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.

Scroll acceleration was implemented by Mozilla intern Margaret Leibovic, very early in Firefox 3.6 development, but finally turned off because it could conflict with mouse driver based acceleration, detecting it was out of scope. So it was postponed for next versions.

But the feature is there, and I have found it very useful, and have become used to it. To enable it, go to about:config to access the advanced preferences. Then look for mousewheel.acceleration.start, and set it to the number of successive mouse scrolls that will trigger acceleration. I found 3 to be a good number for me. Then, set mousewheel.acceleration.factor to how many times faster you want to scroll. I tried and liked 5.

With Firefox’s default setting it took me 14 mouse scrolls to scroll Margaret’s post (with 30+ comments), versus 6 with acceleration.

If you try this setting, please share the values you found to work best for you.

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.

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:

• Browse personas by category, popularity, and most recently added. With over 35,000 personas, this one is really helps you reach the best when there’s no much time.
• Have your favorites on hand. You will need to register at getpersonas.com, so you can mark your and save your favorite personas to have them easily accessible from the Personas Plus’ status bar menu.

• Make your own persona. First, you have to enable the Custom Persona menu option via Personas Plus’ preferences. Then you can set colors and images for your toolbars and status bar background.

• Combine themes and personas. This is one of the most common complaints I have heard about Personas implementation in Firefox: you can’t mix themes and personas. While I can understand this is an uncommon case for  most users, I don’t get why this capability was removed from the latest Personas Plus 1.5. If you install the previous version 1.4 you will be able to have a themes’ button icons for example on top of the persona. Below is the

Get Personas Plus at Mozilla Add-ons.

The result: perhaps the most extensively tested Firefox release, with just above 1 million users by the release candidate stage, which helps Firefox 3.6 be a robust release for an increasingly more competitive, healthier web browser market. Let’s see what’s inside.

Personas

Personsas is definitely the main feature for this release. Also called lightweight themes, unlike full featured themes which allow to change every aspect of the UI (widgets, backgrounds, colors, fonts), personas focus on just changing the status bar and toolbars backgrounds, without requiring an application restart, and making it pretty easy to preview the personas in Mozilla Add-ons.

With more than 10 million extension downloads (for Firefox 3.5 and before), and more than 30,000 available, Personas (now Personas Plus) has been a wild success months before becoming a default Firefox feature.  It is still available, and maintained,  and still adds a couple of advanced features that could attract users: the ability to load your own persona by selecting a couple of files from your computer, and an option to browse Mozilla Add-ons’ personas, and create a set of favorites if you create an account.

User Experience

Firefox 3.5 introduced support for native Theora videos in web pages using the HTML5 <video> tag. Now, there’s an option to see videos in full screen mode. Just right-click on the video and select Full Screen.

Talking about full screen, a new full screen button is available from the Customize Toolbars dialog, available from View menu, Toolbars/Customize, so you don’t have to reach the View menu, or remember the F11 hot key.

A small but significant change: if you attempt to launch Firefox while only non content windows are open (like the Add-ons or Downloads Manager), Firefox won’t create a new window as before but restore the last closed window.

New is also the tab preview and the ability to search tabs by title and URL, though not enabled by default. You will have to set browser.ctrlTab.previews to true via about:confige. Then, when you press Ctrl + Tab to switch tabs, a tab panel appears. Also the List all tabs button in the the bar far right, now displays a thumbnail of all open tabs, where you can select, close, or search.

There is also a couple of new tabbed browsing behaviors. First, tabs opened from a web page (like when you middle-click or select Open Link in New Tab from the link’s context menu), are opened to the right of the current tab instead of the last one’s.  The second change is disabled by default and makes single Ctrl + Tab key presses switch between the current and the previous tab, instead of moving through all the tabs. To enable it, set browser.ctrlTab.mostRecentlyUsed to true.

Autocomplete suggestions in previously filled web forms are now sorted by frecency, a combined indicator that tells how frequently and how recently an option was used. A nice addition for users who frequently fill out web forms.

On Windows, there’s a new option to hide the menu bar and gain a few thousand pixels for web pages. Right click on the navigation or menu bar and uncheck the Menu Bar item to have it gone for good.

