Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on July 11, 2006 by CyberNet.

Unfortunately I have to be the bearer of bad news and tell you that Firefox 2 Beta 1 will not be released today. Linux News reported this last night and said Mozilla will release Beta 1 later this week.

If you don’t want to wait any longer then you can download Firefox 2 Beta 1 Release Candidate 2 that Mozilla made available yesterday. I have also made a portable version of this build for those people looking to take a slightly safer route to testing. After you have it up and running you can start to tweak it with a guide that I put together. In the guide I cover some features like removing the close button from every tab or forcing Firefox to restore your session each time you restart the browser. At least Mozilla has made some things available to us that will tide us over until the official release!

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on May 29, 2008 by CyberNet.

Since the release of Firefox 3 is right around the corner it comes as no surprise that Mozilla is trying to rally the troops community. Back in 2006 they celebrated World Firefox Day by getting people to invite their friends to try Firefox, and right about the time Firefox 2 launched Mozilla gave the much deserved acknowledgements. This is just one of the several campaigns Mozilla has come up with to help spread the Firefox browser, and it’s obvious that they know how to harness the power of the people.

This year they are doing things a little differently, and they are hoping to set a Guinness World Record for the number of downloads in 24 hours. As I sit here writing this they have over 125,000 people who have pledged to download Firefox 3 in the first 24 hours, which Mozilla says will happen sometime in June 2008. It shouldn’t be hard for them to crush the record… mostly because the record is currently non-existent. They are shooting for 5 million downloads, which is possible since Firefox 2 received 1.6 million downloads on the first day back in 2006. But they will essentially be making it in the record books no matter what.

If you are participating there is one thing you should know if you want your download to count. You actually have to download the full installation, and the download must complete. Updating the browser will not count towards the record, but then again they probably won’t release the automatic update on the first day. They’ll be using a cookie system to try and weed out any duplicate downloads.

You can help spread the word about the Download Day by placing any of these banners on your own site, or in the signature section of your emails. Oh, and there will be a certificate the you can print on Download Day to commemorate the event.

Firefox World Record Homepage
Thanks to Natmaster and Max for the tips!

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on October 11, 2007 by CyberNet.

Mozilla has been working hard to get Places into Firefox 3, and they are making some good progress. Back in September we saw a nice mockup of what to expect from the Places Organizer, and about a week after that Oropher pointed out in our forum that the first major UI change occurred.

At the time the only modification was the move away from the classic Menu Bar that resides in the current Firefox 2 bookmark organizer, but just today another new feature landed in the latest nightly build. It’s one that I have been anticipating for quite some time … “smart folders” (I made up the name). There are 6 smart folders that come with Firefox 3, and the bookmarks listed in each are generated on-the-fly like the Smart Playlists in iTunes. Here are the six folders that you’ll see in the latest nightly build:

• Recently starred pages
• Recently visited starred pages
• Most visited starred pages
• Recently used tags
• Most used tags
• Most visited pages

Below is a screenshot of what the smart folders and redesigned Places Organizer look like. What’s left to do in Places? They still have to add the history and downloads to it, but other than that they just need to add some polish. Oh, and they need to get the “Preview” feature working as you can see in the screenshot below. It’s supposed to show a thumbnail of the bookmark you have selected, but right now it is just a place holder.

Overall things are looking pretty good for the next milestone that’s due out on October 30th.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on October 10, 2007 by CyberNet.

Mozilla made an announcement today regarding their future plans to deliver a Mobile Firefox. This isn’t the first time that we’ve heard of something like this from Mozilla, but this time they sound extremely serious.

There are already mobile Mozilla browsers available today, one of which is pictured above and is only available to Nokia N800 and N770 users. It offers full AJAX support, RSS feed previews, add-ons, and more.

There is also the Minimo browser for Pocket PC’s, and the recently released Joey service. Mozilla plans on continuing to develop Joey further, but Minimo is unfortunately getting kicked to the curb. I actually use Minimo as my main browser on my Pocket PC because it is one of the few free tabbed alternatives for Windows Mobile. Mozilla has said that Minimo was a valuable experiment that has given them information on how Gecko (Mozilla’s rendering engine) operates in mobile environments, but it will no longer be developed.

The best news they posted is the idea of Mobile Firefox having support for extensions. This could make it easy to integrate the browser into services like Flickr, Twitter, email accounts, and more without needing to install additional applications. This can be pretty amazing depending on how well Mozilla is able to implement it, and what kind of control they are able to give to developers.

Mozilla is expanding the team of contributors for the mobile project, but when is the Mobile Firefox release date? That’s a good question, and Mozilla has said that it will certainly not be before 2008. The mobile project will use new technology that won’t be available until after Firefox 3 ships, but they can probably pump out some barebones test versions by the middle of next year.

The inevitable question that comes to my mind now is how will this affect Opera Mini usage? Opera has almost been alone in this market for quite some time, but will Mozilla be able to capture the large market that Opera Mini already has? For last month Opera Mini had a 0.39% market share, which isn’t bad when that’s putting it up against desktop browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Source: Mozilla Blog & Download Squad
Thanks for the tip “s”!

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on October 06, 2006 by CyberNet.

Wow, Mozilla has placed Firefox 2 RC2 into the releases folder on the FTP and the Release Candidate download page says that they will be posting the links at 3PM PDT. It looks like they are trying to recover some lost time from previous delays by shipping this as soon as possible.

Like always the drop-down menu below will generate the exact same link that the Mozilla download page will consist of later today. This means that it uses the load balancing instead of linking directly to an FTP location.

I still believe that Mozilla will have a hard time hitting their October 24 expected release for Firefox 2 since they need to squeeze an RC3 someone in between now and then. They might be able to do it but RC3 would probably have to be released sometime in the next 10-days in order to give them enough time between the release candidate and final release to add some finishing touches. G-G-G-G-G-O-O Firefox!

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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