Even though I am testing out the Nokia N8 and using it almost exclusively with my T-Mobile SIM I still find my Maemo 5 Nokia N900 to be an excellent device. The service integration and web browser are awesome and today we hear that Firefox 4 beta for mobile is now available to download and install on the N900 and Android devices. This latest release is designed to increase performance and responsiveness, which is always a good thing.

You will find that Firefox Sync is included to sync browsing history, bookmarks, tabs, passwords and form-fill data so you can have a consistent experience between your PC/Mac and mobile phone. I have personally gone on to using Chrome as my preferred web browser, but still will have to try out this latest beta on my N900.

The Awesome Screen is supported in this release too. Have any readers installed it and tried it out yet?

View full post on Nokia Experts

Mozilla has announced that Microsoft’s upstart Bing search engine will soon become a default part of Firefox’s search bar. When Firefox 4 arrives it will feature some slight changes to the list of included search engines, offering, in order: Google (default), Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, eBay and Wikipedia.

Bing is a new option, though savvy users have long been able to install a Bing search plugin on their own. Now, it will be much easier to access by clicking on the drop-down list in the browser’s built-in search box.

Microsoft’s search engine continues to make inroads against Google, and while Microsoft has had a search product for years, it’s taken a long time to make its way onto Firefox’s short list. Mozilla vice president of products Jay Sullivan says Bing’s inclusion now is based on its “significant rise in popularity over the past year.”

Google’s engine will still be the default option for Firefox users. Google remains a primary source of income for the Mozilla — the two companies share the revenue generated by Google searches typed from within Firefox’s search box.

The new search engine default list removes the Answers.com and the Creative Commons search engine choices. Answers.com is disappearing because, according to Mozilla, “we have heard from our users that Wikipedia is more useful as an included reference search engine.”

The Creative Commons search engine is being removed because the search tool itself has changed from something that searches just CC licensed materials to a more general search engine that duplicates what’s found in Google, Yahoo and others. Mozilla is careful to point that the foundation “will continue to actively support [the Creative Commons] organization and mission through grants and joint programs,” but not, apparently, its search engine.

Of course users are still free to install any of the thousands of search plugins for the sites they’d like — we’re fans of the Flickr CC search plugin and the Speckly torrent search plugin — but making the default plugins list means more traffic for those lucky sites.

In Bing’s case it also means an important new avenue to perhaps pull a few users away from Google.

See also:

• Firefox 4 Beta 5 Adds Audio Tools, Hardware Acceleration
• Fourth Firefox 4 Beta Adds ‘Panorama,’ Hardware Acceleration
• New HTML5 Tools Make Your Browser Sing and Dance
• SamplePlayer Makes Your Browser Sing, Sans Flash

View full post on Webmonkey

Look what the fox dragged in…

I just got an e-mail from Mozilla announcing the launch of Firefox 4 for Android Beta 1 is now available for download. In the browser wars, everyone has their preference and the desktop is no longer the only battleground. While IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and others fight for marketshare on desktops and laptops, there are many different breeds of mobile browsers. Where will the almighty Mozilla Firefox fit in?

You can download the beta here and check out there just post press release here.

Firefox for Android is built using the same technology as the desktop version, just optimized for mobile. Some key things to look out for include:

• Firefox Sync
• Add-ons
• Awesome Bar
• Awesome Screen
• Pinch-to-zoom

I think one of the most powerful features will be the ability for developers to build 3rd party add-ons to the mobile browser. Apps serve one purpose, but I can see mobile browser add-ons serving significant alternate purposes as well, and Firefox enables devs to HTML5, CSS, and Javascript to create their add-ons.

Head on over to the Mozilla Blog and download the Android Beta of Firefox 4 for Mobile now!

PS: we covered the name change from Fennec to Firefox for Mobile previously- just want to remind you the new branding is permanent.

View full post on Android Phone Fans

For those of you who haven’t been following the long journey of  development for Firefox for Android, the application has been in alpha for a very long time and today Mozilla has upgraded the Firefox for Android to beta status (cheers).