When you need support, there is a way to easily get and share most details about your Firefox setup. In the Help menu, select Troubleshooting Information… to open about:support, a page that summarizes your installed extensions, customized preferences, links to your plugins, and build details, and allows you to quickly copy everything to the clipboard so you can paste it in a support forum post or email.

Not as helpful, about:memory is a first approach to providing details about web pages and tabs resources usage, similar to Chrome’s task manager. Right now it basically only shows Firefox total memory usage. It should make much more sense once multi-process architecture starts landing in coming versions.

What’s not here is support for some of Windows 7’s most useful features: there are no jump lists, no tab preview, and no download status in the taskbar either. However, now that Mozilla is open to including new features in maintenance releases, I really hope this lands in some of the early next updates.

Actually, taskbar preview is available in Firefox 3.6, but it is buggy and not really worth enabling. If you still want to try it, access about:config and set browser.taskbar.previews.enable to true.

Also available is accelerometer support which allows web applications know the current mobile device orientation to react accordingly.

Web Enhancement

Mozilla is now supporting the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) for embedded fonts which has several advantages over TrueType and OpenType, like smaller size thanks to compression, and the ability to trace the source of a specific font without the burden of DRM.

With multiple file input, you can select several files for a single file input area, so it is easier to upload. Now, web developers, please use it! It’s always been a pain to upload photos to any photo sharing or printing service unless you use a proprietary plugin or a Java applet.

A new API will now allow add-on developers access Firefox’s geolocation features, and better standard interfaces for easier drag and drop in web pages should make web developers’ lives easier.

It scores 94 in Acid3 (the web standards compliance test), one point more than Firefox 3.5.

Security and Stability

The Firefox components directory is now locked down, which means no third party provider will be able to write to Firefox’s components folder. More details in Mozilla Developer Center.

The extensions.checkCompatibility preference is now less relaxed. In the past, it has been abused by users as a way to force incompatible extensions to work with newer Firefox versions. The preference is still there but it will have to be more explicit. For example to force them to work with Firefox 3.6, you will have to add extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6 and set it to  false. For future versions you will need to set extensions.checkCompatibility.3.7 to false and so on. See Dave Townsend’s post for more details.

Another important addition is an option to check for plugin updates. To do so, just press Find Updates in the Plugins page in the Add-ons Manager. The Plugin Check page will test your browser, report on what plugins are outdated, and provide links to where you can find the latest versions.

Performance

TraceMonkey, the JavaScript optimizer has been futher improved. In my tests, it took about 15% less time than Firefox 3.5 to complete the SunSpider test suite (from 1775ms to 1254ms in my Thinkpad T400). Thanks to stability gains, it is also enabled for improving chrome code as well. Remember the whole Firefox user interface runs on JavaScript.

Per tab network prioritization makes Firefox allocate more bandwidth for the currently viewed tab, less for other tabs in the current window and even less for other windows, enhancing the perceived responsiveness.

What’s Next

Lorentz. The next major update will run plugins (or at least Flash) on their own processes to improve overall stability. It, however, won’t come as a major update but as an update to Firefox 3.6 (around 3.6.2), marking a change in Mozilla approach to minor updates. There are a few other updates that may be included, but nothing is clear right now.

Download Firefox 3.6 now. Release Notes.

With this early RC2 release, it is now more likely the final release will arrive by month’s end, probably on January 26th.

You can also download the full RC2 from Mozilla.

According to the latest meeting minutes, Mozilla was considering January 19 for Firefox 3.6 release if the bug didn’t prove to be severe enough. So, final release date will most likely be January 26th, the second possible date, and another Tuesday, Mozilla’s favorite release day! :)

If you have been following Firefox development releases, this release adds more than 90 new stability and performance bug fixes since the latest Beta 5, made available last December.

Not much to report really since Beta 1.  You can check a complete review here.

Download Firefox 3.6 RC 1, available in more than 70 languages for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

With today’s current resolutions, you will instantly get somewhere between 20 – 40K extra pixels.

When you need to access a menu bar option, press the Alt key and the menu bar will appear temporarily.

