Hasta La Gadget!

Hard to believe that the infamous “fragmentation” term is now being bandied about in the web browser world, but sure enough, it’s Microsoft using the term today to describe the brave new realm we’re living in. If you’ll recall, Google defended its decision to not include H.264 support natively in Chrome, but maintained that WebM plug-ins were coming to Safari and Internet Explorer 9. Today, Microsoft’s kinda-sorta returning the favor. Following the outfit’s release of a Firefox add-on to bring full H.264 support to Windows machines, the outfit is releasing a plug-in for Chrome (only the Windows version for now) that provides support for H.264. Furthermore, it’s committed to supporting third-party WebM video plug-ins; to quote, users “will be able to play WebM video in IE9.” It’s fairly obvious that Microsoft’s taking this golden opportunity to push its browser as one that supports everything (rather than just its own preferred format), but regardless of the motives, we’re just happy to see differences put aside and compatibility finding priority.

Microsoft releases H.264 plug-in for Google Chrome, vows to support WebM video in IE9 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Feb 2011 14:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on June 08, 2006 by CyberNet.

Google Sync is a new Firefox extension that Google released and it will allow you to synchronize your browser’s settings so that you can always pick up where you left off. The extension will synchronize your bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, open tabs, and saved passwords. Now you will even be able to get your bookmarks, passwords, etc… when you are at work or school.

You can find the download for the extension at the Google Sync’s Homepage below or you can just click on the direct link. I found the direct link because Google doesn’t let Firefox 2 users download the extension unless you find the link to the extension so that you can prevent them from checking your browser version.

Google Sync Homepage
Direct Link To Google Sync Extension

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on March 14, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

I am actually surprised at how many times I see people asking whether Firefox needs to have some sort of widget engine built-in. I think a lot of that stems from Opera having the built-in widget handler, so a lot of people think that Firefox is behind in the times as far as this goes.

One of the big reasons that Opera does have this feature is to allow people to add more to the browser since it is not extensible in other ways. For example, there is a widget for Opera that will retrieve and display the weather which is something an extension for Firefox already does. So it is kinda a tradeoff in some sense, but most people prefer to have extensions like Firefox offers over the widgets that Opera has.

Not only that, but you also have to keep in mind that widgets are all over the place already. Both Mac and Windows users can download the Yahoo! Widget Engine that is compatible with thousands of widgets users have already made. Well, Mac users already have a built-in widget system so they probably won’t need to use this and Vista users also have what are called gadgets and they too are the same thing. Widgets are very rapidly becoming more and more part of the operating system.

If you’re really a widget freak and you need to have them in Firefox, then you’ll want to checkout a service called YourMinis. It is yet another personalized homepage but I would say it is just as nice, if not better, than Netvibes. A few months back I started to tinker around with the service and have loved it ever since. What makes it unique?

One of the things I love the most about it is being able to see a view of all my tabs and actually drag-and-drop them from one tab to another. You can get to this view by using the little icon next to the Sign In/Sign Out links in the upper-right corner. It’s really just something you need to play with because you won’t realize quite how cool it is until you try it.

Yeah, I know it is just a website, so why bother mentioning it as a widget handler for Firefox? They actually offer an extension for Firefox that will let you overlay the YourMinis page onto any site that you are currently visiting. It makes the background semi-transparent so that you can still see the page that you were in the process of viewing (pictured to the right).

YourMinis definitely has its perks over a traditional gadget system. One of the biggest that comes to my mind is that your computer is not doing the bulk of the work, so your memory usage won’t be quite so high. In the past I have always been selective with the widgets I choose to use because each one will add more work to my computer. By using YourMinis, my computer can take it a little easier.

Not only that, but I’ll also have my widgets with me wherever I go, which I’m sure is huge for anyone that has more than one computer. It just makes some things so much easier, like checking my 6 different Gmail accounts from one convenient location. Or create a tab just for doing countdowns to upcoming events. With YourMinis you can create as many widgets as you want and you can even use their wonderfully designed feed reader to keep up on the latest news from around the Web.

There is one thing that I have found to be a little distracting with YourMinis though, and that is the load time for the widgets on your personalized page. I recommend creating multiple tabs and dividing up your different widgets, making sure to place only the most important ones on your main tab. Right now when I load the site it can take 15 to 20 seconds to completely load all 11 of my widgets, but after trimming them down to just 5 on my main tab it only takes about 5 seconds to load them.

So to answer the question that this article revolves around…no, Firefox does not need a widget system. I think a very limited number of people would actually use it, so it would hardly be worth the developers’ time to create a feature only a handful of people would use. Widgets are definitely making their way into everyone’s lives, but they don’t need to be built-in to the browser.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on January 15, 2006 by CyberNet.

People are starting to find out about Firefox 1.5.0.1 RC1 which has recently been added to the Mozilla FTP server. It also appears that they have gone through and completed quite a few fixes in this build:

* Fixed: 319004 – Overlong page title causes hang on subsequent startups.
* Fixed: 312415 – Selected images (from a selection of the document to print) are black.
* Fixed: 319357 – Crash in browser when attempting to print a text selection [@ nsImageWin::DrawTile].
* Fixed: 296907 – <canvas> fill/stroke shouldn’t destroy path.
* Fixed: 299343 – Can’t copy and paste into the beginning of a line (Midas/designMode).
* Fixed: 301678 – XML object parsed from string from flash throws permission denied error when accessed.
* Fixed: 309044 – Flashplayer 8 “Bad NPObject as private data!”.
* Fixed: 312550 – Incorrect wrapping in RTL textarea with horizontal scrollbar.
* Fixed: 316821 – Crash with moz-border-radius and small font-size.
* Fixed: 318489 – Unable to create new XMLHttpRequests and DOMParsers from an XPCNativeWrapped window (e.g. in a Greasemonkey script).
* Fixed: 315434 – Security error with remote <xul:tabbox>: can’t switch tabs if chrome has focus.
* Fixed: 105894 – Clicking a partially off-screen link shouldn’t scroll the page.
* Fixed: 314222 – If link target URL has non-ASCII char that is not encoded by UTF-8, the default file name is always escaped at “Save Link As…”.
* Fixed: 315509 – Crash: array_unshift doesn’t handle holes properly [@ js_DeleteProperty – array_unshift].
* Fixed: 306067 – Crash involving autocomplete.
* Fixed: 320488 – Crash [@ nsSHistory::EvictWindowContentViewer].
* Fixed: 313988 – [Mac 10.3] Positioned select drop-down doesn’t work.
* Fixed: 298502 – [Mac 10.2] Empty pulldown menu and Firefox hangs.
* Fixed: 312154 – [Solaris] Start script does not take care of running instance.

Linux Download
Mac Download
Windows Download

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on July 24, 2006 by CyberNet.

By this point I think most people know the frustration that I had with how Mozilla handled the scrolling tab-bar in Firefox but it looks like they have found a good solution. By default I can now have a much more reasonable number of tabs open, in the area of 20-30, before the tabs start to scroll. Thank you Mozilla!

Even better is that the latest nightly build has a button located to the far right side of the tab-bar that will show you a list of ALL your open tabs. This makes it easier to navigate your sites when the tabs get so small you can hardly read them. In the demonstration picture that I took above you can see that my tabs are so small that they are hard to read which makes the tab-navigation button very useful. You can very easily see which tab you have selected because it will be displayed with bold text in the list.

At first I was wondering why they wouldn’t just make the button appear when your tabs overflow and start scrolling, but I am glad they didn’t because I have found it to be quite useful! If you decide you want to live on the edge and try out the latest nightly build of Firefox then go ahead, but you may experience some instability since this is not a released version!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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