Browsersphere

I’m back to using Firefox 2 for the time being, but I just noticed via the changelog for the Google Reader Notifier extension for Firefox that it is now compatible with the latest Firefox 3 beta, Beta 3:

The extension is now firefox3 3.0b3 compatible. Thanks for Ethan Breder for his great help.

Be sure and grab the update if you haven’t been notified of the new version automatically.

Believe it or not it’s been over three months since the last edition of Around the Browsersphere, so we’re long overdue.  Let’s get to it…

• Mozilla turned ten last month.
• Camino 1.5.5, a maintenance release, was made available a couple weeks ago, and Camino 1.6 Beta 2 was released a couple weeks before that.
• Add-on developers need to get their butts in gear and start updating their extensions to work with Firefox 3, primarily because the browser will be out in a couple months and secondarily because I don’t like using the Minefield builds without my favorite extensions
• The Firefox Extension Guru’s Blog points out that over 600 million Firefox add-ons have been downloaded, and that in anticipation of the release of Firefox 3, addons.mozilla.org is being redesigned.
• The Opera Desktop Team has been experimenting with document.all cloaking and is giving users more control over tab-related behavior (more on that here) in the latest builds.
• SeaMonkey 1.1.8 was released earlier this month.
• The Safari team has added support for the new W3C Selectors API and appears to be busy chipping away at bugs related to the Acid3 test.
• The WebKit team has been spending some time focused on SVG performance improvements and a native, Cairo-based Windows port of the rendering engine.
• The forthcoming Opera Mobile 9.5 (not 9.0) is twice as fast as Opera Mobile 8.65 and four times faster than Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile.  Screenshots and videos of the new release have been appearing quite a bit.
• Alex Faaborg has provided a second glimpse at the icons to be used in Firefox 3 (you can see the full sheet of icons here).  Apparently the throbber is still up in the air.
• Firefox has about:config, now Opera Mini has opera:config.
• Glubble is a parental controls suite for the Firefox browser (via Asa Dotzler).
• Will IE8 really pass the Acid2 test?
• Cross-window messaging is coming to Firefox 3 (via Simon Willison).
• VnTutor has a list of 10 hidden features of Konqueror.
• The creator of KHTML, Lars Knoll, has been promoted to VP of engineering at Trolltech.
• Everyone has a pet feature.
• Take a look at Maxthon’s split-view feature in action.

Unfortunately, at least for fans of Avant Browser, there isn’t a whole lot to report about what’s been going on with the browser lately.

The latest version came out in September and was primarily a bug fix release.

However, in looking for anything new to report, I did stumble upon Orca Browser, which appears to be a “Gecko version of Avant Browser,” simply using the Gecko layout engine from Mozilla rather than Avant Browser’s traditional Trident engine.

I think we can file Orca Browser in the “minor players” category, since there doesn’t seem to be anything really official about it on the web, and the latest flurry of announcements seems to have come sometime in the 2005 time frame.

Interesting nonetheless for those of us who like to know what’s being developed and used out there in the browsersphere.

I was cruising Digg and spotted a link to MDZakri.com, which in turn pointed me toward the AdSense Notifier extension for Firefox.  Apparently, it allows you to track your Google AdSense earnings in real time in the Firefox status bar.  Seems like it could be a pretty useful extension for those who are making more money from AdSense than I am

Just caught this via Mashable:

Mozilla has a new Firefox extension, called Personas, that makes it a bit easier to add themes to your browser. Built from a prototype that was discussed and tested earlier this year, Personas aims to extend an option for custom browsers without the need to code. They also have the ability to incorporate online components, supporting HTML, CSS, PNG, JPG, SVG, Javascript and Canvas. Personas also offer real time updates during the creation and editing process, so you can see exactly what you’re getting into. Other feature include the ability to select a Persona from the dynamic menus, and designers can add/update themes at any time without updating any software.

You can get all the details from the Mozilla Labs Blog, and if you want to play around with Personas, you can download it from the Mozilla Add-ons site.

I created a rather lengthy post over at my personal blog tonight titled How to Contribute to Firefox.  Rather than cross-post it here, I figured I’d at least share the link, since it’s probably relevant to a lot of the readers here (or at least I hope it is).

I caught this back in September and it took me until now to post it. Nice.

Anyway, without further ado, Dwight Silverman offers up his take on IE7Pro and how it brings parity with Firefox’s “Restore Session” feature to IE7. He also lists several other advantages to using IE7Pro, including built-in spell checking, an ad blocker, support for mouse gestures and a feature that sounds similar to Greasemonkey support in Firefox.

