I fired up Firefox 3 Beta 5 this morning to find that a new version, version 0.47, of the useful (to me, anyway) Google Reader Notifier extension was available. As reported in the changelog, it is compatible with the latest Firefox 3 beta.
Tags:
Add-ons,
Beta,
Extensions,
Firefox,
Google
Posted on April 28th, 2008 | No Comments »
Last time around, I didn’t get any feedback on the format of these “Around the Browsersphere” posts, so I’ll give a slightly more organized approach a try and we’ll see how it goes.
Camino
- Camino 1.6, which features a customizable toolbar search field, software update capabilities, a scrolling tab bar, etc., was released on the 17th.
Firefox
Flock
Internet Explorer
Konqueror
Maxthon
Mozilla
Opera and Opera Mini
Safari
SeaMonkey
Minor Players
Tags:
Add-ons,
Beta,
Camino,
Digg,
Extensions,
Firefox,
Flock,
Internet Explorer,
iPhone,
Konqueror,
Mac,
Market Share,
Maxthon,
Microformats,
Minor Players,
Mozilla,
Opera,
Opera Mini,
Releases,
Safari,
SeaMonkey,
Stats,
Web Standards,
WebKit
Posted on April 21st, 2008 | No Comments »
My last post pointed to an ars technica article titled When in Rome: engineering the Firefox 3 user experience (via Digg) in which Alex Faaborg revealed that the Vista theme for Firefox 3 will not support transparency. In Vista terms, that transparency is commonly referred to as Vista or Aero “Glass,” and you can read a bit more about it here.
Anyway, I later came across a screenshot (via Twitter) of Firefox 3 very clearly making use of (or at least pretending to) the Vista Glass transparency. That transparent look comes courtesy of the Glasser extension for Firefox, which is currently “alpha quality,” according to its creator. The extension can also be seen as the only hope for Firefox 3 users who wish to see the browser blend in with the Vista operating system like Internet Explorer does, since it could be very likely this feature doesn’t make its way into Firefox until version 4.
As an aside, if you like the theme shown in the aforementioned screenshot, you should take a look at Phoenity Aura, which, according to its author, will be compatible with Firefox 3 RC1.
Tags:
Add-ons,
Extensions,
Firefox,
Internet Explorer,
Themes and Skins
Posted on March 9th, 2008 | 2 Comments »
With at least a couple more Firefox 3 betas on the way, the release of IE8 Beta 1 and the official release of the Acid3 test, there’s a lot going on in the browsersphere these days. Let’s jump right into it…
- First off, it’s now March, so Netscape Navigator is officially dead (but do you really believe that?).
- The Opera Desktop Team has released what they are calling a Plugin Milestone Build.
- I think this guy may be more into web browsers than I am.
- Mozilla’s been getting some fan mail.
- Opera has made the switch back to Google for search in Opera Mini and Opera Mobile (see a screenshot of the new Opera Mini start page). There’s more on this over at TechCrunch as well.
- Sebastiaan de With (remember him?) thinks that the Firefox 3 interface is going nowhere.
- A forum post pointed me toward another minor player called Acoo Browser, which is another browser built on Trident.
- CyberNet claims that Avant Browser 11 will be the best version of the browser yet.
- Ben Moore seems to have mixed feelings about some of the changes made between Maxthon v1 and v2.
- sKatterBrainZ claims that “there’s nothing in Safari that is truly innovative or unique to the world of web browsing.”
- Somewhat contradictory to that, Ian Hixie, the author of the Acid3 test, seems pretty impressed with how quickly the Safari/WebKit team has responded to the issues uncovered by Acid3 (I’ve covered this here as well).
- Ian Clifton had some interesting points to make about the Internet Explorer team’s original stance on standards support in the forthcoming IE8.
- microformatique points out that the IE team has used the hAtom microformat to implement their WebSlices feature.
- CyberNet says the SpaceTime 3D Browser is “mostly for fun” and shows off a video demo of the interesting browser.
