Archive for: mozilla

Mozilla Prism App to Bring Web Apps to your Desktop – Competes With Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight

Mozilla are currently preparing their latest endeavor – Prism, a new application that will bring most web applications to the desktop, similar to what those two products have been doing right now.

Users will soon be able to start downloading and installing their favourite web apps, such as Gmail or YouTube, and use them as stand-alone applications on their desktop. Their new third beta release of Prism is the most stable version yet and is almost close to being the final release version, according to Mozilla.

If you want to try out Prism, visit this site.

New Thunderbird Appeals to Masses

thunderbird

In the battle over email application supremacy, Thunderbird has been one of the  most highly developed for web application next to Google’s Gmail. Consistently we’re treated to new releases, updates, and efforts to make the user experience more comfortable and seamless with other email providers as it works to be the catch all for all of our digital communication. Most recently Thunderbird introduced a bevy of plug-ins over the summer that increased the usability of the application, but also made it more fun. Millions of dedicated Thunderbird users keep this email client in constant development and whats being released this week is no exception.

+Continue Reading

Free Downloadable Add-Ons Make for Speedy Browsing

Mozilla’s 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 Mozilla’s 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 Explorer’s “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.  It’s 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 won’t 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 it’s 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.  It’s totally customizable, and starts you off with some of the most popular websites already configured.  Bookmarks are organized by Topics and it’s 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.

Mozilla’s 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…

Top Thunderbird Email Addons

thunderbirdThunderbird 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)

Firefox 3.5 Available June 30th

firefox3.5Finally after a lot of expectation and three release candidates (all were published within less that two weeks) Mozilla announced that the the final version for Firefox 3.5 will be available to the public on the morning of Tuesday, June 30.

Seems that development team is running against the clock, considering that on June 24 they’ve released the RC3 version for Firefox 3.5 and originally the announcement about the final version stated that “end of June” will be the date. Well they sure are keeping the promise, taking the last day of the month to release it.

Since RC1, the two other versions that were public basically focused in bug fixing, so if you installed were using any of these versions you shouldn’t expect greatest differences with the final one.

Download Firefox 3.5 RC3.

Top 10 Must Have Thunderbird Addons

mozilla-thunderbirdMost people know about Outlook competitor from Mozilla, Thunderbird. Unlike Outlook it is completely free, it’s multi-platform, it’s multi-lingual and most importantly, it’s highly customizable featuring lots of useful addons and themes. Therefore, if you are using Thunderbird we have put together a great list of the top 10 addons you should be using.

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.*)

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.*)

QuickMove – must-have addon letting you quickly file messages to your frequently used folders using keyboard shortcuts. (Thunderbird: 0.5 – 2.0+)

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.*)

Remove Duplicate Messages – helps you quickly locate and remove duplicate messages from the selected folders (and its subfolders). (Thunderbird: 1.0 – 1.5.0.*)

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.*)

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.*)

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.*)

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.*)

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)