Keep in mind that this application has just reached the beta stage and could still bring many bugs and issues. If you’re looking to get your hands on this beta version, head here to give it a spin. Just to give you all a heads up, the file is 11.8MB so don’t freak out. Be sure to let us know how it goes in the comments below. Enjoy!

Via: Mozilla, Android Central

View full post on AndroidSPIN | Your No.1 source for Everything Android.

The newest nightly builds of Firefox Mobile for Android phones are fast, stable, and — unlike the previously released alpha we told you about last month — actually usable.

Development on Firefox for Android is progressing rapidly, and there are a lot of small tweaks and changes to be found in the new nightly builds. But the big news is that everything actually works now. The browser’s performance is much improved, especially in responsiveness, scrolling and zooming.

You can download it here. But be sure to read the release notes, which cover the system requirements (Android 2.0 and up) and the known issues.

This little browser called Fennec (as the mobile version of Firefox is still known at this point in its life) first arrived on Android phones earlier this year. I took it for a spin when the alpha was released in August, and while I noted it had already come a long way in a short time, I was both perplexed and disappointed after a spending a couple of days with it.

I was left wanting because, having seen just about every iteration of Firefox over the years, and having had a wonderful experience testing the Maemo Linux release of Fennec on a Nokia smartphone, I was used to Mozilla shipping alpha versions that were fast, innovative and left you really pumped about the final product.

Not so with this little guy. The first alpha version of Firefox for Android was slow. Really slow. And buggy. Zooming and scrolling were choppy. The Wired home page would mysteriously reload every 20 seconds, and some sites wouldn’t load at all. I double-checked my Nexus One’s system settings, thinking something must be wrong. Since it was alpha code, I planned to revisit it later and measure the changes.

Then I saw this tweet by Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner Friday morning, and I decided it was time.

This most recent nightly build of Firefox for Android fixes most of the performance issues. Wired.com still doesn’t fare too well (probably our fault), but surfing the rest of the web is much more pleasant in the new Fennec. Scrolling and the pinch-zoom gesture are about as fast as Android’s stock WebKit browser. Page rendering is a touch slower in Fennec than in the Android browser, but we can expect that to improve.

As with the previous releases, Fennec syncs up with your other versions of Firefox, so your history, Awesomebar searches, auto-fill form data and passwords will be the same as you move from desktop to mobile and back again throughout your day. Another cool feature is the unique side-to-side swipe action, which brings up menus for things like tabs, bookmarks and settings. It minimizes the browser chrome and leaves more screen real estate for web pages.

Since taking a screenshot on the Nexus One is still a total chore, I shot this video of Fennec in action. Sorry about my massive thumbs.

See Also:

• Firefox Mobile Alpha Lands on Android
• Early Version of Firefox Lands on Android Phones
• Firefox Takes Its First Baby Steps on Android
• Fennec Fits Everything You Love About Firefox Into Your Pocket

View full post on Webmonkey

Woolly, the CSS sheep.

Mozilla is busy committing changes, fixing bugs and finalizing the release of Firefox 4 beta 7. Among the smaller, but important changes in the next release is a change to some of Firefox 4’s CSS support: developers no longer need to use the -moz prefix for border-radius or box-shadow.

We’ve covered the pros and cons of using vendor prefixes in your stylesheets before and generally consider them a good thing. Coding a stack of prefixes into your CSS is not ideal, but it’s better than the alternative of using inconsistent CSS hacks or having to sniff for user agents to serve up totally different styles to different browsers.

However, it’s always important to make sure you include the actual CSS rule as well as any prefixed version since eventually that’s all that will be supported. As CSS guru Eric Meyer writes, “as time goes on and implementations become consistent, browsers will drop the prefixes,” which is exactly what Mozilla is doing for Firefox 4 beta 7.

As we noted Thursday, Microsoft is dropping some vendor-specific prefixes in Internet Explorer 9, which will be released in several months.