The folks over at the Maxthon Blog have explained why the answer to the question of whether or not Greasemonkey scripts work in Maxthon is both “yes” and “no.”  However, after you read the post, you realize the real answer is “no.”  They just support similar functionality.

Carnival (via microformatique) is “a free microformat parser for Safari. Download it, fire it up, and whenever a microformatted site is viewed in Safari, Carnival will glow green. Click on the icon to view the available data.”

According to the extension’s author, “This is an alpha, proof-of-concept release. Only hCards are supported, and you can’t actually do much with the data yet.”

Think of this as Operator Lite for Safari.

When it comes to web browser extensions, you’d be a bit off-base to suggest that any browser has as many options for users as does Firefox.  Therefore, in this edition of Extension Watch, we’ll take a look at some Firefox extensions that have been getting some attention around the browsersphere lately.

• According to Mozilla Links,  Chris Finke has developed an extension that converts Facebook email images to hyperlinks.  You can download that extension directly from here.
• Mozilla Links also points to Daily Dilbert, an extension for accessing several popular comics directly from your Firefox status bar.  You can download that directly from Firefox Add-ons.
• Mini Map Sidebar (via straydog scraps) lets you drag-and-drop an address from the web page you are viewing into the Firefox sidebar to get a map of the address quickly.
• HyperWords allows you to select any plain text on a web page and select from a list of search engines, online references and translation services to use with the text you’ve selected.  You can download that directly from this site.
• Spotter apparently lets you do something with RDF, but I’m either not bright enough or have simply been watching too much football this weekend to comprehend exactly what it is that it allows you to do.
• The developers of the Forecastfox extension have switched their provider from Weather.com to AccuWeather.com, and the latest version of their extension is available to download from Softpedia.com.
• Even with an explanation, I’m not really sure what it does, but you can get the latest version of the SuperDragAndGo extension here.
• Social Media apparently lets “you see what stories have been submitted to which social bookmarking and media sites, as well as how many votes the story has received across these networks,” according to Mashable.
• Firefox Clock puts a clock and a Firefox download counter “on your desktop.”  Not sure if that makes it a widget or if they really mean you have access to it in your browser.  However, TickerFox, which actually comes from a friend and former colleague of mine, is probably the better choice if you can live with your system clock and only want to see how many times Firefox has been downloaded (which we now know is over 400 million).
• deliGoo, according to Read/WriteWeb, mashes up del.icio.us (which will soon just be Delicious) with Google Custom Search.  However, the review doesn’t really give it much of an endorsement.
• The Giacomo Vacca Blog points to Firefox VoIP, which “turns Firefox into a VoIP client.”
• If you’re into bookmarking, CyberNet has a list of the best Firefox extensions for bookmarking.
• Neil’s World mentions Rock Your Firefox, another Facebook-related extension that “lets you show what extensions you have installed on your copy of Firefox, and see what your friends have installed.”
• If you live in Chicago and use the “L,” you may, like Tom Sherman, find this Firefox add-on from Clay Smith extremely useful.
• CashAddOn requires an account to use, but claims to “help you earn cash [back] on the purchases you make while shopping online.”
• According to the AdGlobe Tech Blog, Snap Links “allows you to easily open multiple links in new tabs by drawing a box around them.”
• Fast Video Download lets you quickly save embedded video files from sites like College Humor, Daily Motion, Google Video, MySpace and YouTube.
• Thumbnails in Your Tabs looks kind of useless to me, simply because the thumbnails it shows are very obviously squished to fit into each tab, but I’m sure there are people out there who will find it useful (probably the same people that find Snap Previews useful).
• Boost for Facebook apparently “blows the official Facebook toolbar out of the water,” but I’m not sure what that really means because I use neither Facebook nor its official toolbar.
• All-in-One Sidebar is “Opera 9-like” according to Tech[dot]Blog and “lets you quickly switch between sidebar panels and view Firefox features such as downloads, extensions, bookmarks, addons, etc in the sidebar.”
• Mozilla Links says that Auto Shutdown “adds a check box to the download manager to tell Firefox to shut down your computer after all downloads are finished.”
• Miguel Guhlin is a fan of TinyUrl’s Firefox extension.
• And last but not least (this one has to be my favorite of the list), Tobi’s Timemachine “warps you back to the amateur web of 1996.”

On a semi-related note, Firefox extension developers can head over to the Mozilla Developer Center to find out how they can update their extensions to be Firefox 3 compliant.

I’m always keeping an eye out for the latest buzz-worthy extensions, and not just for Firefox, so stay tuned for more extension-related news here at Browsersphere.  Also, if you have a favorite extension or see something out on the web that you think would be of interest to Browsersphere’s readers, please drop me a line at browsersphere@gmail.com.