best guide to add-ons, themes and tips for Firefox
One of the negative side effects of a new version of Firefox rolling out is the fact that some Firefox theme creators neglect to update their themes to the newest versions. So, when updating our browser, that leaves some of us in the dark, when it comes to using the themes we know and love. However, this time around many more popular themes have been updated to support Firefox 3.5 and here are my favorite ten for you to choose from.
The day a new Firefox version comes out is always a fun day for me, because right now I feel like a little kid on Christmas, waiting to get to open his presents. Today is the day that Firefox 3.5 is released to the public!
This year I hesitated to download any of the release candidates, because they always seem to spoil some of the surprise. So, like many of you, I am anxiously awaiting Mozilla’s web site update that says Firefox 3.5 is ready for download.
9:43 AM CST – Firefox 3.5 is out via Mozilla’s web site!
Go here to download. Be sure to add a comment and leave us your first impressions of the newest version of Firefox!
Time to check out some of the other Firefox sites and stories that are making news…
Mozilla Minefield: Yes, It’s Fast. Really Fast.
There’s been some talk around the blogosphere about Mozilla Minefield, the superfast and super cool-sounding browser by the folks who bring us Firefox. I decided to give it a whirl and see what it was really about.
Drag & DropZones Turns Right-Clicks into Gestures
Drag & DropZones is a clever interface tweak that allows you to perform nearly any action or search by dragging any page element—a link, email address, image, or page itself—onto a transparent grid you set up.
Turning Bookmarklets into Commands for Ubiquity
The main problem with bookmarklets is that they don’t provide a scalable solution for accessing their functionality. You can only have so many buttons on the toolbar before they become an unusable outbreak of pimples that clutter the browser’s interface. With a new utility function in Ubiquity, it’s now trivial to turn any bookmarklet into a Ubiquity command.
(Firefox Add-on Developers) It’s that time again…
With the release of the first beta of Firefox 3.1 today comes everyone’s favorite release-time festivity: extension compatibility updates! If you’re an extension developer using a maxVersion of 3.0.* or less, please test your extension before declaring 3.1b1 compatibility. Some of the changes for extension developers are listed here.
Mozilla releases Mobile Firefox Alpha – For Mac, Windows and Linux?
Mozilla has released the first Alpha version of Fennec, the mobile web browser which currently runs on the Nokia N810 internet tablet, and which will soon run on Windows Mobile. Fennec is just a code name. Eventually the browser will probably be called something like Firefox Mobile. And there’s a good reason for that. If you can view web content in Firefox, you can pretty much view it in Fennec.
Thanks to a new JavaScript engine (named TraceMonkey) it looks as if Firefox 3.1 is going to be getting a major boost in performance.
Here are the benchmarks thus far:
Be sure to check out Brendan’s Roadmap Updates for more. Also here are a few handy links from John Resig on the testing:
So the big question is, will Firefox be able to make Firefox 3.1 even faster in the area of JavaScript? If you have the nightly build of Firefox 3.1 installed, you can turn TraceMonkey on by going to about:config and then toggle the javascript.options.jit.content setting from false to true. For the rest of us out there though, this is just one more surprise to look forward to once Firefox 3.1 gets rolled out to the public.
For more info, be sure to check out Firefox 3.1 to Get More JavaScript Speed Optimizations – as the CyberNet team had done a good in-depth look into this and has done the best job at making it make sense to everybody.
Firefox 3 has been launched with great success, so now it is time to start looking at Firefox 3.1. Right now it appears Firefox 3.1 Alpha should be released July 25th with a beta coming as soon as early August. It doesn’t look like Firefox 3.1 will just be fixes though, there are a lot of new features coming our way too…
Here are a few of them that are targeted for Alpha 1:
Will Firefox 3.1 create as much excitement around the world as Firefox 3 did?
Has Firefox 3.0.1 given you trouble? Well it sound like you might want to contact the extension’s author to make sure thy are using the right compatibility range. Once again Basil does a great job at explaining this in a way that should make sense to us all.
When add-on authors publish their add-on they declare the compatibility range for an add-on. It typically looks like “2.0 to 3.0.*” – meaning that at minimum, this add-on requires Firefox 2.0 and works with any maintenance release of Firefox 3.0. (End of the compatibility range is also called the maxVersion).