To do the same in Firefox 3.5 you will need an extension like Personal Menu or Compact Menu 2.

For the complete review of Firefox 3.6 beta, check my previous review.

Current nightly builds are labeled preb5, suggesting yet another beta may be in the works. It’s worth noting how the concept of beta has changed in Mozilla development from several well defined beta releases to the single more cohesive beta stage we have today that is continuously reviewed and pushed to previous beta users (currently about half a million).

Download  Firefox 3.6 Beta 4.

Nothing too dramatic among the 90+ bug fixes this release introduces, but a few worth noting:

• A new API will now allow add-on developers access Firefox’s geolocation features. (See Doug Turner’s post)
• As expected,  tab previews on Windows 7 taskbar has been pulled back. This is a real disappointment: there will be no support at all for some of Windows 7’s most welcomed features: jump lists, download progress in the task bar (a la IE8), and now no tab previews.
• In the security/stability front, the Firefox components directory is now locked down, which means no third party provider will be able to write to Firefox’s components folder. More details in Mozilla Developer Center.
• The extensions.checkCompatibility preference becomes less relaxed. In the past, it has been abused by users as a way to force incompatible extensions to work with newer Firefox versions. The preference is still there but it will have to be more explicit. For example to force them to work with Firefox 3.6, you wll have to add extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6 and set it to  false. For future versions you will need to set extensions.checkCompatibility.3.7 to false and so on. See Dave Townsend’s post for more details.

What’s next? Current Firefox 3.6 nightly builds are labeled as preb4, which could mean a fourth beta is planned. There are still a few nasty crasher bugs among the current blockers after all. This would push a release candidate into December and Firefox 3.6 final may become the preferred Christmas gift this season!

For the complete review of Firefox 3.6, check my beta 1 review.

Get Firefox 3.6 Beta 3.

Beta 2, available as both an update for Beta 1 and a full download, patches more than 190 bugs, making it a compelling update for those comfortable running betas, and a safer bet for those who daring to wet their toes in software testing.

Among the many stability bug fixes, there’s a new mechanism that will allow Mozilla to block known-bad DLLs on Windows platforms to prevent software crashes and other potentially harming access.

Tab network prioritization, a new feature that will make foreground pages load faster than those in the background has recently landed to Firefox 3.6 nightlies but is missing in the beta (frozen a few days ago).

Nightlies are currently labeled as b3pre, suggesting a third beta is planned. The Release Candidate is already targeted for November 26 according to the latest meeting notes, so we can expect another quik turnaround for Beta 3.

Before starting the review, keep in mind that Firefox 3.6 will be the smallest upgrade Mozilla has released to date. Before this, version jumps have been in the 0.5 (Firefox 1.0 to 1.5, 3.0 to 3.5) or 1.0 (2.0 to 3.0) order, and while version numbers are not mathematically representative, the slight 0.1 version increase reflects the overall tone of this update, and Firefox development in general which is moving to a faster release pace.

Personas

Without a doubt, the most significant addition is support for lightweight themes, also known as personas, that was previously only available with the Personas extension.

A persona, which consists of a couple of images used as backgrounds for the toolbar and status bar areas, and setting a text color, is very simple to author, yet it significantly changes the appearance of Firefox and becomes a way of expression for the user.

To try it, simply visit Mozilla Add-ons, and go to the recently added Personas section. Personas are live previewed as you hover on the thumbnails, and become permanent when you click on Wear It.

Themes after all, personas are also managed via the Themes page in the Add-ons Manager.

Tabbed browsing

Firefox has finally got tab preview, though it’s turned off by default. To activate it, you must set browser.ctrlTab.previews to true via about:config. After that, when you press Ctrl + Tab to switch tabs, you get a horizontal line of tab thumbnails.

You can also press Ctrl + Shift + Tab to get a preview of all currently loaded tabs, and even search the tabs’ titles which comes very handy when having more than 20 or so at a time.

about:

A couple of special about: pages have been added. about:support, should become a troubled user’s best friend as it provides a helpful page with most details of your current Firefox settings including version number, customized preferences, and installed extensions; all of which can be easily copied to a support forum, email or chat window.

about:memory, is a first try on providing details about the current Firefox memory consumption.

