This article was written on March 07, 2006 by CyberNet.
A Digger realized that in the meeting notes from today the Firefox team said that they are hoping for Firefox 2.0 Alpha 1 to be released in the next 3-4 days. It has been about a month since the scheduled release of Alpha 1 and there are many people anxious to toy around with it and have some fun.
If you haven’t read the meeting notes before then you might find them interesting to read since you can find out what is actually going on with the project. That is why opensource is so great, because people communicate openly!
This article was written on August 27, 2008 by CyberNet.
Mozilla has been looking at different ways to optimize the user’s experience when they open a new tab in Firefox. By default Firefox is set to display a blank page whenever a new tab is opened, and from there the user normally performs a search or navigates to one of their favorite sites. From the sounds of it they’re looking to add something much like what Opera already does with Speed Dial.
Using that idea one developer decided to create an extension called Auto Dial. It grabs information from your browser’s history to determine what your most visited sites are, and it will display them in a format similar to what you see in the screenshot above. The more popular sites are larger and listed towards the top, while the less visited sites are at the bottom and occupy less space. The number of items shown on the screen at a time will change depending on the size of your browser window.
As it stands right now Auto Dial is far from being anything fancy. The only way you can access the Auto Dial page is to visit chrome://autodial/content in Firefox, which you can then set as your homepage. If you want the page to appear whenever you create a new tab you’ll need to use an extension like Tab Mix Plus or New Tab Homepage.
I like some of the ideas Mozilla has for optimizing the new tab page, and it will be interesting to see if any of the improvements will be coming in the early part of 2009 when Firefox 3.1 is due out. Would you like to see a revamped new tab page, or are you content with the blank screen?
This article was written on May 03, 2006 by CyberNet.
While using the latest Firefox Nightly build I noticed that they no longer have the Extensions Manager, it is now the Add-ons Manager. It is not that much different except that the Themes is now built into the Add-ons Manager instead of having separate managers for both themes and extensions. They have also moved the uninstall button into a more convenient location.
I am sure this is part of Mozilla’s effort to bring a visual refresh to Firefox and help people forget that they pulled Places out of Firefox 2. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the visual refresh will look like!
NOTE: The download file below is for a nightly build of Firefox. Nightly builds are known to be very unstable and you should only download it after backing up your current installation.
This article was written on February 01, 2008 by CyberNet.
Mozilla hit a huge milestone the other day when the download counter for their add-ons rolled over the 600 million mark. That number only includes downloads from the add-ons sitea, and on top of that there are about 100 million update pings each day. The breakdown for the update requests are pictured to the right in the pie chart, and there are already more than 1 million update requests from users running pre-release versions of Firefox 3.
On a daily basis the add-ons site receives between 800,000 and 1 million downloads, and gets a whopping 4.5 million pageviews. All of that comes from people looking to get one of 4,000+ extensions that are currently hosted there.
I’m curious to see whether the integrated add-ons search tool in Firefox 3 will be able to boost the usage of the extensions. I know quite a few Firefox users who have never installed add-ons before, and probably don’t even realize that the browser is extensible. All they want Firefox for is the speed, reliability, security, and of course the “coolness” factor.
This article was written on May 07, 2007 by CyberNet.
Opera hyped their Speed Dial feature before they announced what it was by saying that it was something that no other browser had. This got a lot of people thinking about what it could be, and when they finally revealed the details I wasn’t disappointed. After Opera 9.2 was released with the Speed Dial feature in full swing I knew it wouldn’t be long before a Firefox extension was created to do something similar.
The Speed Dial feature is a time saver because you can create up to 9 sites to be displayed as thumbnails whenever you create a new tab. In Opera if you click the refresh button while viewing the Speed Dial page it will refresh the thumbnails of all the tabs so that you can see if anything has changed since the last time you visited the sites.
The Firefox extension, cleverly called Speed Dial, tries to provide the basic functionality that Speed Dial in Opera offers. For starters here is what it looks like:
It looks pretty close and serves a similar purpose, but it still lacks a lot of the things that makes Speed Dial great in Opera. Here are some things that you can do in Opera that you can’t do with this Firefox extension:
Drag around the thumbnails to rearrange the order of the sites.
Click on an unassigned spot to add a URL or bookmark.
Refresh the screenshots.