Firefox 4 beta 7 is tentatively scheduled to arrive in the “second half of September,” with the final release coming around the end of 2010. If your stylesheets need updating, now is the time.

See Also:

• Advice From the CSS Guru: Embrace Prefixes
• Dealing With Browser Differences in CSS 3
• A Universal Solution for Rounded Corners in Your Designs
• 
  Handy Guide to Detecting Support for HTML5

View full post on Webmonkey

Mozilla has released Firefox 4 beta 6, but it isn’t the beta 6 you were expecting. The latest release is a very small update with just a few bug fixes. The build originally planned as beta 6 has been pushed back to beta 7.

You can grab Firefox 4 beta 6 from the Mozilla beta downloads page.

The only two changes of note in this release are stability fix for Windows and some rendering and keyboard and mouse focus problems in Mac OS X. If you experienced the Mac bug where white overlays would hide portions of the page, beta 6 takes care of the problem. The other bug fix stops a crashing bug and should make Firefox 4 more stable on Windows.

According to Mozilla’s beta road map the newly renamed beta 7 will arrive October 1st and Firefox 4 will likely reach the feature-freeze stage shortly after that. Although no final release date has been set, judging by the road map, it seems likely Firefox 4 will be ready before the end of 2010.

See also:

• Firefox 4 Beta 5 Adds Audio Tools, Hardware Acceleration
• Fourth Firefox 4 Beta Adds ‘Panorama,’ Hardware Acceleration
• New HTML5 Tools Make Your Browser Sing and Dance
• SamplePlayer Makes Your Browser Sing, Sans Flash

View full post on Webmonkey

Not the official JaegerMonkey logo

Mozilla has shipped a new pre-release build of Firefox 4 with its latest JavaScript technology, JaegerMonkey, baked in.

To try it out, you’ll need to install one of Mozilla’s nightly JS Engine Preview builds. The JaegerMonkey-equipped browser was made available Thursday. Keep in mind, this is pre-release software and should be used only for testing.

JaegerMonkey has a dramtic impact (in the positive direction) on Firefox’s core JavaScript engine, TraceMonkey, which shipped with version 3.5 of the browser.

“We knew we needed another major upgrade for Firefox 4.0,” says Mozilla’s David Mandelin in a blog post about the release.

It’s a welcome addition. Chrome, Safari and Opera have all made significant enhancements to their JavaScript capabilities since Firefox 3.5’s release. Internet Explorer 9, due to arrive as a beta this month, is on par with those browsers when it comes to script execution. If all goes well, this new code will be included in Firefox 4 when it ships later this year.

In my informal testing, the new build is much, much faster at running script-heavy websites and demos than the current Firefox 4 beta. It’s about as fast as Chrome on my Mac, which says a lot, considering how much of a speed demon Google’s browser is. All of those JavaScript demos and games that were only really smooth enough to impress in Chrome and Safari are now nice and fluid in Firefox.

You can see some of Mozilla’s recent test data on JavaScript benchmarks (here and here) to get a clearer picture of how JaegerMonkey is helping close the gap to the other browsers.

See Also:

• Mozilla Asks, ‘Are We Fast Yet?’
• Firefox 4 Beta 5 Adds Audio Tools, Hardware Acceleration
• Apple Updates Safari, Turns on Extensions

View full post on Webmonkey

Mozilla has released a fifth beta for Firefox 4, adding hardware acceleration in Windows, a new audio API and support for a new security protocol.

You can download Firefox 4 beta 5 from the Mozilla website, or, if you’re currently using beta 4, head to the Check for Updates menu item to update to beta 5.

The most obvious change for Windows users will be the hardware acceleration, which should make Firefox considerably snappier. While beta 4 included support for hardware acceleration on Windows, it was not enabled by default. Beta 5 gives users hardware acceleration out of the box (provided you’re using a version of Windows that supports DirectX 10).