Usability

Native videos now have a full screen option: right click on a video and select Full screen. On related news, a new full screen button is now available to add to the toolbars.

Tabs opened from a page (like when middle-clicking on a link) now open to the right of the current tab making it easier to reach content that we know is related to what we’re currently on.

A small but significant change: if you attempt to launch Firefox while only non content windows are open (like the Add-ons or Downloads Manager), Firefox won’t create a new window as before but restore the last closed window.

Autocomplete suggestions in previously filled web forms are now sorted by frecency, a combined indicator that tells how frequently and how recently an option was used. A nice addition useful in very particular cases though.

Internals

As announced before, Mozilla is now supporting the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) which has the advantages of smaller size thanks to compression, and the ability to trace the source of a specific font without the burden of DRM.

TraceMonkey, the JavaScript just-in-time optimization technology introduces with Firefox 3.5 is now also enabled by default for the user interface, which relies on JavaScript for much of its functionality as well.

Finally, this beta introduces support for the new Windows 7’s taskbar previews feature. Don’t get too attached to it though, as it is buggy right now and may be pulled back depending on how it evolves in the next few days.

Next

Further Windows 7 integration like showing a download progress bar in the taskbar and jump lists are also in the works but unlikely to be ready for Firefox 3.6.

The current nightlies are labeled pre 3.6 beta 2 suggesting a second beta may be the next step. This would be in line with the latest roadmap.

Not much is left for future development releases. One final feature could be per tab network prioritization which will make Firefox allocate more bandwidth for the currently viewed tab, less for other tabs in the current window and even less for other windows, enhancing the perceived responsiveness.

As usual, a critical subject are add-ons. Right now about half of them have been updated to some 3.6 development release. You can help increase this number by installing the Add-on Compatibility Reporter. Once installed, all your extensions will be enabled. You can then check and see if they work or not, then go to the Add-ons Manager and report whether it works or not.

Here are my favorite five, but there is something for everyone: really scary, cute , and even pink ones!

Remember you need to install the Personas extension, at least until Firefox 3.6 arrives. If you are really eager to try it, stay tuned as it should arrive next week.

]]> http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2009/10/dress-spooky-with-a-halloween-firefox-persona/feed/ 0 http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2009/10/mozilla-add-ons-now-featuring-personas/ http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2009/10/mozilla-add-ons-now-featuring-personas/#comments Thu, 22 Oct 2009 03:53:58 +0000 Percy Cabello http://mozillalinks.org/wp/?p=3909 In preparation for Firefox 3.6, due later this year and which will feature lightweight themes support or personas, Mozilla Add-ons has just added a section dedicated to personas, so users won’t have to go a separate site for all their customization needs.

Like GetPersonas.com, you just hover the personas thumbnails to live preview it on Firefox. If you like it, just press Wear it to keep it. To choose another theme, open the Add-ons Manager and select a different one in the Themes tab.

For the easiest way of creating and sharing personas, GetPersonas.com is still the place to go.

To make it an even greater success, Mozilla Labs is organizing a design contest aimed towards design school students. If you are one, you just need to create one (a couple of images) and submit it through the contest entry page by October 18th.

Winners will be awarded a Wacom Intuos Tablet an pen (large, medium, or small for first, second and third places), a CandyBar software license. The winning design also takes GetPersonas frontpage.

Hurry up and set your creativity free!

First, tabs can now be previewed from the task bar directly just hovering over the Firefox icon (Namoroka’s in the screenshot). Previews for all windows are displayed at a time, and like other Windows 7 applications you can select or close a tab from there.

Second, support for jump lists: right click on the Firefox task bar icon to get quick access to the most frequently visited sites, create a new tab or window or close Firefox. This features is not yet available in Namoroka, but the trunk (the source for future Firefox versions). It will most likely land after the Beta 1 freeze.

Finally, we should be able to check download status directly from the task bar thanks to a progress bar integrated with the Firefox icon. A green progress bar indicates downloads are currently in progress while a yellow one menas downloads are currently paused. This one hasn’t been landed yet on either source repository.

