December 27, 2007 (Computerworld) -- New versions of favorite applications are always a little tricky; you want to keep up with the times without fixing what ain't broke. With that in mind, I took a look at the newly released Firefox 3 Beta 2 to see what we can look forward to when the final version ships in 2008.
Although the basic look of the browser hasn't changed, there are actually quite a few new features coming. (For a complete list, you can check out Mozilla's release notes.)
Some of the new features in Firefox 3 are not immediately obvious -- at least, not to the casual user. Among other things, Mozilla is incorporating new graphics- and text-rendering architectures in its browser layout engine (Gecko 1.9) to offer rendering improvements in CSS and SVG; adding a number of security features, including malware protection and version checks of its add-ons; and offline support for suitably coded Web applications.
Other new features -- some of which are listed here -- are more visible to end users, such as the menu bar that now appears asking if you want to save a just-entered password. Indeed, I've wondered if the browser will become top-heavy with built-in features that were already available as add-ons.
For example, Firefox 3 Beta 2 adds the ability to save your existing tabs when you close the app down, and it has enhanced the browser's ability to magnify Web pages from just affecting text to taking in the entire page -- features that are already available via the Tab Mix Plus and Image Zoom extensions. Right now, it looks like the new version will escape that particular criticism -- its memory footprint is, if anything, smaller than that of Version 2 -- but time alone will tell.
Incidentally, if you'd like to try out the new beta, feel free -- but be aware that this is a beta version in the traditional sense, not the sort of eternal beta you get with, say, Google Docs. As a result, there is as of yet no support for current add-ons. (Correction: There are some extensions, such as Adblock Plus, that will work with Firefox 3 Beta 2 -- but you should still be cautious.) And there are still a few serious glitches -- for example, you're going to get an error message if you try to use Yahoo's newer e-mail format. (According to Mozilla's bug report, this is a problem on Yahoo's end -- but whoever is responsible, as of this writing, it doesn't work.)
All that being said, here are the five new and/or enhanced features in Firefox 3 Beta 2 that most caught my attention:
1. Easier downloads. While the older Download Manager was quite serviceable, Mozilla has made some nice tweaks in the new version. It now lists not only the file name, but the URL it was downloaded from, and includes an icon that leads to information about when and where you downloaded it. (The Remove link has been, well, removed from the Download manager -- you now have to right-click to delete a listing.)
The address bar is now more readable and searches both your history and your bookmark lists. (Click for larger view.)
Since I've wasted a lot of time over the years having to deal with repeatedly failing downloads, this is something I appreciate.
2. An enhanced address bar. Mozilla has also made improvements in the autocomplete function of its address bar (which Mozilla calls a "location bar"), and I have to say I find it both impressive and useful. In Firefox 3 Beta 2, the autocomplete doesn't just offer a list of URLs that you've been to, but includes sites that are in your bookmark list.
It then gives you a nice, clear listing of the URLs and site names in large, easy-to-read text, with the typed-in phrase underlined. It makes it really simple to find and return to that semi-remembered Web site you visited a few days ago.
3. A workable bookmark organizer. Speaking of bookmarks, the separate history/bookmarks sidebars and managers have been replaced -- or, rather, augmented -- by a single Places Organizer, which uses Windows Explorer's familiar tree-on-the-left/list-on-the-right format. It offers a simple, quick way to read and manage your history and bookmarks -- including the ability to immediately edit a bookmark's name, location and tags rather than having to go into the Properties box (something that I was really sick of in Version 2).
The new Places Organizer vastly improves Firefox's management of bookmark lists. (Click for larger view.)
4. Easier bookmarking. There are, in fact, quite a few new features involving bookmarking, some of which are small but highly useful. For example, you can now quickly create a bookmark by double-clicking on a star that appears in the right side of the address bar. You can also add tags to your bookmarks, which could work nicely as an organizational tool.
You can quickly create a bookmark by double-clicking on the star in the address bar. (Click for larger view.)
