Download Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 Release Candidate 2

This article was written on July 10, 2006 by CyberNet.

Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 Candidate Now Available

The second set of release candidates for Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 have been posted to the Mozilla FTP. You can get this build for Linux, Mac, or Windows (Installer or ZIP). The final release of Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 has also been pushed back to later this week.

Update:
A newer build can be found here.
 
A portable version of this build is also available.
 
Also, I have put together a nice guide on tweaking Beta 1 and some of its new features.

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Helpful Tip: Firefox “Secure Updates” Extension Warning

This article was written on October 19, 2007 by CyberNet.

Firefox Extension Secure Updates

Mozilla is trying to beef up extension security in Firefox 3 by ensuring that the updates are provided by a secure address. All of the extensions on the official Mozilla add-ons site will work perfectly with this new system, but there could be problems when venturing outside of the site.

An example of this happened when I tried to install a development release of Tab Mix Plus. I was prompted with a message that said:

“Tab Mix Plus” will not be installed because it does not provide secure updates

As expected there is a hidden setting that you can adjust to prevent Firefox from checking the address from which an extension retrieves its updates. Here’s what you have to do:

  1. Start Firefox.
  2. In the Address Bar type “about:config” and press Enter.
  3. Right-Click and select New->Boolean.
  4. A box requesting the Preference Name will popup and you should enter “extensions.checkUpdateSecurity” (without the quotes). Press OK to continue.
  5. Select “False” from the box and press OK again.

After that you should be able to install your extensions just as you normally would. Disabling this feature could pose a security risk though, so be careful with what extensions you install when this is disabled.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

Mozilla Prepares Automatic Updater For Firefox Users

This article was written on September 22, 2006 by CyberNet.

Mozilla is currently testing an update process for those people who will be making major updates (such as from Firefox 1.5.x to Firefox 2). They currently activated the new process for people who are upgrading from one nightly build to another nightly build.

The reason they are doing this is because some people don’t like to update to the latest software, heck, some people are still using Firefox 1.0.x! For that reason they don’t want to constantly bug people to upgrade to the latest version which is why they allow people to choose “Never” to upgrade to the latest major release.

The “Update Available” screen:

 

The license agreement (not exactly completed) 🙂

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Open All Your Favorite Sites at Once Whenever You Launch Your Browser

Open All Your Favorite Sites at Once Whenever You Launch Your Browser

Using a single site as your browser homepage seems so quaint. Here’s how to set multiple tabs as your homepage so they automatically start loading every time you launch your browser.

    



Mozilla Gets Places Back in Firefox 3, Prepares for Tagging

This article was written on May 22, 2007 by CyberNet.

There has been some good news lately on the progress of Firefox 3. Mozilla was able to get the backend of Places back into the latest nightly releases, but as of right now you won’t notice many differences. Once Places has been completed, it will offer a central location for users to manage things like their RSS feeds, website history, and bookmarks.

Firefox 3 Alpha 5 is due out around June 1, and by that time they will have Places functional, but it is doubtful that they will get around to polishing the frontend (the actual interface) by that point. Here are some tips that were pointed out in the forum regarding the use of Places as it stands right now:

  • Backup your bookmarks before running the latest nightly of Firefox 3! The file that you need to backup is called bookmarks.html and is located in your Firefox profile folder. Of course, there is an automatic backup created called bookmarks.preplaces.html just in case anything terrible should happen and for those who are too lazy to back it up themselves.
  • When you run the Firefox 3 nightly for the first time it will migrate from bookmarks.html to places.sqlite. The places.sqlite is the new storage location for your bookmarks, but Firefox 3 will also keep the bookmarks.html file up-to-date in case you want to switch back to Firefox 2. However, if you switch back to Firefox 2 and modify your bookmarks the changes will not appear in Firefox 3 the next time you launch it. This is because Firefox 2 doesn’t keep the places.sqlite file up-to-date like Firefox 3 does for bookmarks.html.