Just right click on the video and select Full Screen. While on full screen, press Esc to return to the normal view.

There’s still a half second pause while switching modes that should be ironed in the next days, but is far better than the current Full Screen extension which forced a full video restart when switching modes.Neat!

Like with Mozilla Labs’ Personas extensions and unlike full fledged themes, personas only customize the toolbars and status bar backgrounds, and the menus text color, just a couple of elements of Firefox UI that makes a large share of what we perceive as customization.

To install or even preview a lightweight theme, the web site owner must call a JavaScript API, and get authorization from the user to preview or install the theme if it is not served by getpersonas.com or another whitelisted site.

To change or uninstall lightweight themes, proceed just like with regular ones: open the Add-ons Manager, open the Themes page and change themes at will.

Lightweight themes have been a wild success. Since its launch earlier this year, GetPersonas.com now counts more than 27,000 personas, thanks in large part to the fact that they are very easy to author: create a couple of images (3000 x 200 pixels for the header, 3000 x 100 pixels for the footer), upload them to GetPersonas.com and once approved, they become available for users everywhere.

GetPersonas.com still not fully supports Namoroka, but it is being worked right now, and we should be able to preview and install personas in the next few days. I tried a staging server and found functionality and performance just as good as with the Personas extension.

In the meantime you can try a few lightweight themes provided by Dao Gottwald, one of the developers involved with the Personas uplift, the first Mozilla Labs’ project to get into Firefox’s core. Practically all the other projects are now expected to contribute experience and code in future releases: Ubiquity (via Taskfox), Jetpack, Prism, and Weave.

There are still a few issues to resolve like supporting RTL languages which tend to have menus and button in the right side, where the theme just doesn’t look good.

Also, it’s not clear at this time whether Personas’ option to define a custom persona will be available. In Personas, you are able to load a couple of images yourself and try them as a persona before submitting them to getpersonas.com.

EDIT: Updates to GetPersonas.com have already been pushed and it now supports Namoroka: you can preview by just hovering themes thumbnails and install with a single click!

Implemented as one of the private about: pages. Enter about:support in the location bar, hit Enter, and you will get a simple web page that includes details like your current profile location, exact Firefox version, links to plugins and build configuration details (about:plugins and about:buildconfig), a list of all your current extensions, and all modified preferences which could signal some incompatibility or forgotten customization.

A single button allows you to copy all the information to the clipboard and then paste it into a support forum or chat window, providing the guy in the other end a good idea of what’s going on.

There’s still a debate on whether the profile folder should be shown or not. As you may know, the profile folder name is randomly named, adding another level of protection from remote access attacks.

This is a big leap for Firefox support not only for SUMO (Mozilla Support), but for everyone who has spent some time helping a friend or relative troubleshoot some Firefox problem.

Felipe explains the trick is done with some new program interfaces web developers will be able to use to multitouch enable their web applications. Multitouch devices will also be detectable via CSS media queries so that multitouch interfaces are served for the relevant users.

All of these is targeted for Namoroka (Firefox 3.6), expected later this year.

Namoroka roadmap has been updated and it shows the focus will be on making it feel snappier when performing some common tasks like opening  a new tab, launching Firefox, scrolling a web page, getting autocomplete and location bar suggestions, etc.

It was also confirmed that it will integrate the Personas add-on that allows quick and easy look customization by adding a pair of images as backgrounds for the toolbars. Launched in final form a few months ago, GetPersonas.com, Mozilla’s official personas repository, reports over 25,000 contributed skins, including  a Harry Potters’ set released by Warner Bros. itself.

Among other features, better form autocomplete and location bars are almost done in Alpha 1, released last week.

Surprisingly, the roadmap doesn’t mention any Windows 7 integration improvement, specifically JumpLists and Aero Peek, which would be greatly appreciated by the millions of user (like me) who will jump into the OS  update when it comes out in October 22.

Firefox 3.6 Beta  1 is already targeted for early September, with a second one to follow later that month. By this time all UI changes and updates, including Personas integration should have happened. Release candidates are expected to go out in October, to meet a targeted final release some time in November.

