Press the plus button it adds to the toolbar to save a thumbnail of the current page and have it added to your Taboo collection. From there, it is easily accessible from a second toolbar button that displays your saved pages, and also filter entering a few characters.

For alternative views, press the Taboo button to view and filter all saved pages in a grid, or, cleverly, in a calendar view, so you can go back in time with a few clicks. You can also annotate saved taboos, discard them or recover them from a trash can provided.

Even more, you can import and export saved taboos as zipped files that contain the saved thumbnails and taboos’ addresses in SQLite format.

What’s not to like? The look. Its buttons, its texty dashboard, its fonts, they all scream “edit me, please”. Also, an option to taboo the current page besides the toolbar button and keyboard shortcuts would be appreciated. Yes, I think this is a case where adding a context menu item is worth it.

In all, this is a very well thought and executed extensions, that just needs a visit to the beauty parlor.

You can get Taboo from Mozilla Add-ons.

For October’s desktop wallpaper, Foxkeh is featured skydving in a colorful parachute.

Available in a variety of sizes, with or without October’s calendar. Enjoy!

The contest will roll out in two phases. For the first one, due on October 24, participants must provide a 2-page executive summary of their project that should stay within a $10,000 budget. Mozilla will choose which proposals advance to the next phase, and participants will have until December 5 to submit detailed descriptions that will be presented to the community for final voting.

The winner will be announced on December 19, and will have the opportunity to execute and lead his project and get a $3000 prize.

For complete details, check Impact Mozilla.

Install it, right click on any image, enter some text at the top, center or bottom, align it, and there you go. The image is updated with the text, ready for you to save it and share.

It’s a very first attempt by its developer, Cesar Oliveira, of Prism fame, so you can’t set the font type, size or color, which is pretty much all I’d like to see added, to keep it simple.

Kyoote is available at Mozilla Add-ons but you will need an account as it is still marked as experimental.

A 95-page tutorial e-book (in PDF format, $19), aimed to newbies and experienced developers alike, teaches “how to write industrial strength Add-on code while ensuring you remain a good citizen to the Firefox Add-on developer community”.

XUL School will also offer an e-course consisiting of eight exercises sold separately each including e-mail tutoring by a Glaxstar engineer. Students who successfully complete the eight courses, will attain XUL School certification. Pricing has not been set yet.

XUL School is coming next October, but interested community members can sign up for the first available course slots.

Glaxstar’s initiative is a great opportunity for developers eager to learn Mozilla technologies and prefer a fast track, all-in-one-place approach.

As usual, you should be prompted to updated in the next 48 hours, or you can select Check for Updates… in the Help menu for immediate service.

The latest Firefox 3.1 nightly (code named Shiretoko) features a new tab button in the tab bar, making the addition of a tab fully discoverable for the first time as it is now part of the primary UI.

A previous change, added a few days ago, made the tab bar always visible by default which allows the new tab button to be present at all times. In the past, the tab bar was hidden when there was only one page opened. A preference in Options/Tabs allowed to make it visible at all times.

The old New Tab button which was present in the Customize Toolbar dialog and could be added to the toolbars is gone at this time.

Yet another change in behavior now makes the current window go away when its last tab is closed. There is already a number of users complaining about this behavior and I also at first thought it would be annoying, but I still haven’t been in the situation of closing all tabs, yet wanting to keep Firefox open.

Anyway, and to help long time users anger, a new preference has already been added to restore the old behavior and always keep a blank tab on sight. Just access the advanced preferences (enter about:config in the location bar), and set browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab to false.

As you may know, previous Firefox 3.1 alphas introduced thumbnail tab previews when switching with the Ctrl + Tab keyboard shortcut; as well as real tab moving across windows with tab reparenting instead of just moving the web address and reloading it as in Firefox 3.0.

And there’s more to come.

The List all tabs button will most likely be replaced by an all tabs preview and, hopefully, a tab search option users who tend to have dozens of opened tabs at a time will appreciate.

The ability to tear a tab out (drag it out of a window to its own) is also in the works and under consideration for inclusion in this release. Cool tab animations when moving and tearing tabs may also come soon.

While most of these improvements are already available in Internet Explorer (tab preview, new tab button) and Chrome (tab animations, tab tear out and reparenting), I must note that they have all been in discussion for years within Mozilla and I’d guess other vendors as well. It will be great to have a good mix of other browsers’ proven good tabbed browsing features, plus some unique for Firefox like Ctrl+Tab previews and tab search.

