message filters, and attachment handling.
- Several design improvements and corrections to the interface.
- Download Manager is now accessible as a menu item (Tools > Saved Files).
- Stability and memory improvements.
February 3, 2010 12:34 am
Mozilla’s Stephen Horlander has released a couple of videos showing the plans for a few Firefox tab tasks like adding a new tab.
Read complete article…
January 30, 2010 2:34 pm
Mozilla has released Firefox for Maemo in its final form, bringing Firefox to mobile devices for the first time. It is Firefox: you get the awesome bar, a download manager where you can pause and resume downloads, one touch bookmarking and tagging, tabbed browsing, the site button for quick security checks, popup blocker, a password manager, the same rendering engine (HTML5, native Theora video, embedded fonts), spell checker, etc.
What makes Firefox for Maemo a product on its own is the efficient user interface designed from the ground up to take challenges like having no keyboard, less computing power, or a smaller display while taking advantage of tablets’ touch screens, and handling.
Read complete article…
January 28, 2010 11:14 pm
Mozilla has released Weave 1.0, the Firefox extension and service that provides Firefox user data synchronization among computing devices like laptops, desktops, and starting tomorrow, with Firefox for Maemo release, mobile devices. It is also great for users who dual-boot, and what don’t want to bother remembering where they did what.
So far, synchronization includes bookmarks, history, preferences, passwords, filled forms, and even your last 25 opened tabs. All the information is transported and stored in encrypted form at all times making it pretty safe to use. Read complete article…
10:19 pm
Fun with the Mozilla crew on Firefox 3.6 release day!
January 27, 2010 10:54 am
According to a recent email by Canonical’s Rick Spencer in the Ubuntu development mailing list, Canonical is planning to change Firefox’s default search provider to Yahoo! starting with forthcoming Lucid Lynx, due in April.
The change will also change the default home page from the current Ubuntu customized Google search page to a Yahoo! home page.
The post emphasizes that previous user choices of search engines will be respected, so the change will apply for new users only (new installations, or new local users).
Read complete article…
January 26, 2010 11:11 pm
Firefox 3.6 has yet another secret feature that could significantly improve your web browsing on Windows: scroll acceleration.
By default, when you scroll the mouse wheel, the web page is scrolled the same number of lines no matter how many times you have already scrolled it. But, if you have scrolled the page a certain number of times in a short period, probably you are looking for something far below or above, and accelerating may be helpful.
Read complete article…
January 24, 2010 10:12 am
Here are five quick tips to enhance your Firefox 3.6 experience.
1. Open links in the tab bar far right
In Firefox 3.6, links opened from a web page (middle-clicking on them or from the context menu) open to the right of the current page to keep related content closer by default. To restore the previous behavior, access the advanced preferences by visiting about:config, then look for preference browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent and set it to false.
2. Enable tab previews
If you prefer to see tabs thumbnails when switching tabs with Ctrl + Tab, set browser.ctrlTab.previews to true via about:config.
3. Enable tab previews menu button
Convert the list all tabs button (far right in the tab bar), set browser.allTabs.previews to true via about:config.
4. Tab previews hotkey
To quickly access the all tabs preview panel (once enabled) and search press Shift + Ctrl + Tab.
5. Hide the menu bar
On Windows, you can now hide the menu bar to gain a few thousand pixels for the actual content. Right-click on the menu bar and uncheck Menu Bar. To show it temporarily, press the Alt key.
January 23, 2010 9:43 pm
Following last days’ German, French, and Australian government warnings about the risks of Internet Explorer’s security vulnerability, and recommendations to use other web browsers, Mozilla has seen a huge increase in daily downloads, as reported by Ken Kovash, from the Mozilla Metrics team.
Numbers doubled in France from an average 40K to 80K, in Australia from 12K to 32K, and Germany from around 70K to around 150K.
January 22, 2010 3:32 pm
Personas is now available for everybody who updated to Firefox 3.6, just released yesterday. However, before been a feature, it was an extension, developed by Mozilla Labs. It’s the first of hopefully a long list of innovations to come to Firefox (and most likely, other web browsers as well). Other Mozilla Labs’ projects including Prism, Weave, and Jetpack are next in line (Ubiquity will come later).
Now that personas are available for Firefox 3.6, the original extension has been rebranded as Personas Plus, as it provides even more functionality. Here are a few reasons you may want to try Personas Plus: Read complete article…
