Tag: open source
The Firefox Superbar is about to be kicked to the next level with the integration of Ubiquity. Right now all that is available from Mozilla is the Taskfox Prototype, an illustration of what Ubiquity blended into Firefox’s fabric would look like to the end user. Of course, you can watch the video embedded at the bottom of this article in order to get a perspective over Taskfox for Mozilla’s open-source browser. Taskfox is essentially a feature Mozilla plans for Firefox, and which was inspired by the ubiquity experiment.
“The main thing we haven’t prototyped is the interaction of the awesome bar results and the Taskfox commands. We know that this is a major remaining question so we’ll be prototyping that soon. We’ve more or less ignored that interaction for this prototype,” revealed Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla Labs. “Being able to navigate results with the keyboard is lacking in Ubiquity proper. We’ve tried to solve that in TaskFox.”
But fact is that the video doesn’t actually do Taskfox justice. In this context, Mozilla has made available a demo of the feature, put together with HTML, Javascript, and jQuery. The Firefox Taskfox demo can be accessed via this link, and obviously users will need Firefox in order for it to work. Typing slowly is advised in order to get the best experience possible. Raskin applauded the success of Ubiquity (over one million downloads), an experiment from Mozilla Labs which inspired Taskfox (see the second video embedded below). Read More»
Posted in Firefox | No Comments »
At the end of the past week, Microsoft made available to the public the results of a “browser measuring contest” involving Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.05 and Google Chrome 1.0. What the Redmond company did was to measure the browser load times for the top 25 websites worldwide. In the software company’s own comparison, IE8 managed to come out on top of its rivals, besting the open source Firefox and Chrome which were released in 2008, and not the current 3.1/3.5 version of Firefox or the 2.0 flavor of Chrome. But the real question is does it matter?
Obviously, Microsoft is rather a new comer to the browser measuring game. Simply because Internet Explorer, while considered by rival browser makers a reference point, never actually needed to compare itself to competitive products, especially from the perspective of the dominant browser on the market. IE continues to account for the lion’s share when it comes down to browser usage share worldwide, but Firefox has made a dent in its dominance that is harder and harder to ignore. And fact is that for the first time in the long life of Internet Explorer, Microsoft has a release that it’s worth comparing, as it is bound to score at least on par with rivals, if not even best them in certain scenarios. Read More»
Posted in Internet | 3 Comments »
January 13, 2009 by
Jason
Mozilla introduced Firefox Snowl in the first half of August 2008, and the open source project evolved into its next stage as of January 12, 2009. Mozilla Labs unveiled Firefox Snowl 0.2, moving onward with the development of the solution, from the initial release, which was, by all means, an extremely primitive prototype. With version 0.2 of its experiment with messaging in the browser, Mozilla Labs has in fact taken the conversing capabilities of the project a step further.
“We’re pleased to announce Snowl 0.2. This version of the messaging-in-the-browser experiment builds on the first release with an updated river view, a new stream view for keeping track of messages in a sidebar while you do other things, the ability to send tweets, and support for multiple Twitter accounts,” Mozilla’s Myk Melez revealed.
Users should make no mistake about it, as even at version 0.2 Snowl is still in very early development stages, making them more testers than actual users. However, the program does increase the level of Twitter integration. The solution now supports sending messages through Twitter, but also the ability for users to both receive and send Tweets from multiple accounts that they first need to subscribe to. Read More»
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October 03, 2008 by
Jason
In just the first months of availability, Google Chrome Beta has made consistent inroads into the territory of Internet Explorer and Firefox. Both Microsoft’s IE and Mozilla’s Firefox started to see their audiences slip a little and ended up losing market share to the new browser from Google. In fact, so did Opera and Netscape with Safari left as the sole browser to gain market share. However, considering that Chrome is based on WebKit open source web browser engine also used by Safari, it is possible that some of Google Browser’s traffic to be in fact interpreted as Mac OS X’s native browser.
Market monitoring firm Net Applications revealed that Google Chrome’s usage share dropped after the initial surge. “Google Chrome usage share has been dropping since its launch, but has stabilized at about .7%,” the outfit stated. This in the context in which Chrome exploded to over 1% of the browser market, more than Opera. Still, at the end of September 2008, Chrome accounted for no less than 0.78% of the browser market, a performance by any standards considering that just a month before, it had 0%. Read More»
Posted in Internet | No Comments »
A couple of days ago, I met an old friend of mine who just got his hands on a brand new Mac and, after about half an hour of showing the ins and outs of the machine, he asked me why the Mac community has so few free applications. If he had known that I would start writing down every piece of free and/or open source software capable of running on a Mac and keep talking about them for a whole hour, I think he wouldn’t have asked me that question in a million years.
To be fair, I kind of slowed down about 30 minutes after I started writing the list but still got pretty far to cover two pages. Those were the apps that I could remember at the moment, while still trying to write down other apps in no particular order.
The exact same question seems to haunt a lot of Mac switchers out there and thus, I decided to put up a list of the most important free applications I would install on my own Mac after performing a clean install.
Because I do want to give the list some type of order, I have put the apps in six categories, again, in no particular order: Internet, network, audio/video, graphics, games, editors and miscellaneous. The content in the first five categories is pretty obvious. In the sixth, I have included the programs that wouldn’t fit in any of the first categories. Read More»
Posted in Mac | No Comments »
A download manager is a computer program designed to download files from the Internet,unlike a web browser, which is mainly intended to browse web pages on the World Wide Web (with file downloading being of secondary importance).
Download Manager Features
* Pausing the downloading of large files.
* Resuming broken or paused downloads (especially for very large files).
* Downloading files on poor connections.
* Downloading several files from a site automatically according to simple rules (file types,updated files, etc. – see also Offline Browser).
* Automatic recursive downloads (mirroring).
* Scheduled downloads (including, automatic hang-up and shutdown).
* Searching for mirror sites, and the handling of different connections to download the same
* file more quickly (Segmented downloading). Read More»
Posted in Linux | No Comments »
February 13, 2008 by
Jason
I am utterly convinced there is something wrong with the space-time continuum and that an hour actually only lasts around 40 minutes. At the end of the day I’m left with the nagging question, where did it all go? Well, now you can find out, with a free Open Source utility called Personal Task Manager . It is a time-tracking tool and it looks just like the Windows Task Manager. It lists what you and your PC have been up to throughout the day, creating log and summary files, so you can look back over the past week and see how much time you’ve spent really working, taking lunch, or drinking cups of coffee. Come to think of it, it’s also just the job for suspicious bosses – I would check that it hasn’t already been installed on your office PC…
Posted in Computer | No Comments »
January 02, 2008 by
Jason
Many applications come and go everyday from our computers and, in the end, only the best remains. Therefore, we thought it was a good idea to pick ten of the best open source applications of the year that passed. The following classification is not a “who’s the best or worst app” kind of list, it was made based on the most used and useful applications that helped us (the users) during the entire year. Without any further introduction, here are the finalists: Read More»
Posted in Firefox, Linux, Software | 3 Comments »