Weave 1.0 now available for download

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.

Mozilla Creative Collective goes live!

Mozilla has launched a new web site for its Mozilla Creative Collective initiative which aims to gather all the Mozilla community’s design and artistic efforts in one place:

Mozilla’s visual design is an important area that has traditionally lacked an organized community, which is why we started the Creative Collective. Our goal is to inspire people to contribute their talents to the Mozilla cause, and to give them the benefits of being a part of a community. In the end, the MCC was built to showcase the artists, and we can’t wait to see the results!

First look to Firefox command line, Taskfox

Mozilla’s Blair McBride, has released a first Firefox build featuring a command line integrated with the awesome bar to perform some basic tasks.

As you may recall, Taskfox, is a project that aims to integrate some of Ubiquity’s command line abilities into Firefox to for example perform searches with inline previews, alter page contents, insert maps, schedule events, share web pages, search tabs, and a very long, etc.

Firefox 3.5 Beta 3 is out

Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5 Beta 3, the third public development release of the next major upgrade of Mozilla’s web browser. Because the decision to increase the version number from 3.1 to 3.5 to reflect the significant number of new features and improvements came very late in this beta cycle, the installers are labeled as Firefox 3.1 Beta 3.

There are a few new and improved features in this third beta:

• A new option to easily delete all traces of visiting a certain web site: in the Library, right click on a History item and select Forget About This Site.
• Some minor but very welcome improvements to the themes. On Windows Vista, the ugly gray label backgrounds in some dialogs are finally gone.
• The new tab button is now placed next to the last tab instead of the far right of the tab bar, making it more discoverable.
• Native support for JSON, a widely used data format that will ease the task of loading data to web applications.
• Minor retouches to the native audio and video playback controls.
• Improvements to the TraceMonkey JavaScript optimizer and Gecko, the rendering engine.

For the complete details on what’s new in Firefox 3.5, check my previous review of Firefox 3.1 Beta 2.

There will be a fourth beta sporting the new version number, 3.5, and will most likely include a few additions labeled as sprints for Firefox 3.5 like a summary of your browsing habits called about:me, tab matches in the awesome bar, better error pages for common network errors, smarter behavior when bookmarking a site so that it defaults to the last edited field, the ability to clear history by time ranges (in beta 3 it’s only possible for periods ending in the present), and a few others.

You can get Firefox 3.5 Beta 3, available for Linux, Windows and Mac, in 64 languages, from Firefox beta download page.

Your Firefox defaults

For various reasons, I’ve been installing Firefox on several clean machines recently and I noticed there are a few settings I change as soon as the setup ends:

1. Set the tab bar to be always visible (Options/Tabs)
2. Prevent web pages from resizing and rising windows, and hijacking the context menu (Options/Content/JavaScript)
3. Enable smooth scrolling (Options/advanced)
4. Merge the stop and reload buttons (with this hack)
5. Hide the Home button (View/Toolbars/Customize…)
6. Hide the bookmarks toolbar (View/Toolbars)
7. Set it to start with previous session’s windows and tabs (Options/Main)
8. Set Gmail as my email (mailto:) handler (Options/Applications)

I am curious about what other people have for their defaults, so, excluding extensions and themes, what are your must have customizations?

Chrome+Opera new tab power for Firefox

In Firefox, from the File menu, select New Tab. Or press Ctrl + T. Or double click on the tab bar. The result is the same: a blank page that does help you get where you really want.

The Firefox development team is well aware of this and is currently experimenting with several ways to predict what you may want to do when you open a blank tab: a search, check a recently visited tab, a new web feed item, or just one of your favorite sites.

The dark side of Firefox, unabridged

My past list of six dark themes for Firefox was not meant to be comprehensive, but just share a few ones I stumbled upon on Mozilla Add-ons. Many users made some interesting suggestions for additional dark themes so I decided to take a more complete picture and found there were a lot worth a screenshot.

For dark computer desktop fans, here are ten more Firefox themes that should suit your taste. Pictured on Windows XP with the Royale Noir theme variation.

Minefield is Firefox

There’s been a flood of posts on the web about the discovery of Minefield, an enhanced new web browser by Mozilla, that just leaves Chrome and the others biting the dust due to its serious performance superiority.

As most Mozilla Links readers may know, Minefield is the main code repository for Firefox (the trunk) where patches and new features that are meant to be included in the next Firefox release first land.

When a milestone is approaching (alpha, beta or final), the trunk is frozen so nothing but stuff related to the goals set for the next milestone will go in. The frozen code is used to make a build, the build is QA’d, mirrored and released as an alpha or beta (code name Shiretoko for Firefox 3.1, Gran Paradiso for Firefox 3, all names of national parks).

9 out of 10 Firefox users would recommend it

On the latest blog post by Mozilla’s Laura Mesa, she shares the results of a survey conducted on past September 23 to randomly selected Firefox users updating to 3.0.2 and 3.0.3.

When asked how likely they were to recommend Firefox to a friend in a scale of 1 to 5, 89% of the 30,272 respondents answered 4 or 5 (most likely), “which can also be understood as an 89% customer satisfaction rating”, said Laura in her post.

Pre-school kids switching to Firefox

… because Dora, the explorer, says so.

Dora, the “explorer”. Swiper, the “fox”. It was inevitable. By J8d on deviantART.