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Dec 17

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:

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:

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?

Dec 15

Google Talk for iPhone Works Well in Firefox/Opera Sidebar

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on July 03, 2008 by CyberNet.

The long-awaited Google Talk for iPhone is finally available, and it’s not in the form of an iPhone application. Instead, it’s simply a browser app which makes us wonder why it took Google over a year to make something for the iPhone. Perhaps they were too busy working on stuff for their own Android?

Anyway, Google Talk is available and was designed just for the iPhone. All iPhone users need to do is go to www.google.com/talk in safari, sign-in, and then they’ll be able to start chatting. Because we sold our iPhones on eBay so that we could upgrade to the iPhone 3G next week, we weren’t able to test this out first-hand, but from what others have said, it works exactly as it should. The one downside that we can see is that if you navigate away from the browser or open up a new window, your status is changed to “unavailable” and then when you return, your session will be restarted.

At first glance you may think that this doesn’t benefit you in any way because you don’t own an iPhone. Fortunately that isn’t the case, and there is actually a practical way that Opera and Firefox users can put this to good-use. Think Sidebar.

This new version of Google Talk for the iPhone fits really nicely in the sidebar of Firefox and Opera. Those of you who load sites in your sidebar already will know exactly what to do to get Google Talk up-and-running there. For those of you that don’t, you’ll want to reference this article here where we explain how it’s done for both browsers. Below are the links that you’ll need if you want to use Google Talk in your sidebar:

For a Google Account: http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/m
For a Google Apps account: http://hostedtalkgadget.google.com/a/mydomain.com/talkgadget/m

(Credit to Digital Inspiration for providing the links)

google talk iphone 2.png

Above is a screenshot of what Google Talk for iPhone looks like in the sidebar of Firefox. In no time, you’ll have a simple and clean version of Google Talk running in your sidebar. For those of you who prefer things simple, you’ll probably get a lot of using out of Google Talk for the iPhone, even if you don’t own an iPhone!

Source

Dec 05

Firefox 3 Beta 4 is Here!

Posted in: Today's Chili

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

(Click to Enlarge)

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.

Nov 10

Firefox 3 Alpha 6 Released…Now Come the Beta’s

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on July 03, 2007 by CyberNet.

Firefox 3 Alpha 6 with Add-ons Restarter
Click to Enlarge

The last of the Firefox 3 Alpha’s was just pushed out the door today, which brought some new features along with it. Here’s a quick list of what’s new along with some screenshots:

A new Quit dialog box
Improved cookie performance
Added a permanent â€˜Restart Firefox’ button to the Add-Ons Manager (as seen in the first screenshot) .
Miscellaneous fixes to download manager including correctly displaying large file sizes.
Various Places fixes.

Support for site-specific preferences – Firefox will now remember "text zoom" settings for a specific site. There are some other things that you can configure on a site-by-site basis as well, which can be found when right-clicking on a page and choosing the "View Page Info" option:

I was hoping to see some more changes to the Places bookmark management, but in terms of the UI not much has changed. It still isn’t at the point of the original Places we saw back in early Firefox 2 builds. Back then it provided a central location to manage your history, bookmarks, and subscriptions. As it stands right now the major additions to Places should be complete by Beta 1.

I also started going through the Product Requirements Document to see what things were still on track, and which weren’t going to make the cut for Firefox 3. There are quite a few low-priority features labeled as being "at risk" for not getting completed. The thing that gets me is that they are still planning to ship Beta 1 on July 31, at which time Firefox 3 should be feature complete, and there are still some big things that haven’t peeked out yet. For instance, a revamped download manager and a new Firefox theme are both higher priority items that haven’t been discussed too much.

I’m strongly hoping that they will be able to stay on track, but they still have a ways to go. I do wish that so many of the tab-related features weren’t labeled "at risk" right now, because some of them would be nice to have.

Download Firefox 3 Alpha 6 for:
Microsoft Windows 2000 or later
MacOS X 10.3.9 or later
Linux

Nov 04

Mozilla Firefox 3 Alpha 3 Released with APNG Support

Posted in: Today's Chili

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

Firefox 3 Alpha 3

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

Oct 05

CyberSearch 0.9.9: Better Icon Management, “Smart” Keywords, and More

Posted in: Today's Chili

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

cybersearch 099.png Here you thought that the only big announcements today were going to be from Apple. Looks like you were wrong! We’ve got another new version of our CyberSearch Firefox extension, and this time it packs more than just bug fixes.

P.S. I apologize for releasing these updates so frequently, but I’m trying to make the extension the best it can be.

–Keyword Icons–

The new CyberSearch 0.9.9 has two main features that are accompanied by a handful of bug fixes. The first thing that we’ve added is a slightly intelligent system that will try to guess what icon to use when you’re creating a new keyword. Basically what it does is grab the first URL you specify in the “Website URL” field, attach “favicon.ico” onto the end, and then paste it into the Icon URL field:

To have the icon URL regenerated you can click the “auto” link at any time. We also wanted to show a preview of what the icon looks like, and CyberSearch now does that by replacing the “help” image located next to the URL field. If the field is blank you’ll still see the question mark icon, and you’ll still be able to get help for that field by hovering over the icon even after it’s been replaced.

–Smart Keywords–

I know that we all love the keyword system that CyberSearch offers, but sometimes it can be difficult to remember all of your keywords once you have more than a handful. That’s why we came up with what we like to call “smart” keywords.