Some add-on authors have erroneously used “3.0″ as their maxVersion so when users with these add-ons upgrade from Firefox 3.0 to Firefox 3.0.1, the add-on gets disabled. We encourage these add-on authors to use “3.0.*” as their maxVersion.
So shoot your favorite extension authors an e-mail and ask them to get this fixed, or check to see if this might be the problem. Another suggestion for people with lots of problems would be to try running Firefox with a new profile or Safe Mode. In Safe Mode, you can reset some settings or disable extensions and themes that might be the source of the issue. By comparing Firefox behavior in normal mode to its behavior in Safe Mode with various items disabled, you may be able to diagnose issues.
One of my favorite Mozilla personalities, Asa Dotzler posted an article the other day debunking a lot of F.U.D. about Firefox and how it is the “new security threat” we should all be worried about, according to an article on PC World’s web site. Not often do I sit and read, thinking to myself, “Haha, yeah booyyy!” and “Take that!” but Asa did a great job at taking apart this guy’s argument.
You can check out Asa’s thoughts and the PC World article and make your own decision though. In the red corner from PC World we have Stuart J. Johnson…
“Many people are switching from Internet Explorer to alternative browsers such as Firefox and Safari. Though that might make them feel more secure, the shift has also opened new doors for bad guys.”
In the blue corner, from Mozilla we have Asa Dotzler!
“Stuart J. Johnston, over at PC World’s Bugs and Fixes column, does a fabulous job confusing and unnecessarily alarming Firefox users, while at the same time conflating the valuable contributions being made by the ethical security researcher community with the malicious activities of “bad guy” hackers. That’s quite an accomplishment in just 500 words.”
Who is your money on?
Just got my update a short time ago, have you gotten yours. Looks like Firefox 2.0.0.1.4 was released yesterday afternoon, and if you have automatic updates enabled in Firefox, you should be getting it yourself in 24-48 hours. This looks to be like a critical security update because only one change mentioned in the release notes. Wasn’t rolled in together with any other fixes.
Here are the details from Mozilla:
Fixes for security problems in the JavaScript engine described in MFSA 2008-15 (CVE-2008-1237) introduced a stability problem, where some users experienced crashes during JavaScript garbage collection. This is being fixed primarily to address stability concerns. We have no demonstration that this particular crash is exploitable but are issuing this advisory because some crashes of this type have been shown to be exploitable in the past.
To update you can activate your automatic updates, go to help and then “check for updates” or download the most recent version at getfirefox.com.
The last of the Firefox 3 betas has hit the scene, and at this point it is hard to believe they are still finding things to improve on. So where are the improvements from Beta 4 to Beta 5 of Firefox 3? Well this is what Mozilla says:
Firefox 3 Beta 5 includes more than 750 changes from the previous beta, improving stability and web compatibility, providing platform and user interface enhancements, and resulting in the fastest Firefox ever. Many of these improvements were based on community feedback from the previous beta.
Be sure to check out all of the release notes, and to take a full tour – Mozilla Links has you covered yet again. So if this is the latest of the betas, what does come next? The next release should be a release candidate version which will be what we can expect to see in the final process. With the release candidates they will be having more people test things out and kind of polishing little things here and there.
So should you or should you not be using Firefox 3 yet? I would say for 90% of the population or people using Firefox, no. You should at least wait for the release candidate versions or the final version. The fact of the mater is, even though Firefox 3 looks good it still is not done yet. The idea of bringing this topic up started after reading a post over at Cybernet News:
There is a lot of talking going around the Internet about Firefox 3 Beta being ready for mass usage. It’s because of an article by Reuters where the creators of Firefox supposedly told them that the Firefox 3 Beta is ready for everyone to use after months of being in development.
So I thought I would do what I can to help spread the words too about Firefox 3 being nice, pretty but not ready for prime time just yet. Just to give you an idea of how long you should wait – I haven’t even replaced Firefox 2 yet. Personally I’ll wait till it goes into the "release candidate" versions so that I can get ahead of the curve with some of your questions about it.
Also major "shame shame" on Reuters for not doing their homework on this.
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Mitch Keeler is nothing more than your average Joe trying to leave his mark on the world though both his professional work and his online projects, articles, podcasts and more.
