Web Browser News and Reviews

Firefox 2.0.0.10 Soon to Come

By Vygantas | November 20, 2007 | 0 Comments

While Firefox team is working on Firefox 3, we will receive one more update from Firefox 2 series. While you are waiting for it, feel free to download Firefox 2.0.0.10 RC (not final) release from here and try it.

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Firefox 3 Beta 1 Released

By Vygantas | November 20, 2007 | 2 Comments

It’s finally here, the long awaited Firefox 3 Beta release from Mozilla’s Firefox team. Firefox 3 Beta 1 introduces some new features such as malware protection, auto add-ons or plugins versions checks for easy update as well as lots of improvements like new download manager or plugins management. What you should also expect from this, Firefox 3 Beta 1 release is performance. As it says in release notes, more than 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged. One of the facts in their release notes page really makes a god impression. Here it is:

Firefox 3 Beta 1 is based on the new Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 27 months and includes nearly 2 million lines of code changes, fixing more than 11,000 issues.

That just sounds nice.

Enough of chit chat, let’s see the changelog in full.

More Security

One click site info: Click the site favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand. In later versions, Extended Validation SSL certificate information will be displayed.

Malware Protection: malware protection warns users when they arrive at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware. You can test it here (note: our blacklist of malware sites is not yet activated).

New Web Forgery Protection page: the content of pages suspected as web forgeries is no longer shown. You can test it here.

New SSL error pages: clearer and stricter error pages are used when Firefox encounters an invalid SSL certificate.

Add-ons and Plugin version check: Firefox now automatically checks add-on and plugin versions and will disable older, insecure versions.

Secure add-on updates: to improve add-on update security, add-ons that provide updates in an insecure manner will be disabled.

Anti-virus integration: Firefox will inform anti-virus software when downloading executables.

Vista Parental Controls: Firefox now respects the Vista system-wide parental control setting for disabling file downloads.

Easier to Use

Easier password management: an information bar replaces the old password dialog so you can now save passwords after a successful login.

Simplified add-on installation: the add-ons whitelist has been removed making it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer clicks.

New Download Manager: the revised download manager makes it much easier to locate downloaded files.

Resumable downloading: users can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting your network connection.

Full page zoom: from the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images.

Tab scrolling and quickmenu: tabs are easier to locate with the new tab scrolling and tab quickmenu.

Save what you were doing: Firefox will prompt users to save tabs on exit.

Optimized Open in Tabs behavior: opening a folder of bookmarks in tabs now appends the new tabs rather than overwriting.

Location and Search bar size can now be customized with a simple resizer item.

Text selection improvements: Multiple text selections can be made with Ctrl/Cmd; Double-click drag selects in “word-by-word” mode; Triple-clicking selects a paragraph.

Find toolbar: the Find toolbar now opens with the current selection.

Plugin management: users can disable individual plugins in the Add-on Manager.

Integration with Vista: Firefox’s menus now display using Vista’s native theme.

Integration with the Mac: Firefox now uses the OS X spellchecker and supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates.

More Personal

Star button: quickly add bookmarks from the location bar with a single click; a second click lets you file and tag them.

Tags: associate keywords with your bookmarks to sort them by topic.

Location bar & auto-complete: type the title or tag of a page in the location bar to quickly find the site you were looking for in your history; favicons, bookmark, and tag indicators help you see where results are coming from.

Smart Places Folder: quickly access your recently bookmarked and tagged pages, as well as you more frequently visited pages with the new smart places folder on your bookmark toolbar.

Bookmarks and History Organizer: advanced search of your history and bookmarks with multiple views and smart folders to store your frequent searches.

Web-based protocol handlers: web applications, such as your favorite webmail provider, can now be used instead of desktop applications for handling mailto: links from other sites. Similar support is available for other protocols (Web applications will have to first enable this by registering as handlers with Firefox).

Easy to use Download Actions: a new Applications preferences pane provides a better UI for configuring handlers for various file types and protocol schemes.

Improved Platform for Developers

New graphics and font handling: new graphics and text rendering architectures in Gecko 1.9 provides rendering improvements in CSS, SVG as well as improved display of fonts with ligatures and complex scripts.

Native Web page forms: HTML forms on Web pages now have a native look and feel on Mac OS X and Linux (Gnome) desktops.

Color management: (set gfx.color_management.enabled on in about:config and restart the browser to enable.) Firefox can now adjust images with embedded color profiles.

Offline support: enables web applications to provide offline functionality (website authors must add support for offline browsing to their site for this feature to be available to users).

A more complete overview of Firefox 3 for developers is available for website and add-on developers.

Improved Performance

Reliability: A user’s bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences are now stored in a transactionally secure database format which will prevent data loss even if their system crashes.

Speed: Major architectural changes (such as the move to Cairo and a rewrite to how reflowing a page layout works) put foundations in place for major performance tuning which have resulted in speed increases in Beta 1, and will show further gains in future Beta releases.