Have Speed Dial displayed each time you create a new tab. Well, you can do this in Firefox but it takes some extra work and another extension. With the right extension you can set your homepage to “chrome://speeddial/content/speeddial.xul” and have it opened each time you create a new tab. That’s quite a bit of extra work though.
In order to set a Speed Dial site with this Firefox extension you either have to add a toolbar button that is provided, or use the right-click menu entry that is available:
This has both its upsides and downsides. The upside is that you can quickly add whatever site your currently viewing to your Speed Dial, but the downside is that the sites always have to be added in this fashion. In Opera you can add sites straight from the Speed Dial page which is something I prefer to do.
This extension is still in the very early stages though so I would expect that it will get better over time. I am, however, surprised that it took this long for an extension like this to surface though.
This article was written on January 04, 2007 by CyberNet.
Ever since Firefox became a hit Mozilla has really been raking in the money. Actually, that is an understatement…they are pretty much bathing in money.
In 2005 the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation combined had revenue from all sources of $52.9M. $29.8M of this was associated with the Foundation (both before and after the creation of the Corporation). The bulk of this revenue was related to our search engine relationships, with the remainder coming from a combination of contributions, sales from the Mozilla store, interest income, and other sources. These figures compare with 2003 and 2004 revenues of $2.4M and $5.8M respectively, and reflect the tremendous growth in the popularity of Firefox after its launch in November 2004.
I would say $52.9 million in 2005 is not too shabby. Yes, that says 2005 because their 2006 numbers have not been released yet. If they experience the same amount of growth as they did from 2004 to 2005 (which is probably unlikely), then they will have earned more than $480 million in 2006! Employees are not taking all of this home despite what you were thinking. In fact, Mozilla only spent $8.2 million of the $52+ million earned in 2005 and they put the rest in the bank:
The combined expenses of the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation were approximately $8.2M in 2005, of which approximately $3M was associated with the Foundation. By far the biggest portion of these expenses went to support the large and growing group of people dedicated to creating and promoting Firefox, Thunderbird, and other Mozilla open source products and technologies. The rate of expenses increased over the year as new employees came on board. The unspent revenue provides a reserve fund that allows the Mozilla Foundation flexibility and long term stability.
I am really excited to see partnerships between Web browsers and search engines because it offers the developers an incentive to make a great browser, all while remaining free to the consumer. Browsers like Opera and Flock both have partnerships with search engines to be compensated for any ad revenue generated by users utilizing the built-in search box within the browser.
Below I have two buttons for those people who decide that they don’t want to support Mozilla in this way. Some people might donate money and feel that Mozilla should not receive a revenue from performing the searches, so I have made it easy to remove the referrer from the URL from the search box (you can also manually modify the google.xml file in the Firefox installation folder). The first button, “Replace Existing Google Search,” will only work if you delete the existing Google search engine first because it has the same name (“Google”). The second button, “Add Additional Google Search,” will add another search engine to your current list with the name “Google-R” which stands for “minus referrer.” That way you can always switch back and forth between the two options.
Note: Firefox is still capable of showing suggestions while you type if you use these.
I do recommend that you leave Mozilla as a referrer because it allows you to support them without you having to fork out any money. Thanks to Mozilla for making such a great browser…you have definitely earned every penny!
This article was written on February 07, 2007 by CyberNet.
Mozilla has just released the English version of Firefox 3 Alpha 2 (codename Gran Paradiso) and it is the first release of Firefox that passes the Acid 2 test. Well, it is still a pre-release version but it is on its way to be the final version that will be released later this year. If you haven’t heard by this point, the big thing with Firefox 3 is replacing the rendering engine with Cairo…which has improved a lot of things including how it scales images. Here is a list of what’s new from the Firefox 3 Alpha 2 release notes:
Core layout code affecting the calculation of widths in tables, floats, and absolutely positioned elements has been rewritten. The code for handling incremental layout of pages (as data arrives over the network, as images load, or as dynamic changes are made) has also been changed extensively.
Resolved remaining issues with ACID2 test compliance.
Support for the Web Apps 1.0 API for changing stylesheets.
The inline-block and inline-table values of CSS 2.1’s display property are now implemented.
XML documents can now be rendered as they’re downloaded instead of only after the full document has been loaded.
Greatly improved Mac widgets support since Alpha 1.