- Firefox 3 Beta 3 has replaced Firefox 2 as the default browser in Alpha 6 of Ubuntu Hardy Heron.
- Opera Mini users browsed over 1.8 million web pages back in January.
- Kevin Yank says that table-based layouts will be “the next big thing” (via Simon Willison).
- Daniel Glazman wrote a CSS3 Selector test suite and posted the results for Firefox 3.0b4pre (Minefield), Safari 3.0.4 for Windows, Opera 9.23 and Internet Explorer 7. He was impressed to see that the latest builds of Opera pass all of his tests.
- Opera Twitters (via Opera Watch).
- Myk Melez talks about what it’s like to sheriff for Mozilla.
- Opera Mini users can now zoom images.
- Mitchell Baker has posted about the Mozilla Steering Committee.
- Jesse Ruderman created a Greasemonkey script for those who spend a lot of time looking at the Firefox tinderbox.
- Opera’s Charles McCathieNevile, Mozilla’s Brendan Eich and Microsoft’s Chris Wilson will square off at SXSW tomorrow in a panel called “Browser Wars: Deja Vu All Over Again?”
- It doesn’t look like many CSS3 features have made their way into IE8 yet.
- Konqueror 4 for Windows has been reviewed.
- Someone decided to show off how they made a web browser with Visual Basic 2008 in under three minutes on YouTube.
- Okiwi is a free web browser for the Nintendo DS.
- An online poll asking what the greatest web browser ever is has some interesting options from which to choose.
- A C|Net podcast covers, among other things, BMWs that feature full-blown in-dash web browsers.
- Dan Gayle digs Lynx.
- Auto Web Browser “will consult the search engines from a user defined list, download the pages to your computer, filter and analyze them and then it will automatically surf further, downloading other potentially interesting pages using the links from the meaningful part of the relevant documents.”
- The Off By One Web Browser “may be the world’s smallest and fastest web browser with full HTML 3.2 support.”
- The WorldWideWeb browser (which was later renamed Nexus) turned 17 years old last month.
- You can view your Firefox web browser history visually with ThumbStrip.
- Firefox, Flock, Internet Explorer, Maxthon, Opera and Safari are nominated in the Browsing category of the Webware 100.
- Anne van Kesteren covers some of the “evil” things about IE8.
Amazingly enough, there’s a lot more to post about, but that should hold you over for a little bit. I’m interested in hearing if Browsersphere visitors are more interested in somewhat random links like this or if it would be preferable to have the links broken down by the web browser to which they correspond. If you have any thoughts on that, please leave a comment.
Tags:
Acid3,
Add-ons,
Avant,
Beta,
CSS,
Extensions,
Firefox,
Flock,
Internet Explorer,
Konqueror,
Linux,
Lynx,
Maxthon,
Microformats,
Minor Players,
Mozilla,
Netscape,
Opera,
Opera Mini,
Safari,
Trident,
Ubuntu,
Video,
Web Standards,
YouTube
Posted on March 2nd, 2008 | No Comments »
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.
Tags:
Add-ons,
Extensions,
Firefox,
Google
Posted on February 19th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
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.
Tags:
Add-ons,
Camino,
Extensions,
Firefox,
Internet Explorer,
KHTML,
Konqueror,
Maxthon,
Mozilla,
Opera,
Opera Mini,
Previews,
Releases,
Safari,
SeaMonkey,
Web Standards,
WebKit
Posted on February 19th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
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.
Tags:
Avant,
Extensions,
Gecko,
Minor Players,
Trident
Posted on December 19th, 2007 | No Comments »
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
Tags:
Add-ons,
Digg,
Extensions,
Firefox
Posted on December 17th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
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.
Tags:
Add-ons,
Customized,
Extensions,
Firefox,
Themes and Skins
Posted on December 17th, 2007 | No Comments »
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).
Tags:
Add-ons,
Bugs,
Development,
Elsewhere,
Extensions,
Firefox,
Informational,
Merchandise,
Mozilla,
Themes and Skins