How do they work? Well, there isn’t really anything that you have to setup in order to start using them (they are enabled for everyone by default). That’s why they are so great. Just type a URL, followed by a space, and then the text you want to search for. You will instantly see results from only that site:

cybersearch smart domain.png

We, however, wanted to minimize the amount of work you needed to do in order to take advantage of this feature. Thats why you can also just press the spacebar after a full URL in the address bar to immediately search the contents of the site you’re currently on. Here’s an example where I was viewing the Firefox add-ons homepage, and all I had to do was press the spacebar followed by the extension name I was looking for:

cybersearch full url keyword.png

Notice how all of the results are from the Mozilla add-ons site? Cool, huh? You don’t have to spend time setting up an extensive list of keywords that you’ll never remember, and yet you can still search your favorite sites!

Keywords take precedence over the domain searching, and so any keywords you have setup will override this functionality. If you want to disable the setting all together you can do so in the General tab, and then uncheck the Automatically search domains option.

–And More–

We also threw in a couple of more minor fixes in this release:

When configuring keywords CyberSearch will truncate long URL’s that may appear in the drop-down menu.
HTML characters that appeared in the titles of results (ampersands, quotes, etc…) should show up as expected.

We’d very much appreciate it if you can kick around the new release to see if there are any bugs. The smart keywords won’t work with sites that have some special characters in them, such as question marks, and the reason we did that was because Google doesn’t like searching those kind of sites. Other than that anything should be fair game.

If you get a spare second don’t forget to leave a review for our extension. We’re currently sitting at 4.00 out of 5 stars, and we wouldn’t mind seeing it go up a little more. 😉

Get CyberSearch Extension for Firefox

Sep 20

Best Firefox 4 Theme

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on September 17, 2009 by CyberNet.

firefox 4 theme-1.png

There have been a few themes that have been developed using the mockups Mozilla made for Firefox 4.0. What’s funny is that while Firefox 4.0 is over a year away you can already get the same beautiful design without having to wait.

As you can see in the screenshot above the theme is extremely close to this particular mockup from Mozilla. Unfortunately, however, there are a few things that you have to install other than just a theme in order to get the full affect. The good news is that the theme developer outlines all of the different things you’ll want depending on exactly how far you want to go:

Strata40 – This is pretty essential… because it’s the theme itself.
StrataGlass – Needed for Aero glass effects on Windows 7/Vista.
Personal Menu – Needed for tools and bookmarks toolbar buttons. I noticed that if you hide the Menu bar that you’ll want to disable the ability to press the Alt key to quickly display the toolbar. If you don’t there is a small group of text that isn’t properly hidden by the theme.
Omnibar – Not essential but great for using the address bar for searching instead of the search box. You’ll probably want this because the theme seems to have a little bit of troubles if you have the search box displayed. Our CyberSearch add-on may also be handy in this respect.
Fission – Needed for “progress line” feature. Shows the page’s loading progress as a small line below the address bar.
The mockups also include a tabs on top version. If you would like a tabs on top version install an addon called Stylish, and then install this style.

It may sound like a lot of work, but I was actually able to get it all setup in less than 5-minutes. And there’s no need to say that I’ve had several people ask what browser I’m using when they’ve seen me running this.

Strata40 Firefox Theme [via ghacks]

Sep 12

Firefox 3: Have I Visited this Site Before?

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on April 13, 2008 by CyberNet.

There’s a new feature in Firefox 3 Beta 5 that I just came across yesterday when using the browser, and I’m not sure how long it has been there. What I did was I clicked on the icon for our site which brought up what would normally be security-related information for the page your viewing. Then I clicked the More Information button:

I was then presented with more details on the security of the site, which includes being able to view cookies or passwords for that particular domain. What I found to be really interesting, however, is that it says whether you’ve visited that particular site before… and how many times you have done so:

firefox visited this site

If you frequently clear out the browser’s history then it obviously won’t be able to keep track of this, but it’s been a month or so since I’ve done that. Needless to say I’ve visited our site quite a bit in that period of time. 😉

Aug 31

Firefox 3 Vulnerability Found in 5-hours

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on June 19, 2008 by CyberNet.

firefox vulnerable.jpg Mozilla has got to be happy that they’re Firefox 3 web browser has received over 12 million downloads since Tuesday, but it took only five hours for the browser’s first critical vulnerability to be discovered. Luckily details about the vulnerability have not been made public, and Mozilla has said that there’s no known exploit for the bug at this time.

At this point very little is known about the vulnerability other than the fact that you would have to click on a link to initiate it:

Successful exploitation of the vulnerability could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code. Not unlike most browser based vulnerabilities that we see these days, user interaction is required such as clicking on a link in email or visiting a malicious web page.

For those of you running Firefox 2 still… you’re not immune to this either. This affects both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3, and Mozilla is already working on a patch to plug the hole. I guess that means you’ll want to exercise caution when clicking on unknown links, but then again you should always be doing that. 😉

Mozilla Blog [via CNet]

Hasta La Gadget!

Mozilla Gets Places Back in Firefox 3, Prepares for Tagging

Google Talk for iPhone Works Well in Firefox/Opera Sidebar

Firefox 3 Beta 4 is Here!

Firefox 3 Alpha 6 Released…Now Come the Beta’s

Mozilla Firefox 3 Alpha 3 Released with APNG Support