Memory usage: Over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation.

Download Firefox 3 Beta 1.

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Operation Firefox Doing Really Well

By Vygantas | November 15, 2007 | 0 Comments

Operation Firefox I enjoy reading about various contests from Mozilla. They do know how to promote their products, original idea and great prizes to attract as many people as possible.

One of those contests is “Operation Firefox“.

After 3200 submissions, 50 Firefox agents were chosen. What they have to do now is to place the giant Firefox stickers in any visible places (where it is allowed) around the world until December 3rd.

If you have noticed any huge Firefox logos already, take a picture of them (if possible) and send me over, would be more than happy to post them here.

Isn’t that a great idea?

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Mozilla Corp – Non Profit Organization?

By Vygantas | November 13, 2007 | 0 Comments

Some time ago I’ve posted about Mozilla’s Finances for the year 2007. It seems that “The New York Times” got something to say about Mozilla Corporation and Google as well.

Click here to read the article.

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Firefox 3 Pre-Milestone 9 (Beta?) 2007 11 11 Released

By Vygantas | November 11, 2007 | 0 Comments

Firefox 3 Beta will be released very soon and they are working on it, as for now, one more nightly build from Firefox team (2007 11 11) which is just one more step towards Firefox 3 Beta.

Fixed:

None

Partial Landings/WIPs/Incoming:

#400774 BACKOUT [Core: Event Handling]- Crash: typing accesskey for xul:label when control element isn’t a xul element [All]

#312010 [Firefox:Software Update]- possible to start firefox when the “Software Update” dialog is running [Win]

#392873 [Core:General]- crash in nsExpirationTracker nsSHEntry: :RemoveObject [Win]

#400057 [Core:MathML]- “ASSERTION: Frame is not in the block” with xul and mathml [Mac]

#401741 [mozilla.org:Build & Release]- Version/config bump up for Gecko 1.9b1 [All]

#401949 [Firefox:General]- Bug 395248 caused a Txul regression on Linux [Lin]

#402198 [Core:Layout: Form Controls]- Crash [@ nsHTML Select Element: :PreHandle Event] with shift-tabbing bunch of selects and stuff and setting display: none [All]

#403040 [Firefox:Places]-Places killed all my history >2 days ago [All]

Regressions/Annoying/Common bugs:

#337761 [Core:XPCOM]- Folder does not open anymore for dragged link [All]

#339804 [Firefox:General]- Multiple login requests for authentification proxies if sessionstore is enabled [Win]

#385245 [Firefox:Places]- history sidebar very slow (way slower than fx2) [All]

#386343 [Firefox:General]- Breakpad doesn’t work [Win]

#388209 [Firefox:Places]- bookmarks menu dnd indicator not visible if I want to drop an item before a separator [Win]

#400075 [Core:ImageLib]- long delays painting the app when it’s brought to the foreground. [Win]

#401075 [Firefox:Places]- livebookmark folder favicon is replaced by default folder favicon [Win]

Download now.

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Opera 9.5, New Weekly Build

By Vygantas | November 11, 2007 | 0 Comments

Opera 9.5 Beta Let’s continue with the news. Opera Desktop Team recently released one more Opera 9.5 build (not a final). As usually, they have tried to fix as many bugs as possible. And here we go… Changelog.

Several stability and crash fixes

Scrolling with mouse wheel now works over Flash objects with onRollOver handler

Fixed linebreaking and white-space handling in designMode

Fixed long content makeing scrollbars disappear and disabling scrolling

Missing table cells have no more a green background

Fixed 1 pixel high Gmail compose window

Fixed crash when opening the Info panel

Fixed sorting of IRC channels

Fixed message priority not being displayed in Mail

Fixed wrong context menu shown for selected text that is a link

We are now splitting too long IMAP commands into smaller chunks

Fixed wrong port when creating NNTP or IMAP account with Gmail e-mail address

Fixed fetching of new POP3 mail once you empty trash

Windows specific:

Opera runs on Windows 95 again

UNIX specific:

Fixed broken expansion of “~”

Fixed flickering of notifications

Fixed crash when connecting to chat

Known issues:

GMail top menu bar broken

Wrong cursor on form buttons and labels

Plugins on UNIX might be even more broken – big changes coming up… (Do not bother filing plugin bugs on UNIX)

No sparc builds

[BUG 296670] Animated gif images get corrupted on Windows

[BUG 267632] Images don’t display when printing

[BUG 213115] Queued mail is sent at the next check, instead of waiting for manual action

[BUG 295195] Web archives are broken if you ever have changed the default action of a file type in Preferences

Download Opera 9.5 for Windows (Build 9649)
Download Opera 9.5 for Windows (Classic Installer) (Build 9649)
Download Opera 9.5 for Macintosh (Build 4529)
Download Opera 9.5 for UNIX (Build 1662)

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Internet Explorer, No More “Click to Activate”

By Vygantas | November 8, 2007 | 1 Comment

Internet Explorer Remove Click to Activate Internet Explorer news… I am sure you do know that annoying “Click to Activate” “feature”. Good news, Microsoft had finally licensed the technologies from Eolas, and that means… Yes, no more “Click to Activate”. However, you will have to wait a bit. The first preview release which is called “Internet Explorer Automatic Component Activation Preview” will be released in December. You can expect it in the next Windows Service Packs (Vista SP1 and XP SP3) pre-releases as well. Finally, it will be integrated directly into IE in April 2008.