There is also new folder called Smart Bookmarks in the toolbar. It offers three categories of bookmarks -- Most Visited, Recently Bookmarked and Recent Tags -- and is automatically populated during the course of your Web sessions. Since, like most people, I have a series of sites that I tend to visit regularly, I can see how something like the Most Visited list could prove handy as a one-click resource for my daily surfing. (I could, of course, create my own folder for these sites, but it's a lot easier to let Firefox do it.) My only quibble: A Recently Visited list would also be handy -- more handy, I think, than a list of sites that were recently bookmarked.
5. Better memory management. I'm a great fan of Firefox, but there have been times when I've considered going back to Internet Explorer because of issues I was having with memory. After a couple of hours of adding and dropping tabs, Firefox could commandeer nearly 200MB of memory, at which point I'd usually have to shut it down to prevent my other apps from grinding to a halt. It was very frustrating -- especially when the folks at Mozilla denied that it was really a problem.
The new version of Firefox appears to have a smaller memory footprint than its predecessor. (Click for larger view.)
This is admittedly not comprehensive or conclusive testing, but if that trend extends to long-term usage, I can see the latest version of Firefox taking up a lot less memory than its predecessor.
According to Mozilla's Firefox 3 Beta 2 release notes, "There's still more to come." That could be good -- or bad. Firefox became popular because it was lean, mean and user-tweakable, and I'd hate to see Mozilla lose that focus.
Certainly, if Firefox 3 Beta 2 is anything to go by, the Mozilla team is doing a fine job in balancing new features with a basic philosophy of "don't fix what ain't broke." We can only hope that they will continue following this adage as time goes on and the final release grows closer.
January 11, 2008 (Computerworld) -- With a new CEO on board and a major update of its Firefox Web browser expected this year, Mozilla Corp. hopes to reinvigorate its campaign to pull users away from Microsoft Corp.'s still-dominant Internet Explorer software.
But Mountain View, Calif.-based Mozilla continues to expend little energy on wooing IT managers to formally adopt Firefox for deployment within their organizations, according to analysts and users of the open-source browser.
In the past, Firefox faced two main obstacles that limited its adoption by corporate users: its immaturity, and its incompatibility with corporate Web applications and intranets that relied on Microsoft technologies such as ActiveX.
Now nearly three-and-a-half years old and nearing the release of Version 3, Firefox no longer can be accused of being callow. And while many IE-only apps remain, plenty of others have been overhauled to support Firefox as well, according to Rafael Ebron, general manager of Browser Garage LLC, a Web consulting firm in Mountain View.
However, other obstacles to broader adoption have emerged. Mozilla thus far has neglected to develop tools to help IT departments deploy and manage Firefox, and it doesn't offer paid technical support services to risk-averse corporate users.
"The enterprise is looking for a neck to choke, and that is absolutely what is missing from Firefox," said Ebron, a former product manager for Firefox and its predecessor, Netscape Navigator. "If you have a problem with IE and you are a big enough customer to Microsoft, [CEO] Steve Ballmer is going to come out and talk to you. That isn't there yet from Mozilla. It isn't their focus."
Mozilla claims that Firefox has more than 125 million users. And according to market researchers, the open-source browser has made some steady, albeit relatively small, inroads against IE on usage.
For example, Net Applications Inc., an Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based company that tracks visitors to about 40,000 Web sites, said Firefox held a 17% share of browser usage in December, compared with 76% for IE.
Similarly, Janco Associates Inc. in Park City, Utah, currently gives Firefox a 16% usage share among visitors to 17 business-to-business Web sites that it monitors. Janco puts IE's share at 67% while giving 9% to Netscape and 3% to Google Desktop. (Netscape is credited with only a minuscule market share by Net Applications, which doesn't include Google Desktop in its rankings.)
Firefox's market share has increased from 14% since last January, while IE's share has eroded by two percentage points, according to Janco. But Firefox's gains have mostly come from workers installing the browser on their own, without IT's blessing, noted Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis.
