Archive for: firefox
Like you read it, you can download files using the BitTorrent network without actually using .torrent files with a new Firefox add-on.
“Well, yeah, I know that” you might say “those are called magnet links”. Yes, it is true, magnet links exists already; and they don’t use the .torrent file to download, they use DHT protocol. But unfortunately, magnet links are not so easy to find; even though there are some popular clients (like Vuze and uTorrent) that already support magnetized links.
But now, you can find those very easy with the Firefox Add-on Magnetiser. You can install it, look for the Torrent that you want to download, click on magnetise, select the torrent client, and your download will start.
One small consideration though, the Add-On it is not officially out just yet (officially meaning that you can download it directly from Mozilla site); but you can download this add-on from here (just drag-n-drop the .xpi file intro Firefox.
Mozillas Firefox Bookmarking Add-Ons make browsing on-line faster, more organized, and more convenient. While there are hundreds of free Bookmarks Add-ons to choose from through Mozillas AMO website, only a handful of them have received a coveted Recommended rating. Features vary wildly, and though some are a slight improvement over Internet Explorers Favorites, others succeed at being both simple and sophisticated.
If you just want to take the bookmarks names off the Bookmarks Toolbar to allow for more bookmarks to appear, Smart Bookmarks Bar 1.4.3 is an okay option. Its straightforward, but doesn’t give you much in the way additional functionality. Multirow Bookmarks Toolbar 4.0 does just what it says. As you get too many Bookmarks for one row, additional rows will appear. Of course as you add more and more bookmarks, you wont have much space left on your screen.
Xmarks 3.3.2 is popular because it synchronizes your bookmarks and passwords and allows you to access and update them on each computer you keep. Plus it supports Firefox, as well as Internet Explorer and Safari. One slightly worrisome feature of Xmarks is that it captures all of your Google searches (and other search engines) so it can interject websites into your Search results (they call this their “discovery service”). Just like Google, it keeps a history of websites that you visit, so security is a concern. Although Xmarks says its encrypted, it doesn’t seem impossible for its server to get hacked and all of a sudden have all of your passwords for sale to the highest bidder on the net.
The best feature of samfind Bookmarks Bar 2.0.3 is how fast it gets you to the sites you visit most often. Its totally customizable, and starts you off with some of the most popular websites already configured. Bookmarks are organized by Topics and its easy to add websites, even letting you drop and drag sites you want to add right from the address bar. You can position the samfind Toolbar where you want it, and you can select the look of websites on the Bar as icons, icons and text, or text. You can also change samfind’s layout to fit several times as many websites as you normally could, saving valuable screen space.
Shareaholic 1.9 supports over 60 social sites, allowing you to choose your favorite social services and access them from a single drop down menu. This add-on is tightly focused on bookmarking/sharing, blogging/publishing, as well as emailing, and link shortening. You can have instant access to shared web pages with the websites in these categories. In this respect it is similar to some of the other add-ons mentioned, although with fewer numbers of websites to interact with.
Mozillas Recommended Bookmarks Toolbars are all free downloads, and they offer a variety of features that will appeal to virtually any level of web browser. Once installed, they can all make repeated visits to the Internet a whole lot quicker and a lot less cluttered. Now if we could only find our car keys
Even though all the rumors said that we were going to have an official beta of Firefox 3.6, as we’ve discussed earlier, Mozilla will be releasing a 3.6 build, but as an early beta.
This “test build”, that should contain several bugs, will be a small preview of the real 3.6 beta that will be available to the public on October 21st (yes, one day before Windows 7 official release to the public). To take a nice preview of what’s coming in 3.6, you can access Mozilla FTP and download the build.
As we’ve said earlier, Firefox 3.6 (codename Namoroka) won’t bring us big changes, the features that you’ll find here:
- Lightweight themes with Vista-like interface.
- Improvements in TraceMonkey JavaScript engine
- Bookmark synchronization
- Optimized session restore feature.
- Enhanced page rendering.
- New additions for CSS.
- Previews of tabs
We’ll have to wait for 3.7 to expect major differences.
Mozilla team is working really hard on brainstorming the idea and design of Firefox 3.7 (currently in 3.5, 3.6 it’s just around the corner). What’s the main idea? Hide the Menu bar and use a very similar look-n-feel of Office 2007/Office 2010 Ribbon.
