Do you need the forward button? Most likely yes, but it is rarely used compared to the back button, which is the single most used widget in any browser user interface. So it doesn’t make sense to keep it present at all times, stealing focus from its helpful neighbor. To address this, current Firefox nightlies
Mozilla has confirmed a critical security vulnerability disclosed yesterday by Milworm, that may lead to remote code execution. As it is related to the new TraceMonkey JavaScript optimizer, users can mitigate it by temporarily disabling the optimizer. To do so: Enter about:config in the location bar to access advanced preferences. Look for javascript.options.jit.content and double
Mozilla plans for Firefox theme update is two-staged. As announced last week, the first stop will be Firefox 3.7, targeted for next year, but there is also some planning for the release after that one, tentatively called Firefox 4, with more incremental changes over 3.7. As we can see, it keeps the new Page and
Firefox 3 Beta 5, Gran Paradiso’s milestone #13 is here and the list of features and improvement it brings along is pretty long so let’s get started. Oh, for those following Firefox 3 development you may want to jump to the sections marked in green for what’s new in Beta 5. Performance Firefox 3 gets
Do you know Page Info? It’s a central point for information about the web page you are currently visiting. To reach it just select Page Info in the Tools menu or right click the current web page and select View Page Info. It includes the document type, character encoding, the referring URL, the render mode
Firefox 4 will feature a significantly updated theme on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. In the last few days significant pieces of the new user interface have started dropping in: The Firefox button (called Minefield in the development builds) gathers the most frequently used menu options in a single point. The button is now
It turned out that a few weeks were really more like a few minutes. Mozilla Messaging has released the first alpha of Shredder (icon wanted), the code name of Thunderbird 3. As planned, this new release has the main goal of letting Thunderbird users that its email client is alive and healthy and this alpha
Latest Firefox 3 development release (August 8 nightly) got a couple of small but significant improvements among the usual couple of dozens bug fixes. First, the addition of a resizer to the Customize Toolbar dialog you can add to the toolbar to easily resize the search bar and the location bar, a much requested feature.
From gaming and TV, 3D is now making the jump to web development and design, thanks to Tilt 3D, a new Firefox extension by Mozilla’s Rob Campbell and Victor Porof. Tilt 3D adds a new menu item to the Web Developer menu (accessible from the Firefox button) that renders a 3D version of the current
Mozilla has published the Firefox roadmap for 2012, stating what major new features and changes are to be expected this year. It turns out the list is pretty long which hints on a very important year for Firefox development and users. The user interface is due to some pretty enhancements under the new Australis theme
If you tend to have a large number of tabs open at a time, get ready to experiment considerably faster session restores thanks to cascaded session restore (CSR), an optimized approach that loads a limited number of tabs at a time (3 by default) when Firefox restarts. In recent Firefox 4 nightlies, it prioritizes the
Have you noticed the new Google search favicon? I am not sure if Google intends to keep it forever but I like the refresh. You can update the Firefox’s default Google search plugin to show the new Google search icon: Locate the searchplugins folder in your Firefox install folder. (typically C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\ on Windows).
The latest nightly releases of Firefox.next come with customizable tab bars, which means you can drag buttons off (like the new tab and list all tabs buttons) and into the tab bar to make it suit your needs. This can be used to reduce all Firefox toolbars to a single one as shown in the
During the latest US Department of State Town Hall Meeting, secretary Hilary Clinton was asked to let the staff use Firefox. You can see it in the video below at 26:30. Hillary Clinton is asked for Firefox in the US Department of State July 14, 2009 9:40 am During the latest US Department of
The latest Firefox 3.1 (code name Shiretoko) nightlies include support for the W3C draft specification of Geolocation API, opening the way for yet richer web applications that can offer content customized to a user’s current location. The API implementation enables the browser to act as a position broker communicating with the computer’s positioning API (probably
Adobe has opened the source code for its mobile devices oriented JavaScript virtual machine, QVM and added it to Mozilla’s open source JavaScript VM project,Tamarin. “QVM makes [ActionScript 3] bytecode execute on a majority of devices that consumers already own and is a key part of the future Flash Player and AIR strategies. The open
On a recent article I explained how to add online feed readers to Firefox 2 so you can subscribe to them with them. Forget about it. This article at franklinmint.fm explains a new Firefox 2 interface that allows the addition of content handlers (in this case, web feeds) with a single click. So here you
Today’s Shiretoko (Firefox 3.1 codename) nightly introduces support for simple web elements transformations as CSS extensions originally proposed and implemented by the WebKit project. 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
Mozilla has just landed a new JavaScript optimization feature to Firefox 3.1 development code base (Shiretoko) that effectively enhances JavaScript-based web applications performance by a 2X 20X fold compared to the already-severely-pumped-up Firefox 3, according to a variety of JavaScript performance tests ran and published by Mozilla’s Brendan Eich. TraceMonkey tracks the JavaScript code
Synovel, a startup based on Hyderabad, India founded by a group of International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) graduates, has released a preview of Spicebird, a Mozilla-based collaboration suite. Spicebird is built on Thunderbird and Lightning, the powerful extension that adds calendaring functions to Thunderbird. Additionally it seems to integrate SamePlace, a Firefox extension that