Tag: Firefox
According to Google, Internet Explorer 8 comes in last place out of the world’s most popular five browsers in the race for JavaScript conformance. Christian Plesner Hansen, Google software engineer, is basing this conclusion on the results that IE8, Firefox 3.6, Opera 10.50, Chrome 4 and Safari 4 got in the company’s Sputnik JavaScript conformance test suite, a collection of over 5,000 tests designed to assess the level of conformance with the 3rd edition of the ECMA-262 specification.
On the left “is an experimental plot that compares five popular browsers and which we hope to update as new stable versions of the browsers are released. We created this chart by running Sputnik in each of the five browsers and then plotting each browser such that the fewer tests a browser fails the closer it is to the center and the more failing tests two browsers have in common the closer they are placed to each other.
In this example, when running Sputnik on a Windows machine, we saw the following results: Opera 10.50: 78 failures, Safari 4: 159 failures, Chrome 4: 218 failures, Firefox 3.6: 259 failures and Internet Explorer 8: 463 failures,” Hansen stated. Read More»
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While there is more than enough room to grow by simply eroding Internet Explorer’s share on the browser market, the growth of a specific player impacts the others as well. Case in point: Google Chrome’s increase in usage share in January and February 2010. Chrome is managing to hurt not only Microsoft’s IE but also Mozilla’s Firefox. According to statistics from Net Applications, Google Chrome was the only major browser to gain market share in January 2010.
“The Google Chrome browser gained .4% of global usage share in January. All other major browsers showed a month-to-month decline,” the Internet metrics company stated. This is, of course, nothing new for Internet Explorer, as Microsoft has been continuously seeing its browser market share erode. However, it is news for Mozilla, which has become used to a steady pace of growth, especially in the detriment of IE.
What’s even more interesting is that the first two months of 2010 could very well end up being the beginning of a new trend. At the start of the past month, Net Applications revealed that “the Google Chrome browser gained .6% of global usage share in January. Both Firefox and Internet Explorer dropped share during the last month.” Read More»
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February 25, 2010 by
Jason A second Alpha version of Firefox is planned for availability by the end of this week, the evolution from Firefox 3.7 Alpha 1 which was released almost two weeks ago to developers. Specifically, in the first half of February 2010, Mozilla offered the Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 1. In this regard, Firefox 3.7 Alpha 2 is bound to be nothing more than Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 2.
With the Alpha releases, Mozilla is exploring development directions for the next iteration of its open source browser. The Alpha 2 development milestone will bring to the table one of the key features announced for Firefox 4.0, namely Out Of Process Plugins (OOPPs).
“We are planning to do another alpha release of 1.9.3 this week with out-of-process plugins on by default. The following bugs should be resolved on February 23rd or 24th: bug 532208 – make browser->plugin streams unidirectional; bug 545734 – hide the iframe used to submit plugin crash reports; bug 547894 – topcrash with DivX passing null to a string function; and bug 544074 – topcrash at PluginModuleChild::UnregisterActorForNPObject,” stated Mozilla’s Benjamin Smedberg. Read More»
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February 23, 2010 by
Jason Here are five quick tips to enhance your Firefox 3.6 experience.
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.
Read More»
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February 23, 2010 by
Jason
Firefox 3.6 has yet another secret feature that could significantly improve your web browsing on Windows: scroll acceleration.
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. Read More»
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February 13, 2010 by
Jason With the advent of Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft introduced a feature designed to allow end users to easily hide their browsing history from people sharing the same computer.
However, even though IE8 came with the promise of complete browsing privacy, components intimately connected with the browser, such as Adobe Flash Player were still collecting and storing data, irrespective of the fact that users had opted for the contrary. That is no longer the case with the latest update for Flash.
By activating InPrivate Browsing, IE8 users could navigate to any website they wanted without the browser keeping any sort of data as to the locations they visited. The default behavior for all browsers is to store a plethora of information including cookies, favorites, temporary Internet files, history, form saved data, passwords etc.
All of the saved information makes it possible to re-trace the browsing history of users. IE8’s InPrivate Browsing mode made sure that no data would be collected from browsing sessions. As of version 10.1, Adobe Flash also supports the InPrivate feature of IE8. Read More»
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January 31, 2010 by
Jason Mobile phone users that own a Maemo-based handset from Nokia have now yet another reason to rejoice, as the final version of Firefox for their handsets has just emerged on the web. Following a long line of beta and release candidate flavors, now Firefox for Maemo 1.0 is here for them, providing an experience similar in many respects to the one that the desktop iteration of Firefox can deliver.
One of the main feature of the web browser is that it comes around with support for add-ons, something that no other solution offers to users. The add-ons enable any Maemo-based device owner to customize the browser via the over 40 add-ons that are already available for download on Mozilla’s website. Among them, we can count popular solutions like AdBlock Plus, URL Fixer, TwitterBar, language translators, or geo guides. The Add-ons Manager allows for an easy installation of such solutions, and Mozilla recommends for the YouTube Enabler add-on be installed.
The features that Firefox for mobile comes with to Maemo-based phones should be already familiar in a way to those who use the browser on their desktop computers:
Read More»
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December 28, 2009 by
Jason It might look and feel like Windows XP, it might sport a similar graphical user interface and even be able to run XP software, but fact is that an operating system developed by Rain Forest Wind Guangdong Computer Technology Co., Ltd. is anything else but Windows Vista’s predecessor. Ylmf OS is designed as a Windows XP clone based on version 9.10 of the Ubuntu distribution of the Linux open source operating system.
The makers of Ylmf OS revealed that the Windows XP’s GUI was adopted in an effort to allow users of Microsoft’s proprietary platform to immediately start running Ubuntu Linux without needing to adapt to a new operating system.
An obvious downside to Ylmf OS is the fact that the release is Chinese only, at least at this point in time. Available for download localized exclusively in Chinese, Ylmf OS is bound to serve only users living in China and speaking the local language. No indications were offered by the team behind the project of future releases or support for additional languages. According to third-party reports, the people building Ylmf OS are in fact a group of Chinese pirates that were previously distributing a pirated copy of Windows XP, and which were tackled by the local authorities and Microsoft. Read More»
Posted in Linux, Windows XP | No Comments »
December 27, 2009 by
Jason Mid-2009 brought with it the first indications that Mozilla was planning a major overhaul of the graphical user interface for the next major iteration of Firefox, namely version 4.0, not 3.6 which is considered only a minor upgrade to v3.5, and not v3.7. It now appears that the efforts done for the Firefox 4.0 GUI redesign are starting to take contour and that the company has chosen a direction in which to take the end user experience in 2010. Included with this article are a range of sketches and mock-ups of the way designers envision the Firefox 4.0 revamping at this point in time. It is important to note that the screenshots provided here are nothing more but concepts, and certainly not the final implementation of the GUI for version 4.0 of Firefox, and that they apply only to the Windows flavor of the open source browser (especially to Windows 7).
To cut a long story short, Firefox 4.0 will feature style elements common to Microsoft’s Ribbon/Fluent GUI, but also design similarities from Google Chrome and Opera 10.5. As far as Firefox 4.0 is concerned, Mozilla is planning the “Introduction of “App” tabs. [But also to] combine location bar and search bar (separate location and search items can be customized). Tabs-on-top option (possibly left/right as well). In bar search “button” with drop down of other types of search. Ability to attach stop/reload/go to location bar (TBD). Expanded home tab functionality. Read More»
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