Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on March 10, 2008 by CyberNet.

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It’s here! Firefox 3 Beta 4 has been added to Mozilla’s FTP’s, and the distribution has already begun among download sites. This release was expected by the end of February, but they must have hit a few bumps in the road. And now Firefox 3 Beta 5 is currently scheduled for late March.

If you’re wondering what’s new in this release there isn’t that much that I can show you. The release notes for Firefox 3 Beta 4 have not been updated to reflect the release, and so I winged it:

• The Vista theme now shows up correctly for those of you running Vista on your computer, and you can see the various icons in the screenshot above.
• The really good news lies in some of the improvements that they’ve made under-the-hood. For example, as we previously outlined Firefox 3 really takes the cake on the SunSpider JavaScript test. Those changes have been rolled into Firefox 3 Beta 4, and hopefully you’ll see some better performance because of it.
• Hundreds of bug fixes have landed in this release.

Okay, now it’s your turn to try it out! Mozilla hasn’t updated the official Beta site yet, but the necessary files have been added to the FTP. Our downloader, as always, balances the load across all the servers that are hosting the setup file which eases the burden on Mozilla’s servers. So download until your heart is content:

Note: The build ID is 2008030714, which means this version was compiled on March 7th. This is not the same version that was posted last week by some download sites, such as BetaNews.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

Google promised that we’d get hands-free voice search in Chrome back at I/O 2013, and it’s delivering today with the beta of its Voice Search Hotword extension for desktop Chrome 31 users. As long as you’re either sitting at Google’s home page or have a new browser tab open, the add-on lets you start a search by saying “OK Google,” much as you would in Android 4.4 KitKat. Anyone eager to move beyond mouse-and-keyboard queries can grab the extension today from the Chrome Web Store.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Google

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Via: Google (Google+)

Source: Chrome Web Store

This article was written on January 02, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

There’s no doubt that your browser stores a lot of important information that could leave you in quite a bind should it disappear all of a sudden. The Firefox users out there probably have a bunch of extensions installed and configured, settings tweaked just the way they like them, obscure passwords stored that no human could possibly memorize, and enough bookmarks saved to make even a hardcore geek nauseous.

I don’t find much joy in the fact that a hard drive can crash at anytime for any number of reasons. We’ve had it happen twice this year, but fortunately for us we had backups of all our most important information. You shouldn’t even think twice about backing up your browser’s profile, and that’s why today we’re going to show you two easy and free Firefox profile backup solutions!

–MozBackup (Homepage)–

This is a small program that you can download, and on the website you’re given the choice between an installable version or a no-install ZIP version. I opted for the ZIP version because I can always keep it on my USB drive, which conveniently happens to be the place where I store my Firefox profile backup.

MozBackup is not restricted just to Firefox profiles either. It can also backup profiles for Thunderbird, Seamonkey, Mozilla Suite, and Netscape. Don’t worry, you’ll be prompted early on in MozBackup to select specifically what application and profile you want to backup.

You’ll then be able to pick exactly what you want to backup, such as bookmarks, history, extensions, passwords, cookies, and more. I’ve documented the entire process in screenshots:

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Once you’ve got the backup done it will create a single file that can be used to restore everything that you backed up. To perform a restoration just go back through the wizard, and on the second screen just choose the Restore a profile option instead of Backup a profile.

Tip: Close Firefox before using MozBackup, otherwise it will prompt you to do so in the middle of the wizard.

–FEBE (Homepage)–

I find this to be a rather interesting profile backup option for Firefox. FEBE (short for Firefox Environment Backup Extension) is an extension that can be used to backup important parts of your profile. Things like themes, extensions, bookmarks, preferences, cookies, passwords and more can all be saved to a single file, and restored at a moments notice.

What really makes this a fantastic choice for backing up your Firefox profile is that it has scheduling capabilities. You can choose to have your profile automatically backed up daily, weekly, monthly, or you can just set it to remind you every few days.

The first thing you’ll want to do after installing FEBE is go and setup the directory where your backups will be stored. Then from the Tools -> FEBE menu you can initiate your first backup of whatever profile items you chose in the options.