EDIT: You can hide the new tab button adding this code to the userChrome.css file found in your profile folder:

.tabs-newtab-button {display: none;}

Mike Beltzner, Firefox lead, explains in a post to the mozilla.dev.planning group:

The symptom is that users who have password data stores with non-ASCII data saved as something other than UTF-8 (more common for people who have saved passwords on IDN domains or non en-US domains) will not be able to access their saved passwords or create any new saved passwords. There is no permanent dataloss, the saved data is just inaccessible. While this doesn’t affect all Firefox users, it is a significant regression and has triggered a fast-release Firefox 3.0.3 which will contain a single fix for this issue.

A fix is ready, and as soons as QA gives the go ahead, it will be available as Firefox 3.0.3 for users to update, most likely, some time next week.

In fact, according to the release notes, this should be the last Lightning version to support Thunderbird 2.0, as they intend to focus on integration with Thunderbird 3 on next iterations.

Among the hundreds of bug fixes, Sunbird and Lightning 0.9 fixes and improvements include:

Events spanning days now have a visual indicator indicating them as connected events

When reloading a remote calendar a progress indicator is now shown

The so-called “minimonth” (small calendar month in the upper left) has been given a visual overhaul

The calendar views (day, week, multiweek, month) have been given a visual overhaul

The today pane can now be displayed in calendar mode and task mode as well [Lightning-only]

CalDAV support and interoperability with various CalDAV servers has been improved

iMip/iTip support (support for email invitations) has been greatly improved [Lightning-only]

The application stability and memory consumption has been greatly improved

Lightning 0.9 is intended to be the last release for the Thunderbird 2 series. For the future we are planning to integrate Lightning fully into the upcoming Thunderbird 3 release [Lightning-only]

Icelandic, Romanian and Traditional Chinese were added as new languages. Unfortunately no builds in Macedonian or Turkish are available for 0.9

Lightning and Sunbird are for Windows (XP and later), Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris and can be downloaded from the Lightning and Sunbird project pages respectively.

Lightning 0.9 release notes - Sunbird 0.9 release notes

As usual, it comes with a number of stability fixes, and patches for five security vulnerabilites, two of them critical.

There are two new locales Sinhala and Slovene, raising to 48 the number of available Firefox locales, with eight more in beta status.

Also, this update bundles Gmail as a web mail provider, so you can use it to compose emails when clicking on mailto: links or for sharing web pages selecting File/Send Link… from the main menu. To use it, open the Options window (or Preferences on Linux and Mac), switch to the Applications page, look for mailto: in the Content Type column, and select Gmail.

To update, select Check for Updates… in the Help menu, or wait for the automatic prompt in the next 48 hours.

More details in Firefox 3.0.2 release notes.

In good Apple style, you will need to jailbreak your iThing and follow a few instructions to happily mess with it.

As an absolute iPod jailbreaking and pwning newbie, I found that the hard part was getting all the appropriate instructions together, but once on hand it was pretty straightforward. Here’s what I did to get the Foxkeh theme working on my first gen iPod Touch (2.1 firmware) on Windows. Estimated time: 10 minutes.

• Downloaded and installed QuickPwn to jailbreak iPodTouch. During the setup I chose to install Cydia and Installer (both optional application installers), but I’ve only used Cydia so far. This should take about 5 mins.
• On the iPod, open Cydia and install the OpenSSH and WinterBoard packages. In whatever order. 2 mins.
• To upload the theme I used WinSCP and connected to mi iPod’s IP address (Settings/Wi-Fi/<network name>), with user name root and password alpine (the default set by OpenSSH). Download and all, some 3 minutes.
• WinSCP offers a graphical interface where you see local and iPod’s files. Just dragged the foxkeh theme from my computer to the iPod’s /Library/Themes folder and renamed it to foxkeh.theme (I think this is not necessary but recommended by Winterboard developer). 1 minute
• With the theme uploaded, I opened WinterBoard on the iPod and checked the foxkeh theme listed now. A few seconds later, Foxkeh is all around!
• Enjoy!

It provides five preview styles: circle, row, grid, wall, and stack, which resembles Vista’s application switching style.

Since it is very resource demanding, FoxTab has options to set the size of the preview window from full screen to about one quarter. You can also set the number of thumbnails and change the hotkey for tab switching.

The thumbnails are not of very high quality and I really miss an option to search the tabs by title, or even better by contents.

FoxTab is still an experimental extension in Mozilla Add-ons, so you will need an account there to install it.

Here’s the EULA.

Ubuntu (and about every Linux distribution) ships with Firefox already installed so users are not prompted with the EULA at any time. Mozilla wants Ubuntu 8.10 (due next month) to include a patch to display the EULA on its first run to ensure users sign the EULA, which as said before doesn’t mean most of them will actually read it. Instead, most of them, will just click on whatever they need to.