Here is a quick screenshot to show you that there is no difference to the interface yet, even though the backup file for Places has been created which verifies that Places is running:

Firefox 3 Places
Click to Enlarge

I also did a little digging, and noticed that in Firefox 3 Alpha 6 (due out June 29) more functionality will be added to Places, including tagging capabilities. I eventually came across this image that demonstrates four different methods of implementing tags in the bookmarks:

Firefox 3 Tags & Bookmarks
Click to Enlarge

The problem that they are trying to conquer is getting around those people who don’t understand what tags are and how they are used. Judging by the smiley faces in the mockup, they have determined the last option (the one furthest to the right) to be the best. I would have to agree with that because if I was going to bookmark or tag a site I would want to have a nice unified interface for doing it. This solution provides just that. The only thing that I’m hoping they implement is an auto-complete feature that will show a listing of matching tags as the user types them.

So what do you think about the tagging being built-in to Firefox?

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

FoxieWire: Digg-Like Site for Mozilla News

This article was written on April 06, 2007 by CyberNet.

FoxiewireSpreadFirefox has announced a new Digg-like site specifically for Mozilla news. The site is called FoxieWire and uses the Pligg software as the foundation to handle the user voting. Here is what SpreadFirefox had to say about the launch:

If you see a news story or information about items related to Mozilla and its products, go to Foxiewire and submit it for others to view and vote on, or you can use Foxiewire’s bookmarklet to submit news from anywhere online. It’s a great site to grab fresh Mozilla news to post on your website or blog.

Any Mozilla content is acceptable including Stories and information about Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Sunbird, and also stories about the people who maintain and develop those products. Basically anything goes as long as its Mozilla related.

At this point it needs some publicity to get the ball rolling, and they really need to feature it somewhere on the Mozilla homepage where it will attract the right people. As it stands they have 18 members and some of the top stories have only 2 votes. One of the things they could do to help out a little bit is remove the requirement that a user has to be registered in order to vote. This would help promote a lot more participation from people just passing by.

The other thing that came to my mind is whether there are just too many Digg clones on the Internet which may deter people from becoming a member? Sure some of them are very focused such as FoxieWire, but these kind of sites require a lot of user dedication in order to become useful and most people already focus a lot of their attention on the real Digg.

If you feel like joining the new FoxieWire site you can head on over and register. Once you got that done you can start submitting your favorite Mozilla-related articles that you find around the Web.

Thanks to Chris in the forum for pointing out the new site!

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

Firefox Start Screen For Windows 8 Version Spotted

Firefox Start Screen For Windows 8 Version SpottedThe good people over at Mozilla are currently working on the latest version of the Metro/Modern user interface port, and right now, it seems to be on track for a release later in January next year. As of now, however, the online meeting notes for the Mozilla team members do show a rather interesting screenshot – that of a new start screen user interface for Firefox for Windows 8. This mockup start screen that you see above will be able to deliver helpful hints for those who might be a wee bit confused by the new options that are made available.

For instance, the screen itself will show off any bookmarks which might be set up, in addition to the sites which are visited the most by one particular Firefox user, as well as how one is able to access tabs simply be right-clicking or by pulling them down with a finger, assuming one is running it on a touchscreen enabled device. Apart from that, the user interface team for Firefox is tipped to work on the “Windows 8 First Run experience” beginning sometime next week, which is good news. After all, starting sooner is always a whole lot better than later, right? [Press Release]

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  • Firefox Start Screen For Windows 8 Version Spotted original content from Ubergizmo.

        



    Release Candidate Of Firefox 2 RC2 Available

    This article was written on October 05, 2006 by CyberNet.

    Update:
    Firefox 2 RC2 has actually been released and can be downloaded from here.

    Firefox Logo Mozilla has placed the second release candidate of Firefox 2 RC2 on their FTP. This is another confusing version because it should be called Firefox 2 RC2 RC2 so I tried to word it a little smoother.

    The official testing day for this release candidate of Firefox 2 RC2 is tomorrow (Friday) and the scheduled release date is Tuesday, October 10. Everything seems to be running smoothly for me so they shouldn’t have any trouble making that date.

    If you don’t feel like scouring through the FTP looking for your language you can use the downloader that I tweaked to work with the FTP:

    It doesn’t appear that they have every language available but from what I counted but most of them should be there.

    As far as changes go there isn’t anything visible since Firefox 2 RC1 was released. We are about a month away from the official release of Firefox 2 so most of the work will be fixing bugs to make sure there aren’t any major problems when it gets released. For the most part the visual changes are done, which is good because I like how everything looks.

