If you have ever needed just a single tiny file trapped inside a very large archive somewhere in the web, you know how frustrating it is to wait so long for so little.

ArchView is an almost miraculous Firefox extension developed by Solar Flare, that lets you access the contents of a RAR, ZIP and ISO archives (7zip should come later) and extract and view individual files without downloading the archive. For example, I was able to view and extract the checksum file and a few images from an Ubuntu 8.04 image without downloading the full 700+ MB file, a real time saver.

Once installed, ArchView displays clicked RAR, ZIP and ISO files (served through http, ftp or file protocols) contents in a familiar file browsing interface. You can then either open or save a file right-clicking on it and selecting Open or Save.

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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 »

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.

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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.

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Duong Thanh An, has just released Pencil, a simple and efficient open source tool to create user interface prototypes with native Windows and Linux GTK widgets.

Using Pencil is pretty straight forward. You start with a new document and just start adding widgetsfrom the toolbar to the canvas. It includes a variety of basic elements like windows, menus, tables, progress bars, checkboxes, buttons, radio buttons, etc. as well as basic annotation tools like text, images, and arrows, to add comments.

You can also add images but be aware that by default Pencil will just link to the file instead of embedding the image data in the document, so if you delete the source it will be gone from the prototype as well. You can embed the actual image by pasting it but Duong warns thatit may affect performance.

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Firefox PDF plugin for Mac OS X is a new extension developed by colesbury that will let you view PDFs directly inside Firefox without the need of launching Preview or any other PDF viewer.

The extension is based on Apple’s PDFKit program interface and includes options to zoom in, out, autoadjust and view several pages at a time, but no thumbnails so far. A very handy tool to add to your extension belt.

Firefox PDF Plugin is not yet available on Mozilla Add-ons but you can install it from its Google Code web site.

Via Fredericiana.

18 months after Firefox 2 launch, 3 years of development for much of the underlying Gecko code. Eight alphas, 5 betas, and 3 release candidates later, Firefox 3 is here.

Firefox 3 is not a timid release. It has been designed since the beginning with the specific goal of simplifying the web experience, creating a “personal web” and in the longer term, delivering the “browser as information broker” vision where it identifies pieces of information in web pages and passes these pieces among the user selected web services, making them work together for a richer overall experience.

Firefox 3 in not a quiet release either: Mozilla wants to set a Guinness World Record for the most downloaded software in a 24 hours time window and is airing live what’s going on in its Toronto offices, at Mozilla HQ in California and South Korea, while the counter approaches 2 million downloads in the first 5 hours since its release.

Meet Firefox 3

Changes start to get noticed in the installer which has grown by about 1 MB compared to Firefox 2 even while the DOM Inspector, a web developer tool, was removed and made available as an extension only now. The help documentation has also been removed and points instead to online Mozilla Support.

Another change is that Firefox installs itself as the default browser by default. Some users may cry fault for this as neither Opera nor Safari do the same during installation. But I am not sure if Mozilla’s way is more invasive as both Safari and Opera, and previously Firefox, do prompt to become the default browser with an already checked box during the first launch.

If you are a Firefox 2 user already, perhaps nothing will please you more than hearing about the great job Mozilla developers have done in optimizing Firefox’s resources utilization, to become the web browsers that uses the least memory of all current versions. That is thanks to a new memory cycle collector that releases memory back to the operating system that is no longer in use by an impolite module or extension. Other improvements include smarter large image storage in memory, and better tab memory caching.

Firefox 3 on Windows, also includes profile guided optimizations (PGO) a technique that compiles the code twice, the second one adding a series of tweaks based on the first pass analysis.

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Firefox 3 and it has so much to learn about you may want to read the full review. But if you just need to know the most notable features, all you need is 5 minutes. Go!

0. The road Codenamed Gran Paradiso. 8 alphas, 5 betas, 3 release candidates, thousands of fixed bugs, a cool robot story, a redesigned site, and 20 months since Firefox 2 later, Firefox 3 has arrived. Read the rest of this entry »

More than a year and a half in the making, at Release Candidate 2 stage, Firefox 3 is almost here and ready for the about 150 million current Firefox users and the millions to come, to lay their hands on its code and benefit of the dozens of new features and improvements aimed for a better web experience.

In fact, according to the latest NetApplications browsers utilization report, about 0.62% of web users are already using Firefox 3. Not surprisingly, here at Mozilla Links numbers are radically different with about 53% already surfing the web with some Firefox 3 release. Read the rest of this entry »

PayPal has released a new Firefox plugin that integrates with its new Secure Card feature which generates a custom credit card number linked to your PayPal account that you can use to make a single or multiple payments with any seller that accepts Master Card, PayPal’s partner in this venture.

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