"Users are frustrated with Microsoft's product, and more people are starting to experiment in enterprises with Firefox," he said.
Firefox may gain more users following AOL LLC's Dec. 28 announcement that it will discontinue Netscape Navigator -- and its recommendation that users switch to Mozilla's browser.
But Mozilla's laissez-faire attitude toward corporate users can lead to awkward situations, such as the one at a leading vendor of Web-based software. The company's CIO, who asked not to be identified, said it is a longtime Microsoft shop that has standardized on IE as its browser of choice.
Firefox is a great browser, but you already knew that, right? Firefox’s keywords facility can be used for a neat search trick. It is best used for a directed search engine that digs specific data for example, a Bugzilla search, IMDb search, LXR search or Marcel/wine search wine-searcher, and so on. Here are the steps:
1. Using Firefox, go to a site that offers a simple search facility (for example, IMDb, LXR or your local Bugzilla).
2. Place the cursor within the search box.
3. Right-click, and select Add a Keyword for this Search.
4. Give your new search shortcut a name.
5. Give your new search shortcut a short keyword (for example, I use bz for my Bugzilla search and lxr for LXR).
That’s it. To try out your new keyword search shortcut, open a new tab (Ctrl-T), place the cursor at the location bar (Ctrl-L), type your keyword followed by the search term(s)-for example, assuming you added keyword bz for the search at bugzilla.mozilla.org, then typing “bz 95849″ in the location bar will show you this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95849.
This is an ideal way to use a search engine that digs through some specific data.
Andrei provides an excellent tip for Firefox users in Pasting Wrapped URLs:
Here’s another Mozilla/Firefox tip: if you copy a URL wrapped over multiple lines from somewhere and try to paste it into the address bar, you will end up only with the first line of it. To fix it, go to about:config and change editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines setting to 3 or add:
user_pref(”editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines”, 3);
to your user.js file. Now all the line breaks will be removed upon pasting.
Excellent! I’d been looking for such a feature.
The second beta of Firefox 3.0 is now available for download. In this manner, Mozilla lived up to its promise made earlier in December that it would move Firefox 3.0 out of Beta 1 stage, by December 21st. Having dropped the first Release Candidate for Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 as early as December 11th, it was clear that Mozilla was making headway with the development of its upcoming version of the open source browser. The final availability date for Firefox 3.0 is not set at this point, with more beta milestones expected, but all indications point to early 2008.
“Firefox 3 Beta 2 now available for download. Please note: We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 Beta 2 milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only. Firefox 3 Beta 2 is now available for download. This is the tenth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3″, Mozilla revealed on its Development Center.According to Mozilla, Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 marks quite an evolution, in comparison to its predecessor testing version. The new development milestone features almost 900 improvements over Beta 1. Mozilla has, in fact, tweaked a wide range of aspects of the open source browser, starting with the graphical user interface on the surface, and continuing under the hood with security, performance, stability memory usage and reliability enhancements.
“Firefox 3 is based on the new Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 28 months and includes nearly 2 million lines of code changes, fixing more than 11,000 issues. Gecko 1.9 includes some major re-architecting for performance, stability, correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers”, reads a fragment of the Firefox 3 Beta 2 Release Notes.Since ActiveX applies only to the Windows platform, it is unsuitable for Firefox which is available across multiple platforms. Currently, there is no mechanism by which you can use ActiveX controls in Firefox 2.0 or later.
Until recently, a third-party plugin provided ActiveX functionality for Firefox. The Mozilla ActiveX Plug-in provided partial ActiveX support for Firefox 1.5 and earlier versions. By default, these ActiveX plugins were configured to execute only the two Windows Media Player ActiveX controls, which enabled the playback of video content through the Windows controls. There is a configuration file that can be used to enable other ActiveX controls.