Improvements in the Cairo graphics layer.
I’m definitely excited about this release, but I just can’t bring myself to switch to this as my primary browser at this point because my GMarks extension doesn’t work. I know that I could just use the built-in bookmarking system but it is always nice to have my bookmarks available wherever I go. I’ve contacted the extension developer and he is currently looking into it, and once that gets fixed I plan on permanently switching over.
So what does the future look like for Firefox 3? As of right now the Alpha releases will be every 6 weeks or so, but they do not mention exactly how many of them they plan on doing. That puts us at the End of March before we see the next Alpha release and my estimation for the final release date is sometime this summer (probably the June/July timeframe). It will definitely be fun to see what the future has in store for us!
Note: In case anyone is wondering Places has not been put back in yet.
It wasn’t that long ago that Myriad gave us an exclusive sneak peek at its platform agnostic Android app emulator, Alien Dalvik 2.0. While we were there, the company gave us a glimpse of another project, called Remarkz, that piqued our interest. Remarkz is a slick little HTML 5 application that lets users annotate web pages with text and drawings and share the marked up pages via email, Facebook and Twitter. As opposed to using screen grab programs like Skitch or Jing, Remarkz keeps the web page links live and only requires adding a bookmark to get started. Additionally, a timeline feature lets you see when new notes are made on a page and who made them — giving it greater potential for use as a collaboration tool. True to Myriad form, it works on any platform (tablets, PCs and Macs) using any browser that supports HTML 5. It’s still in beta for now, but the app works pretty well despite a small bug here or there. Plus, given its egalitarian nature, Myriad hinted that we may see it on more screens (think big) in January at CES, which would up its cool quotient considerably. Interested? Check out a video walkthrough of the app after the break, and hit the source to start using it yourself.
This article was written on December 30, 2007 by CyberNet.
One thing that I’ve always enjoyed with Google’s test site, SearchMash, was the powerful sidebar that it included. It gives users quick access to videos, images, Wikipedia, blogs, and more. Determined to find a way to get similar features on the Google search page I decided to turn to Greasemonkey.
The script that I came across is called Google Extra, and it does everything that I wanted it to. It utilizes the extra space on the right side of the search results to display:
Images – Six small thumbnails are shown, and hovering over a thumbnail will show you a larger version.
Videos – Grabs four videos from YouTube, and if you hover over one of the thumbnails it will flip between three thumbnails from that video.
Wikipedia – You’ll see a condensed excerpt from Wikipedia.
Dictionary – A nice list of definitions for the word you’re searching for.
(Click to Enlarge)
The thing that really makes this script nice, however, is the ability to reorder the four different sections so that they are organized with your most useful ones first. If you don’t use one of the sections very often, such as the videos, just minimize it. Your settings are remembered for every search you perform.
Heads up: Don’t be concerned if you perform a search and don’t see the four different sections pictured above. It’s designed to only display a section if it actually has matching results, so most of the time the Wikipedia and Dictionary results probably won’t show up.
You probably have some speed concerns, which is understandable given that several different sites have to be queried in order to display the extra data. After all, you don’t want to compromise Google’s split-second search results. Don’t worry, the script is well designed so that it will load after your search results. Basically you won’t notice any speed decrease in how long it takes to show the search results, but the overall page will obviously take an extra second or two to load.
Google Extra Script Note: This script uses Greasemonkey-specific features, and for that reason it won’t work in Opera.
This article was written on August 11, 2006 by CyberNet.
It looks like Mozilla is really trying to catch bugs early on by using Coverity to scan the source code for errors. Mozilla licensed the Coverity tool more than a year ago but they didn’t want to say anything until they were sure that it was doing a good job. I can only see this tool as being a good thing as long as it is used in addition to the normal bug testing.
Hopefully the use of Coverity will lead to a very stable Firefox 2 which is scheduled for release 6-weeks from today. I’m guessing we won’t see Firefox 2 in final form until early October with the recent push back of Beta 2. Beta 2 has now been delayed a total of 2 weeks and is planned for August 23.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
Mozilla hit a huge milestone the other day when the download counter for their add-ons 
Ever since Firefox became a hit Mozilla has really been raking in the money. Actually, that is an understatement…they are pretty much bathing in money.
It looks like Mozilla is really trying to catch bugs early on by using 