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As you can see this is an extremely intuitive option for backing up your Firefox profile, but MozBackup is also nice since it works with several different Mozilla applications. The choice of which backup solution is obviously up to you, but take them seriously because they could save you a lot of trouble in the future.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on November 15, 2007 by CyberNet.

Apple released a pretty big update to the Safari 3 Beta browser for Windows this morning. One of the most notable additions is the spelling and grammar checking, which can be done inline if you so desire. To have Safari check the spelling while you type just right-click in a text box, go to Spelling and Grammar, and then tick the Check Spelling While Typing option. As you can see above it underlines incorrect words with a dashed red line.

One of the other big features is the ability to perform a full history search. If you pull up the browser’s history and start to do a search it will scan all of the text for your visited websites, instead of just the titles and URL’s. This is almost like what Opera 9.5 offers, except that Safari’s isn’t searchable directly from the address bar.

There were also improvements to security, stability, compatibility, keyboard shortcuts, and several more features:

• Windows to be resized from any side – thank goodness! It was annoying have to grab the bottom-right corner each time I wanted to resize Safari.
• Includes an additional font smoothing option (“standard”)
• Supports listing FTP directories
• Links to proxy settings from Safari (Safari respects the proxy settings in the Windows Internet control panel)
• Adds cookie management
• Includes tooltips
• Allows printing of page numbers, titles, margins
• Improves bookmark collection interface
• Maintains original order of imported bookmarks
• Adds an interface for editing AutoFill information
• Adds a new preference to manually mark RSS articles as read
• Includes support for tilt wheels

If I didn’t know better I would almost say that Apple is trying hard to provide a decent version of Safari for Windows users. Who would have ever thought it would come to this?

Get Safari

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on October 29, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Web browsers are becoming more and more important to our everyday lives because they help keep us connected, informed, and productive. So it’s no wonder that there are several different people competing to be successful in this area including Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, Opera, and now even Google.

Today we wanted to take a look at an awesome new WebKit-based browser called Cruz. I wouldn’t have found out about it if it wasn’t for one of our readers, Yansky, who pointed it out. And I must say that it has some unique features that might be able to pull Mac users away from their current browser of choice.

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–The Awesome Features–

Here are some of the best features I’ve found in Cruz:

• Site-specific Cover Flow. As you can see in the screenshot above there is a Cover Flow system that is able to integrate with certain sites (Google Search, Flickr, Wikipedia, Digg, and Facebook, are a few examples). What it does is scan the page for links based upon certain CSS attributes that you specify. Digg is a great example of how it works because it shows thumbnails of each site listed on the page your currently viewing.
• Sidebar Sites. You can have a sidebar open on either (or both) side of the screen, and each one can serve up a website. You can also adjust the user agent for each sidebar independently from the primary viewing area, which is handy for viewing iPhone-only sites within your browser.
• Userstyles and Userscripts Built-in. If you’re a fan of Greasemonkey or Stylish in Firefox you’ll be happy to know that the functionality of both add-ons are already incorporated into the browser.
• Create TinyURL’s. You can right-click on any link inside the browser to have a TinyURL created for it. The shortened link will then be automatically copied to your clipboard.
• Google Search Thumbnails. If you’re more of a visual person you can choose to show thumbnails of websites next to each Google Search result.

–The Other Features–

Here are some of the other things that is included with Cruz:

• Open Plug-in Architecture
• Global Keyboard Shortcut
• Single-Window Browsing Mode
• Session Restore
• Full-Screen Mode
• Customizable Shortcuts
• Integrated Gears-loading (InputManager)
• Hidden “Closed” Windows
• Automatic Software Updates
• Custom User-Agent Strings
• Full WebInspector
• Custom Window Opacity/Level/Style

–More Screenshots–

And finally here are some more screenshots showcasing some of the browser’s features and preferences:

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–Overview–

Since the browser uses the same rendering engine as Safari most sites I tested worked just as you would expect them to. While some of the features are cool I don’t see Cruz pulling me away from using Firefox as my primary browser. But in their defense this is a very early release, and they might still have some other aces up their sleeve.

Cruz Homepage
Thanks Yansky!

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com