Like Personas? Get Personas Plus for more

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:

Firefox 3.6 now available for download

Planned as a minor update to Firefox 3.5, released last June, Namoroka (Firefox 3.6’s code name) is not only the quickest Firefox release but the first featuring Mozilla’s new beta approach: a single big beta release that gets frequently revised, and updated, keeping all beta users in the most current test lane.

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.

Set your destination for new tabs in Firefox

If the white space you get when opening a new tab in Firefox is not your thing, NewTabURL, a Firefox extension developed by Sogame, should help.

Once installed you can set your home page, the current page, or a web address (URL) you enter as the content to show when adding a new tab.

Pretty simple, pretty useful. Try it at Mozilla Add-ons.

The obvious solution to tab clutter: filter them!

Here’s a great Firefox extension that helps find the tab you’re looking for among dozens. Tab Filter/Tab Search, developed by Tito, adds an option to Firefox tabs’ context menu so you can filter in the ones that match by title, address or both the terms you entered. As you start typing, tabs that don’t match the criteria are removed until you get the wanted ones.

To get all your tabs back, just press Esc or close the filter bar.

It works really great. My only complaint is that Tab Filter/Tab Search desperately needs a keyboard shortcut to activate the filter bar. (And a shorter name!)

URL Tooltip makes it easier to know where you’re going

In Firefox, you have to drive your eyes to the status bar while hovering a link to know where it will take you. Not anymore with URL Tooltip, a Firefox extension developed by Tim Tate, that shows the target URL as a tooltip, along with the title attribute (if present) defined by the content author.

Pretty simple and pretty useful as it helps to get rid of the status bar and gain a few extra screen lines.

Get URL Tooltip from Mozilla Add-ons.

Expand shortened web addresses in Firefox

Thanks to twitter and its 140 character limit, we now suddenly have to care about web addresses (URLs) length. Yeah, whatever. Except that you never really know where that shortened URL will take you and it could easily be just bait to increase someone’s page hits count.

Fear no more thanks to Long URL Mobile Expander, a Firefox extension created by Sean Murphy, that reveals the true destination of obfuscated URLs using the LongURL web service that covers more than 200 URL shortening services.

A peek at Firefox future progress bars

If you already know that Firefox 3.7 and beyond will feature page loading progress bars in the tabs themselves (making you a true Firefox fan), you may also want to know there is an extension that lets you try this feature about a year before it becomes generally available.

Tab Progress Bar, developed by Frank Yan, adds just this feature which I found so far to be more informational than the old common progress bar in the status area.

Get Tab Progress Bar from Mozilla Add-ons.

Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 review

Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 is now available for download!

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.

FireMath, a powerful MathML editor for Firefox

I learned today about a cool new Google Docs feature that lets you create good looking mathematical expressions via its new equation editor. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support MathML export at this time, which I thought would be great to help scientific authors produce better web documents.

(Not that) Surprisingly, there is a Firefox extension that will help anyone create a MathML expression of really complex mathematical equations. FireMath, created by MrBont gets the job done, and allows you to save the formula as a full XHTML file, a stand alone or inline equation, or an image file.

Auto Shutdown helps greener downloads with Firefox

If you tend to leave your computer running overnight to let some Firefox download complete, now you can do so without the guilt of all the wasted energy once downloads complete and you’re well into R.E.M.

Auto Shutdown is a Firefox extension developed by InBasic that monitors your active downloads and will shutdown your computer when they are done.