Point one: why include an annoying EULA prompt?

There are two other points: does an open source product needs an EULA?, and, are the terms of the EULA appropriate?

So, does Firefox needs a EULA? I am not a lawyer or anything close but my understanding is that this is all about protection: your computer could crash, hardware could fail, which could lead to data loss, which if happens to include your precious wedding pictures, will also lead to psychological damage. You may lose time, and hence, money. You may feel too confident with the antiphishing and malware protection services and suddenly realize your identity was stolen after all. There may be a delay in serving a Firefox or extensions update to you and be infected by a known and already patched vulnerability, etc., etc.

In short, you may feel disappointed (specially f you loose money) and feel a sudden itch to sue Mozilla. Maybe not you, but there must be a troll or two among the millions of Firefox users. But he won’t be able to do so or at least not just everyone, depending on your local specific legislation, because the troll would have signed the EULA and accepted its terms.

So, is there a need for such protection? My gut feeling says yes. I don’t know how offering a product for free or letting everyone see how it is done would relieve Mozilla from being held responsible for any damage it may do. That other open source projects (or even if all of them) aren’t getting this kind of protection doesn’t make it the right thing.

Another factor is scale. Firefox is the most used open source product, so it has the largest area of exposure (to lawsuits that is).

So I believe the EULA is necessary.

What about the terms of the EULA terms? Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Foundation, has recognized that the current (as shipped in Firefox 3)  terms fail to clearly state that the software is open source in all its forms: code and binaries. An updated EULA has been posted to make this crystal clear.

I’ve read the EULA in discussion several times now and I just can’t find something that I as a user wouldn’t sign (fortunately because I’ve already had). Aside from releasing Mozilla of any liability for causing you any loss, you agree to their privacy policy, to comply with with import/export regulations (like, you are not supposed to send it to Syria or Cuba, ROFL), and to respect the Firefox logo and name trademarks.

The Firefox logo and name trademarks, were subject to another heated discussion with the Debian community a few years ago because it’s their policy not to ship anything with trademarks. It couldn’t be settled and Firefox code was rebranded as Iceweasel.

This is another necessary evil. If it wasn’t, I for example, could abuse of unknowingly Firefox users who visit Mozilla Links and point them to my special “Firefox Mozilla Links Edition” seeded with spyware, rootkits, and cool affiliate links to fill my bank account. Mozilla policy is you can do that as it is open source code, but you can’t call it Firefox or put the Firefox log on it. The trademark allows Mozilla to go after this kind of scammers, but also after people who could just want to add a couple of mega-helpful features. As said, a necessary evil.

So, back to the original issue, which after reading so many comment in Mitchell’s blog, Slashdot and several other blogs, seems to be the main one here: an annoying dialog with a legal document no one reads.

Mitchell says Mozilla will also look for alternative ways to ensure the user is aware of the terms in the least obtrusive way.

So what do you think. Does Mozilla needs an EULA? Are the terms correct? Is there a point in having an EULA if the user is not aware at least of its existence?

With an initial $5 million funding over the next 5 years provided by the Knight Foundation (a journalism and community empowerment non-profit), the W3F is headed by Steve Bratt and is currently in the planning phase with early 2009 as the targeted launch time frame.

Here are some highlights of Berners-Lee speech:

Understanding and accounting for the social side of the Web was, and remains, a vital part of encouraging its growth.

For example, it took 18 months for my colleague Robert Cailliau and me to persuade the CERN directors not to charge royalties for use of the Web. Had we failed, the Web would not be here today.

…

It became apparent that for all the interesting work being done around the Web, the analysis and engineering of the Web itself — humanity connected — was not recognised as an object of study. We did not have the right journals for research results, nor the right courses. A few of us at MIT and at Southampton University in the UK realised we had to define a new field, Web Science, and make it happen.

…

Future technology should be smarter and more powerful, of course. But you cannot ethically turn your attention to developing it without also listening to those people who don’t use the Web at all, or who could use it if only it were different in some way. (I have read that 80% of the world do not have access to the Web. ) The Web has been largely designed by the developed world for the developed world. But it must be much more inclusive in order to be of greater value to us all.

…

A few years ago I chatted with a woman involved in relief work in war-ravaged areas. I wondered aloud whether Internet access should be low on the priority list after clean water, and other critical resources. She responded by telling me the story of a young man who had taught himself English, and with a connection to the Internet, how he set up his own translation business. This business provided income for the village as well as opening up new communications opportunities. I learned that I should not prioritize for others. Instead, I should listen to their concerns and opportunities and then do what I can to help.

