Mozilla has stepped up to the plate with their launch of Firefox 4, which has now garnered well over 59 million downloads as of its launch on March 22nd. With App Tabs, much improved performance, and some incredible features like Panorama baked right in, I’ve adopted Firefox 4 as my browser of choice for the time being over Chrome and Safari. While I leave my love of WebKit behind (perhaps only temporarily), ConceivablyTech dug into the Firefox UX planning pages to give us a glimpse of what’s next for Firefox 5.
Posts tagged with "firefox"
Social and App Tabs to Play Big Role in Firefox 5
Firefox 4 Is Officially Live
While sites leaked out the Firefox 4 download yesterday, rumors cropped up that the download was the 2nd release candidate with the 4.0 name. I wasn’t interested in verifying the download or posting it until it officially went, and as of this morning you can download and visualize Mozilla’s success in realtime from glow.mozilla.org. It’s very cool, and also provides ample opportunity to download Firefox 4.0 for yourself.
The new Firefox 4 interface not only looks a lot better (the address bar improvements are very cool), but now you have something Panorama available where you can group tabs by dragging and drop websites into collections for work, play, research, or however you want to organize them. According to Mozilla, Firefox 4 3x faster than Firefox 3.6 in the Sunspider test, and scores 6x higher on the V8 test. You can check out all the features here and download Firefox 4 from the same page.
SendTab for Safari Shares Websites Between Browsers
Sharing websites is the staple of online communication, but we haven’t really figured out how to appropriately share links in person. Somebody overseas can be bothered with a Twitter link or quick email, but if you’re trying to share a video with a group of people (say at work), you ultimately end up with three terribly smelly people crowding around your computer, complaining about the monitor viewing angle and whatnot. So it’s time to further solve our ability to spread the latest offices memes with the SendTab extension for Safari.
Mozilla Releases Firefox 4 Beta 4 - Tab Candy Renamed to “Panorama” and Built-In
Firefox 4 is coming up great, and a huge Safari 5 fan is telling you this. Mozilla has just uploaded Firefox 4 Beta 4 to their servers (although the official Beta page hasn’t been updated yet) and you can go download it here. Update: official beta page now lets you download Beta 4.
The big news is, Tab Candy (or Tab Sets, or Firefox Uberview) has been renamed to Firefox Panorama (I love it) and it’s now built in Firefox 4, starting from this beta.
Tabs-on-top Now Available On Firefox For Mac Nightly Build
Unless you’ve been living under a giant rock for the past - well - few years, you should know that Firefox 4.0 is coming. A major new version of Mozilla’s browser with redesigned interface, new addon manager, new engine, lots of improvements and tweaks. Mozilla die-hard fans look at it as the ultimate program coming to a computer near them. We Mac users just think about how Mozilla badly screwed up with the UI on OS X in the past and wait with curious eyes for some stable version to actually ship.
Now, we have a nightly version (as usual, it’s dubbed Minefield) with the much-discussed tabs-on-top available for testing. You can also download a 64-bit enabled build for Snow Leopard.
So, how about these tabs?
Firefox Home Approved, Mozilla Fans Rejoice
Looking to access your Firefox profile in the cloud? Firefox Home, approved by Apple yesterday, can now be found on the App Store. While I don’t touch Firefox too often, I still appreciate some of its features and am looking forward to the latest update. For those still using the mighty fox, Firefox Home for the iPhone can collect your open tabs, bookmarks, and other related data so that you have a portable carry-on for that workflow.
You can download Firefox Home at this link.
[via TechCrunch and CNET]
Mozilla Explains Why Tabs on Top is Better for Everyone
Firefox isn’t removing the choice of placing tabs on the bottom. Rather, they’ve been debating on where to place tabs after a fresh installation. They’re arguing about default settings if you will, and while it’s not the most exciting news, Mozilla has decided that Firefox will come shipped with tabs on top as the default preference. Being a Chrome user, it’s certainly what I prefer.
Weave Is Now Firefox Sync, Soon Available in Firefox By Default
Weave was a quite popular extension for Firefox coming from the Mozilla Labs which allowed you to create an online identity and sync bookmarks, passwords, tabs, history and preferences across multiple computers and Firefox installations. I personally used the service many times back when I was a Firefox user and it saved me many hours of boring export / import. It was useful.
Firefox Home sends Bookmarks to your iPhone
Unfortunately it’s not Fennec, but at least it gives me access to the hundreds of Firefox bookmarks I’ve collected since 2004. Firefox Home (why not just call it Weave Sync?) is a Mozilla iPhone application that lets you sync bookmarks between your favorite mobile device, and your favorite web browser. While I’m more interested in the NES case in the video than the application itself, those few dozen iPad case links you saved (of which I’m guilty) can now follow you wherever you take you an iPhone. Click past the break for a demo vid.