The plugins for Netscape, Mozilla Suite, and Mozilla Firefox were created by Adam Lock and are maintained on his site, which has not been updates since 2005. These plugins do not work with Firefox 2.0 or later.
For more information, see Adam Lock’s Mozilla ActiveX Project.
Mozilla Firefox is a graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation. Started as a fork of the browser component (Navigator) of the Mozilla Application Suite, Firefox has replaced the Mozilla Suite as the flagship product of the Mozilla project, stewarded by the Mozilla Foundation and a large community of external contributors.
Mozilla Firefox is a cross-platform browser, providing support for various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Although not officially released for certain operating systems, the freely available source code works for many other operating systems, including FreeBSD,OS/2, Solaris, SkyOS, BeOS and more recently, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.
I am providing some Very Useful Tips to speedup your Firefox.
In your location bar, type about:config
Once it Opens You should see similar to the following screen
Tip1
In the filter bar type network.http.pipelining
You should see the following screen
Normally it says ” false ” under value field , Double click it so it becomes ” true “.
Once you finished this you should see the following screen.
Tip2
In the filter bar again and type network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Once it Opens You should see the following screen
Default it says 4 under value field and you need to change it to 8
Once you finished this you should see the following screen.
Tip3
Go to the filter bar again and type network.http.proxy.pipelining
Once it Opens You should see similar to the following screen
Normally it says ” false ” under value field , Double click it so it becomes ” true “.
Once you finished this you should see the following screen.
Tip4
Go to the filter bar again and type network.dns.disableIPv6
Once it Opens You should see the following screen
Normally it says ” false ” under value field , Double click it so it becomes ” true “.
Once you finished this you should see the following screen.
Tip5
Go to the filter bar again and type plugin.expose_full_path
Once it Opens You should see the following screen
Normally it says ” false ” under value field , Double click it so it becomes ” true “.
Once you finished this you should see the following screen.
Tip6
Now you need to Create new Preference name with interger value for this got to Right click -> New -> Integer
Once it opens you should see the following screen
Here you need to type nglayout.initialpaint.delay and click ok
Now you need to enter 0 in value filed and click ok
Once you finished this you should see the following screen.
Tip7
Now you need to Create one more Preference name with interger value for this got to Right click -> New -> Integer
Once it opens you should see the following screen
Here you need to type content.notify.backoffcount and click ok
Now you need to enter 5 in value filed and click ok
Once you finished this you should see the following screen.
Tip8
Now you need to Create one more Preference name with interger value for this got to Right click -> New -> Integer
Once it opens you should see the following screen
Here you need to type ui.submenuDelay and click ok
Now you need to enter 0 in value filed and click ok
Once you finished this you should see the following screen.
Some more Tweaks
Enable the spellchecker for inputfields and textareas (default is textareas only)
layout.spellcheckDefault=2
Open lastfm://-links directly in amarok
network.protocol-handler.app.lastfm=amarok
network.protocol-handler.external.lastfm=true
Firefox Memory Leak Fix
Open a new tab. Type “about:config” without quotes into the address bar and hit enter/click Go.
Right-click anywhere, select New, then Integer. In the dialog prompt that appears, type:
browser.cache.memory.capacity
Click OK. Another dialog prompt will appear. This is where you decide how much memory to allocate to Firefox. This depends on how much RAM your computer has, but generally you don’t want to allocate too little (under 8MB), but if you allocate too much, you might as well not do this. A good recommended setting is 16MB. If you want 16MB, enter this value into the dialog prompt:
16384
(Why 16384 instead of 16000? Because computers use base-12 counting. Thus 16 megabytes = 16384 bytes. Likewise, if you want to double that and allocate 32MB, you’d enter 32768.)
Click OK to close the dialog box, then close all instances of Firefox and restart. If your Firefox still uses the same amount of memory, give it a few minutes and it should slowly clear up. If that fails, try a system reboot.
Now your Firefox will now be 3 - 30 times faster in loading pages.
