Hasta La Gadget!

Firefox has been talking up Australis, its next-gen browser interface, for quite some time now, and that celestial-sounding update has just landed on Firefox Nightly. Yes, finally curious users can test it out and evaluate the experience as Firefox gets closer to the final version.

Per a video preview on the Mozilla blog, one of the most immediately obvious changes with Australis is a new, curvier tab shape (like a rounded take on Chrome’s style). Firefox also designed the forward button to only appear when you hover over it, and the tool bar has been streamlined, with the bulk of browser settings accessible via a menu on the right-hand side. Firefox says Australis will offer “consistency and unification” across different devices, which likely means a similar look and feel along with the requisite saved tabs. Finally, enhanced customization settings should make it easier to tweak the browser to your liking. We’re definitely digging the softer, more minimalist look — check it out for yourself via the source links below.

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Source: Mozilla Future Releases, Mozilla UX, Firefox Nightly

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:

(Click to Enlarge)

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.

(Click to Enlarge)

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

Last month, a handset running Firefox OS was launched in Brazil, the LG Fireweb. If you’ve been holding out hope that one would be hitting shelves in the US sometime soon, you’re out of luck — at least for the foreseeable future. Mozilla has a strong focus on emerging markets with its mobile development, and […]

This article was written on November 29, 2011 by CyberNet.

With the holidays right around the corner it is important to make sure you’re getting the best deal for the gifts you are picking up. There are all kinds of browser extensions out there that can help you save a few dollars, but PriceBlink is one I always use.

PriceBlink is available for Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Safari and does price comparison shopping as you browse around some online stores. If it sees that someone else is selling the item cheaper or that there is a coupon available the extension will display a popup bar along the top of the webpage just like in the screenshot above. In my demonstration Newegg is selling a pair of headphones that I can get for half the price somewhere else. That is a pretty big savings.

By my count the service supports upwards of about 5,000 online merchants which means it should work with most of the retailers you shop. If you tend to shop around yourself then you may not need something like this, but if you’re more of an impulse buyer this can save a lot of dough.

PriceBlink Homepage (Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Safari Extension Available)

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on March 24, 2007 by CyberNet.

It’s here! People were wondering where Mozilla’s next milestone was for Firefox 3 and it has finally come. This release, like other Alphas, are geared towards developers and don’t really include much that casual users would find exciting. Here’s what’s new according to the release notes:

• Animated PNG (APNG) images are now supported.
• The DOM clientLeft and clientTop attributes are now supported.
• Introduced support for <link rel="offline-resource">, which puts resources into the browser’s offline cache. This allows a web application to ensure that its resources are available in the cache when the browser goes into offline mode. See Marking Resources for Offline Use for further details on offline support.
• Improved precision of layout and scaling across a wide range of screen and printer resolutions.
• Implemented cycle collection in XPCOM, which detects cases where two released objects hold one another, but neither is held by anyone else. In this scenario, both objects can safely be purged. Previously, the holds each has on the other would have prevented them from being purged.
• Added support for the HttpOnly cookie attribute, which marks a cookie as readable only by the server and not by client-side scripts.
• Added a new preference, “Warn me when web sites try to redirect or reload the page”, which notifies the user when the page specifies HTTP-EQUIV=refresh.

The APNG’s (Wikipedia article) are new and is something that could change how we see animated images on the Internet. Animated GIF’s have been around for quite awhile but their quality does not match the advancements made to date. There are some examples of APNG’s (example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, example 5, example 6), but they only work with the latest nightly releases of Firefox 3, and not with Alpha 3.

Since the images contain many more colors than animated GIF’s, it is only expected that the files would be much larger…and they are. The other thing that came to mind was whether these would start to become popular. Sure they are higher quality, but at this point very few people would create APNG’s because they are not supported across all browsers. I guess Mozilla is the first one stepping up and they’re probably hoping that other browser would soon add APNG support as well.

I had already found the feature to notify users of a redirect and mentioned that here along with providing screenshots. It is a great feature from a security standpoint but a lot of sites use redirects, such as Gmail when clicking on links in emails, which can make this feature annoying. As of right now they don’t have a whitelist option which would make it easier to approve common sites, but hopefully that is something that they add…just like they have for approving popups.

Lastly, I have put together a portable version which you can download below. This will make it easy for you to play with it, see what’s been happening, possibly test your own sites to make sure they still look okay, and then go back to your primary browser.

Windows: Gran Paradiso Setup Alpha 3.exe
Mac OS X: Gran Paradiso Alpha 3.dmg
Linux: granparadiso-alpha3.tar.gz
Firefox Portable 3 Alpha 3 (for Windows)

Source: FF Extension Guru’s Blog

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