Like we’ve seen in the most recent graphics-intensive games on Windows PCs, the idea behind hardware acceleration is to shift some of the work from your computer’s main processor to the graphics card. In a browser, this speeds up page rendering, particularly text, graphics and scripted animations. The coming Internet Explorer 9 and future versions of Google’s Chrome browser will both take advantage of hardware acceleration.

The other major new feature in this release is a new Audio Data API that gives web developers a way to interact with raw audio data in HTML5’s <video> and <audio> elements using JavaScript. With the new API, developers can read and write audio data within the browser, opening the doors for online tools like spectrum analyzers, audio remixing tools and 3D audio visualizations.

For more on what the audio API offers, check out our earlier write up and be sure to read through Mozilla developer Dave Humphrey’s blog post. To see the new tools in action, check out the video Humphrey created to showcase some of what’s possible with the new audio API.

The Firefox 4 beta also now supports the Strict Transport Security (HSTS), a new security protocol that allows websites to require that Firefox always use secured connections. Designed to help stop the so-called “man in the middle” attack — where something lurking between your browser and the secure website steals your data — Firefox 4 Beta now remembers which sites use the HSTS protocol and will only connect to those sites using SSL in the future.

See also:

• Fourth Firefox 4 Beta Adds ‘Panorama,’ Hardware Acceleration
• New HTML5 Tools Make Your Browser Sing and Dance
• SamplePlayer Makes Your Browser Sing, Sans Flash

View full post on Webmonkey

Mozilla Labs has announced an update to its Jetpack extensions system that makes it easier for developers to write browser add-ons that more closely interact with a person’s computer desktop.

The new Jetpack SDK is version 0.7. It is quickly reaching the level of maturity required for it to become a standard feature in Firefox.

Jetpack is a new extensions framework for Mozilla’s browser designed to offer developers an easier, faster way to build browser add-ons using common web development tools like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The Jetpack extension framework will not replace Firefox’s existing framework, which uses heavier code. But Mozilla expects to see many developers switch to the new framework once it’s complete.

While Jetpack was innovative when Mozilla first announced it, Google has since added an extension system to its Chrome browser that works on the same principles as Jetpack — using web-based tools like HTML and CSS. More recently Apple joined the fray by adding a similar extensions system to Safari 5.

Firefox’s lightweight extension framework has spent a long time in development. Jetpack graduated from Mozilla Labs (though the project is still hosted there) in March of 2010, but, while there was some speculation that Jetpack might end up in Firefox 4, that appears unlikely.

Still, the developer SDK is now at version 0.7 which brings three new APIs for developers to test. The panel API creates floating modal popups that appear on top of web content and browser chrome and persist until dismissed by users or programs. There’s also a clipboard API for interacting with the OSes clipboard and a notifications API which mimics the look of Growl to display messages to the user.

The Jetpack roadmap calls for another SDK release near the end of September and then Jetpack should hit 1.0 sometime in the fourth quarter of 2010. Once Jetpack 1.0 is stable look for it to begin working its way into Firefox.

In the mean time, if you’d like to test out Jetpack and see what the fuss is about just install the Jetpack add-on, which allows Jetpack to work within current version of Firefox. Yes, it’s a little weird, but for now Jetpack is an add-on that you use to install add-ons.

See Also:

• Latest Update Makes Jetpack Add-ons More Powerful
• Mozilla’s Jetpack Prepares to Take On Chrome Extensions
• Review: New Features Bring Safari 5 Up to Speed
• Chrome Extensions Are Cool, But They Can’t Match Firefox

View full post on Webmonkey

Mozilla has released the alpha version of Fennec, available to download here. The mobile version of Mozilla’s popular Firefox browser syncs with the Awesome Bar browsing history, bookmarks, passwords, form-fill data, and open tabs from your computers Firefox. The final version of Fennec will look to standout based on two major technologies it will incorporate, “Electrolysis” and “Layers”. The former is implemented in this alpha version.

Electrolysis, which allows the browser interface to run in a separate process from the one rendering Web content. By doing this, Fennec is able to react much faster to user input while pages are loading or CPU intensive JavaScript is running.