They are using their Wiki to give us some of the advances made so far, the ideas floating in the air and of course receive feedback from most of the Mozilla lovers (and non-lovers as well, why not?). And here are the ideas that they have so far:
- Embracing Glass: Toolbar and Tabs using Glass. Raised translucent buttons that are slightly glossy to meld with the toolbar. Raised 3D look to achieve tactile “feel”.
- Neutral Tones: Overall neutral color scheme that can transition among platforms. Can remain attractive and slick without fighting for focus from web content.
- Hiding the Menu Bar: Hiding the menubar by default (on Vista/7) allows us to use Glass, free up vertical space and retain platform consistency.
- Page and Tools Buttons: Condense and trim existing menu structure into two buttons “Page” and “Tools”. Similar to Safari and Chrome.
- Combine Stop/Reload: Combine Stop and Reload into one button. Reduces visual “clutter” and combines two buttons that have mutually exclusive functionality.
- Home Button/Tab: Remove “Home” Button from default toolbar. Move functionality to a “Home Tab” containing your homepage.
More info: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback
Personally I think those are very nice and significant changes. Office, Vista and 7 seems that they are setting the standards of any UI (no surprise there, Windows will still be the world’s main OS for a few years more). But the good news is that Mozilla it is also trying to establish browsers standards, like the “Page and Tools Buttons” that is a common feature in Safari and Chrome.
And also the “Combine Stop/Reload” feature it is something that I’ve been waiting to see in Firefox for a long time. I know, it’s a very tiny thing, but don’t you love having the same functionality in different browsers?
And what are the other changes that you would include?
Ubuntu has quickly become one of the best Operating Systems around and with this it has become easier and easier to add applications.
Appnr is a new web based tool where you can search and install applications directly on your Firefox within Ubuntu.
Appnr makes use of the apturl protocol to initiate the installation process. Since apturl was included as a dependency for Firefox since Ubuntu 7.10, if you are using a later version than Gutsy, you can simply click and install applications directly from Appnr.com. For other debian based distro, you will have to install apturl:
sudo apt-get install apturl
The navigation in Appnr is easy. On the left are the categories and the respective applications on the right. There is an “Install” button on every application entry and you just click on it to install the particular application.
Thunderbird is an Outlook like email client that is free to download and is made by Mozilla, the same company that makes Firefox. The best thing about Thunderbird is that developers from all over the world are able to make addon tools to use, unlike Microsoft and Outlook. Thunderbird is multi-platform and multi-lingual. Here is our list of the top 10 Thunderbird addons.
(1) Contacts Sidebar – handy addon that lets you display all available address books in Thunderbird sidebar. This lets you easily access all your contacts from the main window, quickly edit contact details, drag’n drop files on top of a contact to send it as an attachment and more… (Thunderbird: 1.5b – 2.0.0.*)
(2) QuoteCollapse – automatically collapses all the quotes within any message, making it look neat and less cluttered. To expand quotes back to standard view just click inserted ‘+’ button. (Thunderbird: 0.7 – 2.0.0.*)
(3) QuickMove – must-have addon letting you quickly file messages to your frequently used folders using keyboard shortcuts. (Thunderbird: 0.5 – 2.0+)
(4) Signature Switch – allows you to create multiple email signatures (Private, Business, etc.) and quickly switch between them right from the main toolbar. Also provides configurable signature auto-switch option based on the email recipients. (Thunderbird: 0.7 – 2.0.0.*)
(5) Remove Duplicate Messages – helps you quickly locate and remove duplicate messages from the selected folders (and its subfolders). (Thunderbird: 1.0 – 1.5.0.*)
(6) Nostalgy – lets you assign single-key keyboard shortcuts to common thunderbird operations i.e., move/copy/delete messages, change folder, add/remove/view tags, add attachment, scroll the message while keeping the focus on the thread pane and lots more. (Thunderbird: 1.5 – 2.0.0.*)
(7) GMailUI – adds Gmail-like mail archiving and powerful message search (i.e. ‘from:Makeuseof to:Aibek’) functionalities into Thunderbird. Makes excellent addition to already existing ‘Saved Searches’ feature. (Thunderbird: 0.8 – 2.0.0.*)
(8) Attachment Extractor – integrates one-click attachment extract option from selected messages. Once attachments have been extracted it can delete, detach or mark messages as ‘read’. Way easier than going through messages one-by-one. (Thunderbird: 2.0 – 2.0.0.*)
(9) Auto Zip Attachments – adds an ‘AutoZip’ button to the compose toolbar allowing you to compress all attached files to a single ‘zip’ file. (Thunderbird: 1.5 – 2.0.0.*)
(10) Send Later – integrates extra ‘Send Later At’ (’Ctrl+Shift+Return’) feature to the message compose window, allowing you to send messages on a particular future date and time. It can be a contract cancellation notice, a ‘Happy Birthday’ or a friendly ‘Don’t Forget’ note. (Thunderbird: 1.5 – 2.0)
It’s all about security this week in the tech world. Google are under the spotlight concerning security in their upcoming Google Chrome OS and Norton 2010 is turning heads. Now, Mozilla Firefox is to receive an update (3.0.12) which will close several major security loop holes in their popular browser.