You can read the complete Berners-Lee speech at the Web Foundation’s site, or watch the video version uploaded to Vimeo.

There are strong commonalities between Mozilla and the Web Foundation missions, so we may see some collaboration between both foundations in the future.

The first is available now in six languages (with more to come soon) and includes twenty questions that should take no more than 5 minutes to answer. So if you have some time, give it a shot. Results will be released when available

Note that the survey detects your language and constrains the countries menu to those where the language is spoken which may prevent you from selecting the correct one. I suggest you scroll all the way down and select the main language for your country.

Take the survey now.

The extensions include move, rotate, skew, scale and matrix operations for almost every web page element except plugins and popup menus among others. In the example below, Google’s main page and Wikipedia English home page have been embedded in transformed internal frames: moved, rotated and skewed. I also added some experimental transparency in the mix for a better effect.

You can try this code in today’s Firefox nightly:

<iframe style="width:500px; height:500px; -moz-transform:translate(100px, 50px) rotate(30deg) skew(20deg);" src="http://google.com"></iframe>
<iframe style="width:500px; height:500px; -moz-transform:translate(50px, 80px) rotate(-50deg) skew(-20deg); -moz-opacity:.70;" src="http://wikipedia.org"></iframe>

As said, these are still experimental features that haven’t been standardized yet (hence the -moz prefix), but as Keith Schwarz -the Mozilla intern largely responsible for the implementation- notes, now that there are already two implementations (Firefox and Safari) it should speed things up.

“It will be interesting to see what uses developers find for CSS transforms. Much of the functionality once reserved for plugins can now be directly integrated into CSS and Javascript, which hopefully will help web developers create more graphically exciting pages.”, added Keith in his announcement post.

The main reason is to allow enough time to bake a high quality private mode as announced earlier this week but some other minor but sensible changes will take place as well.

We’re still hammering out the details, but we know that there is a core list of features that we’ll be looking to land between beta 1 and beta 2, likely:

• extending TraceMonkey’s capabilities into the DOM and other parts of our system
• completing private browsing
• a bunch of UI cleanups and improvements building on FF3’s success, and incorporating things we’ve learned from other browsers and add-ons
• some core improvements to systems like PFS [Plugin Finder System] and our security UI

Though there’s no official schedule, code freeze for Beta 1 is targeted for September’s end, so it should be around by mid-October. If Beta 2 gets to close to December, it will probably push release candidates and final release to early 2009.

When a capture device (like a scanner or camera) produces a digital image it may be able to include as part of the image metadata, a definition of how its color codes correspond to a standardized colors definition. This mapping is called a color profile and contains valuable information on how to exactly replicate the colors as “seen”by the capture device.

Output devices like computer screens and printers, may also provide their own color profile, telling the computer how the colors it shows correspond, again, to the standardized color definition.

When a color management enabled application opens an image, it tries to get the color profile of the output device and use it to display the best image possible. If the image includes a color profile, then it has the complete information and can do the best job.

With color management disabled and enabled (courtesy of Deb Richardson)

Due to performance issues and the possibility to break some websites’ designs if they were not tested in a color management enabled browser, it is turned off by default in Firefox 3. Instead, you have to manually turn it on by setting gfx.color_management.enabled to true via about:config.

As some of the performance issues have been resolved now, developers have opted to turn it on for tagged images (those that contain a color profile and makes the most sense). The advanced preference is now gfx.color_management.mode which supports three possible values: 0 disabled, 1 enabled for all, 2 (the new default) enabled for tagged images only.

Work continues to eliminate the remaining performance penalties and enable the feature for all images, but at least we should get partial support for Beta 1, due in a few weeks.

More details at Bobby Holley’s blog.

There’s still no available download to try but according to the demo and screenshots in Postbox’s web site, it indexes and classifies the complete contents of messages to provide topic based views to make it easier the process of finding attached links, images, documents, and addresses. It also provides integration with online communities and access to web services to aid email composition.

Scott McGregor, former Thunderbird lead engineer who resigned last year around the time it was announced a communications-focused Mozilla subsidiary would be spun off, is one of the founders of this  San Francisco-based startup.

As usual, you can use all these enhancements without touching anything, or go the customization way and tweak a preference or two.

You will need to access the advanced preferences entering about:config in the location and looking for the related setting. To change it, just double click it and enter the new value.

• By default, documents you download with Firefox are automatically added to the My Recent Documents folder on Windows’ Start menu. If it is cluttering your menu, you can deactivate it by setting browser.download.manager.addToRecentDocs to false.