If the roadmap is followed (or even slightly delayed), it will become the fastest development cycle for Firefox: all previous major updates have taken about a year, except for Firefox 3 which took a year and a half.

Among the features that have been phased out for the next release are the mentioned Mozilla Labs’ extensions integration (Ubiquity, Jetpack, and Prisim), said Windows 7 support, site preferences accessible from the site button, better file uploading, and a few second priority including helpful new tabs, about:me for personal web browsing analysis, identity management support (OpenID likely), and file management capabilities from the downloads manager.

There’s still no word on what release will take these feature, but most likely it will be Firefox 3.7, tentatively targeted for mid-next year. Another major feature for 3.7 will be the deep Windows theme updates shown a few weeks ago, which will make it look much more native.

One of the main themes in this release is making Firefox feel snappier to the user: whether you are launching it, opening a new tab, a sidebar, there is a difference on whether the action is done fast and perceived fast.

In this area, you will notice that web pages now scroll faster thanks to acceleration activated after a few mouse wheel scrolls.

User experience

A new feature provides better autocomplete recommendations for previously entered form fields: instead of an alphabetically ordered list, it is sorted by frecency (a combined index of frequency and recency of use) so the most likely values are displayed first. Also, the characters you type are searched in all previously entered strings not just the beginning as in Firefox 3.5.

Originally planned for Firefox 3.0 and 3.5, tabs preview got backed out in both development cycles. It is back again to provide visual tab switching: press Ctrl + Tab and you get preview of the current along with the five most recently used tabs, plus an option to show all tabs’ thumbnails including a search bar.

Also back is the new behavior for single Ctrl + Tab:  instead of moving to the next tab in the tab bar, you switch to the previously used tab.

Unlike previous attempts, this time tab preview and the new tab switching behavior are off by default. To enable tab preview, set browser.ctrlTab.previews to true via about:config. For the new behavior, set browser.ctrlTab.mostRecentlyUsed to true.

A new full screen button is now available in the customize toolbar dialog for users who prefer mouse browsing. There’s always F11 for hard core keyboard users.

Better Session Restore

Has this happened to you? You want to restart Firefox, so you close your only window, then double click the Firefox icon and instead of your tabs you get your home page only. What happened? You then realize that there was a non browser window (the Add-ons or Download manager)  also opened, so you just got a new window. Starting with alpha 1, Firefox is smarter about this and will restore your tabs whenever it finds no other browser window open.

Performance

JavaScript optimizations (TraceMonkey) are improved and are also now available for the user interface by default. You can do the same in Firefox 3.5 setting javascript.options.jit.chrome to true via about:config. I have been using it that way since the Firefox 3.5 alphas or betas and haven’t had  a problem, so I think it is is safe to have it enabled by now.

Web Development

In the development front, support for multiple background images, gradients, rem units (root font size) in CSS. It scores 94 in Acid3 (the web standards compliance test), one point more than Firefox 3.5.

As said, Firefox 3.6 is targeted for later this year. A previous Namoroka draft plan included a lot of significant new features borrowed from Prism, Ubiquity, Personas, and Jetpack Mozilla Labs’ extensions, but it is hard to imagine all or even any of these will get in for a fall release.

The all tabs preview includes a search bar to look for keywords among tab titles and tab close buttons for some housekeeping.

Also back is the new behavior for single Ctrl + Tab:  instead of moving to the next tab in the tab bar, you switch to the previously used tab.

Unlike previous attempts, this time tab preview and the new tab switching behavior are off by default. To enable tab preview, set browser.ctrlTab.previews to true via about:config. For the new behavior, set browser.ctrlTab.mostRecentlyUsed to true.

It’s also worth mentioning that the list all tabs button still shows a list of tabs, while recently released mockups and previous implementations in Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 replaced it with a tab preview button. These just could be temporary and a tab preview button could be on its way.

While it definitely looks good and modern (it still has to undergo Windows and Linux theming, and I would prefer Flip 3D on Vista and 7), I’m still not convinced on how much it will improve tab switching for heavy tab users like myself (usually 20+ tabs), but at the very least, I find more helpful than the current combination of tab bar scroll bars and a list.