“We strongly recommend that all Firefox 3.0.x users upgrade to this latest release,” Mozilla said on its developer blog. “If you already have Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting ‘Check for Updates…’ from the Help menu.”
It is recommended that users download the update so that they remain secure online. Using credit cards and even just keeping your browsing habits safe is a difficult task these days so the last thing you want is a browser that lets unsavoury programs or people peer into your bank account.
However, this will be one of the last, if not the last update for the browser. As of January 2010, no more updates will be made available to users of the 3.0.’X’ series as Mozilla try to pedal their newest browser, Firefox 3.5 to users.
Besides the Firefox Add-On official site, where anyone can download/upload the add-ons and share it with the community; you can also find Mozdev.org where there are over 250 projects related to Mozilla that are actively in motion by several developers in the mission to “establish Mozilla as a viable application development platform”.
Within the site, you will find several very interesting add-ons and plug-ins to use with Mozilla Firefox. Including the Top-50 most viewed and downloaded projects.
On this list you’ll find very, very useful tools that you can install to improve your browsing experience: Integration with Thunderbird, FTP client, autocopy highlighted text, proxy configurations, RSS reader, etc etc.
Again, another open source project that shows a lot of maturity, adding value and constant improvement. Cheers to that
We’ve announced earlier the release for Firefox 3.5 RC1, but the Mozilla development team already prepared a new build: Firefox 3.5 RC2. This new version has no bigger differences with the RC1, mostly fixing some bugs before making it the final version.
Company’s strategy it is quite interesting actually, releasing two RC versions in one week. They sure are very confident about the beta and RC stability, I can’t imagine Microsoft releasing release candidates versions of the same product in such short period of time.
That definitive version for Mozilla Firefox 3.5 it is expected in a few days more, ending June. You can check the release notes and improvements about the RC2 version here.
And you can download it from here.
The second most used browser has released the Release Candidate version for the upcoming Firefox 3.5. If you are wondering what kind of versions are the “release candidates”, those represents the first and most acceptable beta release that are very stable and with no big issues involved; but it doesn’t mean that this version will be the exact one used as a final version. This one is the seventh milestone (meaning build) that the development team prepared for Firefox 3.5.
Some of the improvements that Firefox 3.5 will include that appear in this RC1:
- Based in Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform.
- Support for HTML 5, JavaScript query selectors, SVG transforms and others.
- Improved performance with TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
- Private Browsing Mode for private data management.
- Support native JSON and web worker threads.
- Providing Location Aware Browsing to enhance web sites to display information according your geographical location.
You can download Firefox 3.5 RC1 from this link.
Consider that installing this version will overwrite your previous version of Firefox, your bookmarks and browsing history will be maintain, but do not expect that all your add-ons working properly.
Download it, enjoy it and give them your feedback!
Inside Google Code the company shares multiple applications and projects for all those interested. And for those webmasters also has very interesting tools, like Page Speed that I’m sure that you are going to find it quite useful.
Page Speed is an Firefox add-on that uses Firebug that runs several tests to measure performance on your site. Using several tests this particular scan gets the most important information from your front-end code and gives you all the hints necessary to improve the performance, having also different type of recommendations that can help you be more proactive on improving your site.
Resources for this tool, you’ll find plenty, “Using Page Speed” and even “Page Speed Community“. The Google Code it’s a great iniciative, Google shares a lot of code that is released completely as open source and you use it and modified it as you please. Cheers to that.
Like you read it, you can download files using the BitTorrent network without actually using .torrent files with a new Firefox add-on.