• By default, downloaded files are passed by Firefox to your antivirus for scanning. Since some antivirus already monitor and scans downloaded files on their own, this may be redundant. To deactivate automatic scanning, set browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone to false. Note that the feature is available on Windows only.

• When you close Firefox, active downloads are paused and resumed automatically the next time you start. To change this behavior, modify browser.download.manager.quitBehavior and set it to 1 to pause downloads but don’t resume automatically; or set it to 2 if you prefer to cancel active downloads (you won’t be able to resume).

• Now that there’s a download status indicator in the status bar you may no longer need the download complete notification. To deactivate it, set browser.download.manager.showAlertOnComplete to false.

• If you don’t need to keep a full log of all the files you have downloaded, you can set Firefox to clear all download manager entries as soon as they are completed or as soon as you quit. To do so, set browser.download.manager.retention to 0 to discard them as completed, or 1 on quit. The default value is 2 which discards nothing.

• Create a bookmark to open the download manager in a new tab or the sidebar.

Happy tweaking!

In private mode, all user activity involving data such as searches, visited web pages, downloads, cached pages, credentials passed to restricted sites, etc. is discarded once the user returns to normal mode. Despite being infamously well known as “porn mode” there are many other valid use cases. As stated in Mozilla Wiki:

For instance, users may wish to begin a private browsing session to research a medical condition, or plan a surprise vacation or birthday party for a loved one. Use cases will range from users cheating on their spouse, to users buying engagement rings. Given the breadth of our user base, specific use cases are likely to be extremely varied.

With Chrome’s InCognito and Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2’s InPrivate, introduced in the last couple of weeks, lacking a private mode option by targeted year’s end release, would put Firefox in one obvious disadvantage.

Safari added a private mode with version 2, about three years ago.

“Recent development with Chrome will likely make finally getting private browsing mode shipped a priority for 3.1.”, commented Mozilla’s Alex Faaborg shortly after Chrome’s release in the tracking bug.

According to Firefox’s Private Mode specifications, the implementation will attempt to do as much in-memory data storage as possible to provide the most reliable purge. Authenticated sessions will be lost when entering or exiting private mode.

Additional interfaces will be provided for extension developers so they can tweak their extensions to honor the private mode.

There’s still no definition on what the UI will be, but at least one important requirement is that it shouldn’t be evident for people other than the user that he is in private mode. Chrome for example changes the color and even adds a cute but tell-tale spy image.

I would personally prefer a more discrete but evident (for the user) indicator similar to IE8’s (shown below).

There are already experimental builds that include the necessary back end, mainly developed by Ehsan Akhgari, so it shouldn’t be long before it lands in the nightly builds.

There’s also no word if it will have some fancy name like Chrome’s InCognito or IE’s InPrivate.

With Firefox implementation, private browsing will become a standard feature for browsers just as tabbed browsing, antiphishing and antimalware protection, web feeds handling, secure connections notifications, the search bar, and others we’ve seen in the last few years. Let’s hope Browser Wars II lasts much longer than the first one!

Created by Pavlos Touboulidis, it allows to easily change the background, text and highlights colors, or use a background image for the upper toolbars area and the status bar, set whether to repeat or not them, and its position. You can also save your customization as a preset or use any of the dozen included for quick access.

AnyColor is similar to Personas, a Mozilla Labs extension, in that you can use an image as a background, but the latter lacks the option to set basic colors. On the other hand Personas, allows users to use remote images and even a web page as the toolbars’ background which just expands the possibilities.

AnyColor is available for download at Mozilla Add-ons, but you will need an account there as it is still labeled experimental.

What HP and its partners have done is create a virtual layer that sits separate from the desktop’s operating system but that still communicates with the operating system. The browser itself works within a virtualized run-time environment, which allows all the cookies and downloads to be sequestered in what Godkin [HP product manager] calls the “sandbox.

About a year ago, ZoneLabs (now a CheckPoint property) released ForceField which used the same approach to a safer browsing but I found serious performance issues in the beta I tried then. It must have benefited of Firefox 3 performance improvements and its own development cycles since them though. ForceField is available for purchase for $29.

HP Firefox Virtual Browser (yeah, that’s the name) , will be available later this month with business oriented Compaq dc7900 laptop ($599 and up).

Hopefully it will be also released as an extension or plugin for interested users.

Via eWeek.

Tabs Open Relative, developed by John Mellor, does a single trick: it makes new tabs open to the immediate right of the current tab, making them much easier to reach and saving a few seconds and scrolls.

It may take a while before you get used to look for your new tabs just next to the current and I would prefer to have this behavior limited to links opened from a web page instead of all actions that open a new tab, but it is definitely worth a try.

Get Tabs Open Relative at Mozilla Add-ons.