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Opera Mini 4 Final Released

By Vygantas | November 7, 2007 | 14 Comments

Seems that Opera Mini 4 Final was just released. Isn’t it too early to release the final version of it? You may check it yourself by downloading it. That’s what I am trying to do now (107 KB), it’s been the 5th time and I still do get “Error: Connection to server lost” while downloading.

Anyway, Opera Mini 4 introduces lots of new features (Opera Link, Mouse Cursor, Start Points and more) which give you everything or at least most of the things which you would like to have in the mobile web browser.

Opera Mini Features
Download Opera Mini 4
Opera Mini Live Demo

I’ve missed “Opera Mini vs. iPhone” video in the home page, where is it?

UPDATE: Peter Bortas from Opera contacted me regarding downloading issue, and told that they have fixed some problems and it should be working fine now.

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Flock 1.0 Released

By Vygantas | November 5, 2007 | 0 Comments

So what is Flock is? Flock is a social web browser (that’s how Flock developers call it) which is based on Mozilla’s Firefox platform. I’ve just installed it and it looks fascinating. I even don’t use most of those integrated services (expect Youtube, Flickr and del.icio.us) but this interface is so well balanced and looks astonishing. Latest Flock release (1.0) includes all the security fixes from Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8. What else is new in Flock 1.0?

Click on the Picture to Enlarge.

Changelog:

Flock 1.0 has added a “People” sidebar to support new service integration with Facebook and Twitter.

Flickr and Youtube have been promoted to “People” services.

Several performance and stability enhancements have been implemented and several memory leaks have been fixed.

Added People services for Facebook and Twitter

However, there are still so many known issues which have to be fixed.

Several Firefox extensions including FireFTP and Chatzilla are known to be incompatible with Flock’s toolbar causing icons to be misplaced or missing.

Your Windows account must have administrator priviliges to install Flock. This restriction will be removed in an upcoming Flock release.

Flock has been tested for users with up to two thousand friends. Beyond a thousand friends, unforeseen challenges may exist. Closing the People sidebar may return your surfing speed to normal. If you are incredibly popular with more than 2000 friends, we would love to hear about how the People sidebar is working for you. Please send your feedback to popularitycontest at flock.com.

Facebook friends will occasionally not show up in the people sidebar. To fix this problem, open the Accounts and Services sidebar (click on the key symbol) and find your facebook account in the topmost field. Click on “Forget Account.” Then log back into facebook, and your friends should appear in the people sidebar.

When uploading to Facebook, if no album is specified, the photo will be uploaded to a default album for the application, which will be created if necessary. Regular albums have a size limit of 60 photos. Default application albums have a size limit of 1000 photos.

Clearing your Twitter status causes an alert to show up indicating “An Error Updating Your Status”. Twitter does not allow an empty status message.

Flock is unable to upload files with the “.jpeg” extension to Piczo.

Accessing own private Photobucket photos when not logged in to Photobucket does not bring you to the Photobucket login page.

If for some reason the upload process fails, perhaps a network connection issue, tags and descriptions associated with the photos will be lost.

When using Hotmail in plain text, dragging a picture from the media bar the email recipient will receive blank content.

Some valid Flickr accounts are not discoverable through the media search bar.

Flock will not auto discover your account when logging into Ma.gnolia using your Facebook account ID.

If your computer’s clock is too slow or fast, you may experience errors when publishing your favorites to Del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia.

Drag’n Dropping a local favorites folder onto your Online favorites does not work correctly. A folder with no name is created that includes a blank favorite.

When customizing the blog editor toolbar, the customize window has duplicate icons.

Replacing a Blogsome blog entry does not work correctly.

Replacing a self-hosted WordPress blog entry does not work correctly.

Craigslist searches will not show up in the search flyout when searching from the browser’s search box.

Web clipboard content don’t always migrate when updating Flock from 0.9 to 1.0.

Photos dragged to the uploader but not yet uploaded will not migrate when updating Flock.

When importing IE settings and starting Flock for the first time, if two or more sites are set as home pages, Flock will only import one of those page.

Firefox live bookmarks not always handled properly during import.

Firefox bookmarks are not being indexed when imported. The Flock star will not highlight when one of these pages are visited nor will it show up in search from the search bar.

Download Flock 1.0.

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