Archive for the ‘Browser Wars’ Category.
On 17th June 2008 @ 12:23 pm by Arul N S
The entire community living in the eastern hemisphere of the globe have to wait a little longer to taste the final release of Firefox 3. According to the Mozilla blog, the record attempt will start at 10:00AM PDT [05:00PM UTC] [10:30PM IST] [09:00PM GST] on June 17th 2008 CE. But do remember you have entire tomorrow also to download.
On 17th June 2008 @ 07:30 am by Arul N S
I am yet to download the official release of Gran Paradiso, the Mozilla Foundation’s developers are already discussing about the next update to Firefox. Going with the tradition of naming Firefox projects with place names, the Firefox 3.1 project is named as Shiretoko after the Japenese National Park in the north eastern tip of the island of Hokkaido, Japan. The word in native tongue means “end of earth”.
Shiretoko is a minor update to the Gran Paradiso which would be running the Gecko 1.9.1 Engine and most of the features that didn’t make in time to the 3 release.
- One of the major feature would be visual Tab switching. For now Ctrl+Tab extension serves the purpose in Gran Paradiso. This feature would be integrated into the browser along with Tab searching and filtering.
- There are lot of features for Tagging which include bulk tagging, tag autocomplete, lightweight tagging UI, Advanced Search UI.
- In the add-ons divison there would be enhanced compatibility checking during upgrades which means we might have to really wait till the developer makes the extension compatible than we doing it ourselves
The entire feature list of this release can be obtained from the Mozilla’s planning center for Firefox 3.1. The nightly builds of alpha release 1 can be obtained from Mozilla’s FTP servers here. It will be installed under the name of Minefield, the codename for Mozilla’s testing builds.
Source : [Mozilla Wiki]
On 17th June 2008 @ 12:57 am by Arul N S
Opera Software ASA released their latest version of Opera Desktop Browser 9.5, thereby becoming the first major release in 2008 for the browsers. Although the market share of Opera remains very small compared to Micro$oft’s Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, it is a favorite among many netizens. It was also a one time favorite of mine before Firefox wooed me with its extensions and themes. It’s quite a lite browser and indeed one of the fastest down in the market.Finally I downloaded it and tested it today.
The loading time is awesome, nothing compared to Firefox or Safari. But again there is no plug-ins or widgets added in Opera, whereas my Firefox is loaded with extensions.
The 9.5 version has a great address bar but somehow my honeymoon with Firefox’s address bar is yet to get over and Opera didn’t get anywhere near to take me away from it.
One of the features which really turns your head is the Bookmarks Sync. You can achieve this in Firefox with extensions but Opera has a built-in feature. This feature is a useful one for somebody who has Opera in their Mobile also. It saves you a lot of trouble.
Regarding the Malware protection in Opera 9.5, didn’t get much chance to test it. But the online reviews already place Firefox to be better in this department. Opera has to do a lot in this if it needs to be taken seriously.
Lifehacker’s Browser Tests proves the Opera’s Unbeatable launch time and also Firefox’s low memory consumption. Also complete list of changes in this version can be seen here in Opera’s Website.
Even though this browser is lite, standard compliant, fast it is yet to drag me away from Firefox because of the lack of extensions and it is not Open Source.
Source : [LifeHacker, Opera]
On 16th June 2008 @ 01:21 pm by Arul N S
With the everybody getting ready for Firefox 3 release tomorrow, Google silently seems to have updated their Toolbar extension to accommodate the latest version. Even though according to the version info in the official site is still carrying the old version number of 3.0.20070525, the version that is being offered for download is 3.1.20080605W
There has been no significant changes in the layout or any new features in this release but still for those who jumped the wagon with Firefox release candidates and had been handicapped without this, it would be a relief.
On 16th June 2008 @ 09:16 am by Arul N S
Finally the word is out… The Download day or the day IE get its a$$ kicked is 17th June 2008. It is celebration time at Mozilla Community as the market share is steadily growing for Firefox and every other news service is covering this huge event. My Google News alerts for Firefox is flooding with the release news. Also another reason for the Mozilla Foundation to open the cork would be the 10th anniversary of its launch. On March 31st 1998, the first Mozilla Code became publicly available under the Open Source License and Mozilla Foundation took shape.
So for the people who are joining this party late… Please download your copy of Firefox on June 17th from here
On 10th June 2008 @ 12:07 am by Arul N S
With the entire netizen community going ga-ga over announcements of Firefox 3 release and checking out the release candidates, everybody seemed to have missed out the news from Micro$oft last week about their next disaster in the line. It seems Ballmer and his gang will burden us with next beta release of Internet Explorer 8 this August. For now IE 8 looks very much similar to IE 7 and the major changes or additions would be that Micro$oft would be trying to adhere to standards more than what it has been doing all this time. This would also make IE 8 incompatible with the pages which were specifically coded for non-standard versions of previous IE. IE 8 also would introduce us to Web Slices which is somewhat similar to Active Desktop. We can also expect Micro$oft to plug many vulnerabilities and introduce many in this upcoming release.
I am certainly not very anxious for this release. For now Firefox seems to take care of my browsing requirements.
On 9th June 2008 @ 11:19 pm by Arul N S
One of the features that got attention was the bookmarks management in Firefox 3. Lately I have had the need to bookmark many of the links in my bookmarks toolbar. With the favicon displayed next to the side, it was pleasing and eye-catching. But the space was restricted and the links started to overflow the given width. So little googling to increase the height of my bookmarks toolbar brought me to MozillaZine (which I should have done before going to Google). This is how you go about it….
- Go to Firefox’s Profile directory ( Press [Win]+[R], and type “%APPDATA%” to go to your apps directory and you will find a directory called Mozilla and then navigate to your profile directory inside)
- In chrome folder, there might be a file called “userChrome.css“. If not you might have a example file and even if that is not there then create one using notepad.
- Inside type the following based on which version of Firefox you are running. Please change the height variable according to your needs. 54px worked out for me. Then save the file and restart Firefox to have as much bookmarks as you want in your toolbar.
For Firefox 2
/* Multi-row bookmarks toolbar */
#bookmarks-ptf {display:block !important;}
#bookmarks-ptf toolbarseparator {display:inline !important;}
and sometimes you might need to add this also
/* Sometimes you may need this */
#PersonalToolbar {max-height: none !important;}
For Firefox 3 (this worked out for me)
/* Multi-row bookmarks toolbar for Fx3b5pre*/
#bookmarksBarContent
{display:block !important;}
.places-toolbar-items
{display:block !important;
height: 54px !important;
overflow-y:auto !important;}
#bookmarksBarContent toolbarseparator
{display:inline !important;}
#bookmarksBarContent .bookmark-item
{visibility: visible !important;}
.chevron {height: 0px !important;}
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