    The weekly updates also say that Thunderbird and Firefox 1.5.0.8 will ship a little after Firefox 2 is released. At that point I would hope most people would want to upgrade to Firefox 2, but I am sure some people aren’t going to want the “bloat”.

    Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

    CyberSearch Passes 50,000 Downloads

    This article was written on May 07, 2009 by CyberNet.

    cybersearch downloads.pngOur homegrown CyberSearch Firefox extension has hit a big milestone last week as it passed the 50,000 download mark! I never expected the extension to be that well received, but I’m happy to see that so many users are finding it to be useful.

    On average it looks like there are about 10,000 users running our extension each day, and at its peak there were about 13,200 users. If you’re interested in more stats they are all publicly available here.

    So what’s next with CyberSearch? As of right now I don’t have any plans on adding new functionality, but one of the most requested features is to add support for other search engines like Yahoo. I would really like to do that, but the last time I looked at Yahoo’s search API it wasn’t quite as elaborate as what Google offers. So it would probably take a significant amount of work to make it work the way I’d want it to.

    The main thing I’m focusing on right now is making sure the extension remains compatible with pre-release versions of Firefox 3.5, because as a Beta tester myself I know it can get frustrating when an extension stops working. I’m not using nightly builds right now though, so if you see a bug in a nightly release please shoot me an email so that I can look into whether it’s something I need to resolve.

    We’ve updated the extension so that Firefox 3.5 testers should be able to install CyberSearch without needing to force the compatibility, which is something I’ve received several requests for. So if you’re using the extension I hope you’re enjoying it, and as always feel free to submit your feedback.

    Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

    CyberNotes: Reduce Tab Clutter in Your Browser

    This article was written on April 18, 2007 by CyberNet.

    CyberNotes
    Web Browser Wednesday

    Tabs are probably one of the things that have almost become a requirement for Web browsers. Without tabs I know for sure that my productivity would dramatically decrease because they help me multitask in a way that keeps all of my Web browsing separated from my other applications. Heck, I probably average around 20 tabs open at a given time, and I can’t imagine having a separate window for each one of those cluttering up my Taskbar.

    Now that I’m am addicted to tabs I find myself looking for ways to keep them better organized and separated. Sometimes this consists of opening a few different windows and separating out the tabs between them, or there are even some Firefox extensions that can help you get a little more organized.

    —Firefox Extensions—

    Seeing that Firefox is one of the most customizable browsers available I’m sure it won’t come as a surprise to you that there are a few extensions that can help reduce your tab clutter. The first extension is called Faviconize and you can set it up to collapse a tab down to only its icon. If you keep a large number of tabs open at any given time then this will save you a lot of room:

    Faviconize

    Then there is the Tab Groups extension which is essentially folders for your tabs. This is useful for me because I always have articles that I want to read when I get more time later on. I know that if I bookmark them I’ll forget to go back and read them, but with this extension I can keep the tabs open without cluttering up my tab bar:

    Tab Groups for Firefox

    The Separe extension is a little like the Tab Groups extension in the sense that you group your tabs, but it doesn’t use a folder-like structure for them. Instead it basically creates a blank tab that is orange in color, and you can place it anywhere on the tab bar to serve as a divider. It also includes a group management window that allows you to move tabs from one side of a divider to another:

    Separe

     

    —Drag and Drop—

    Being able to drag and drop tabs between browser windows is something that both Firefox and Opera support. The concept is simple: open up multiple windows for your browser and drag tabs between them.

    Opera Drag and Drop

    Opera and Firefox each do drag and drop differently. Firefox actually makes a duplicate tab in the new window and doesn’t close the original, whereas Opera closes the original tab after it has been moved to the new window. I actually prefer the way Opera handles it because the reason I am moving a tab from one window to another is to reduce clutter, and by it automatically closing the tab in the original window it saves me an extra click.

     

    —Overview—

    I love seeing how tabs have evolved over the years and how they have become an important part of a user’s daily lives. I’m not sure what new additions will be added to tabbed interfaces, but if I had to guess I would would say being able to select multiple tabs simultaneously would be the next big thing (maybe hold down the Ctrl key and select multiple tabs?). You could then drag multiple tabs from one window to another, or close only the selected tabs. That may not seem like a ground-breaking feature, but it is something I have wanted for quite some time.

    Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com