Layers won’t find it’s way onto your Android phone until the beta release.

The upcoming beta release will start taking advantage of Layers to greatly improve performance in graphic intensive actions like scrolling, zooming, animations and video.

Google has already been hard at work bringing us features like Chrome to Phone but Mozilla has proven to be very good at this browser stuff in the past. I for one love to see the competition, which will only lead to a better product.

Firefox for Android (Fennec) Alpha Released

View full post on Google Android News Android Forums

The first official pre-release version of Mozilla’s mobile Firefox browser for Android devices has arrived, the company announced Friday.

Curious users with phones running Android 2.0 and above, or with Nokia N900 devices, can download and install it right now.

Codenamed Fennec, Firefox mobile is based on the same code as the big daddy desktop version of Firefox. It supports the same web standards and it even accepts add-ons. It also syncs up with your other versions of Firefox, so your history, Awesomebar searches, auto-fill form data and passwords will be the same as you move from desktop to mobile and back again throughout your day.

One of the strokes of genius design in the Fennec browser is the unique side-to-side swipe action, which brings up menus for things like tabs, bookmarks and settings. It minimizes the browser chrome and leaves more screen real estate for web pages. This new version has the sync features as well as pinch-to-zoom browsing.

We’ve seen pre-release versions of Fennec running on Android in the past, but they were patchy and bare bones. This is a real-deal alpha release. It may not be entirely stable yet, but it’s come a long way since its meager beginnings.

In a blog post, Mozilla tells us about some of the secret sauce in this release:

The main focus of this release is to increase performance and responsiveness to user actions. This is being implemented using two major technologies, “Electrolysis” and “Layers.” This Alpha release includes Electrolysis, which allows the browser interface to run in a separate process from the one rendering Web content. By doing this, Fennec is able to react much faster to user input while pages are loading or CPU intensive JavaScript is running. The upcoming beta release will start taking advantage of Layers to greatly improve performance in graphic intensive actions like scrolling, zooming, animations and video. We’re also working to optimize these actions using the hardware-accelerated graphics rendering capabilities showing up in today’s mobile devices.

And here’s a video demo:

Last year, I took an in-depth look at Fennec for Maemo (mobile Linux) on the Nokia N900. It’s pretty sweet.

See Also:

• Early Version of Firefox Lands on Android Phones
• Firefox Takes Its First Baby Steps on Android
• Fennec Fits Everything You Love About Firefox Into Your Pocket

View full post on Webmonkey

Mozilla has released the fourth beta for the upcoming Firefox 4 browser. The latest pre-release version of Firefox 4 brings several new features including a new tab-organization tool, hardware acceleration in Windows 7 and support for the HTML5 video-buffered property.

If you’d like to help Mozilla test beta 4, you can grab Firefox 4 beta 4 for all major operating systems (and more than 30 languages) from Mozilla’s beta download site.

The big news in beta 4 is the Panorama feature (it used to be called Tab Sets, and Tab Candy before that — hopefully this name sticks). We looked at in depth when it hit the nightly builds.

Panorama allows you to group and quickly switch between related clusters of open tabs. Designed for those of us over-stimulated freaks who frequently have dozens of tabs (or more) open at one time, Panorama allows you to conquer tab chaos: for example, grouping tabs for work together and tabs for fun together, and then quickly switching between groups.

The feature works a bit like multiple desktops in your operating system — a la Expose on Mac OS X — except in this case it’s just web pages inside a single browser window. Here’s a video by Firefox designer Aza Raskin showing the latest version of Panorama in action:

Firefox beta 4 also brings what’s fast becoming the new hotness in web browsers: hardware acceleration. Like graphics-intensive games, the idea behind hardware acceleration is to shift some of the work from your PC’s main processor to the graphics card, which will speed up page-rendering, particularly text and graphics. The coming Internet Explorer 9 and future versions of Google’s Chrome browser will both take advantage of hardware acceleration.

Firefox is planning to do the same, but, as Mozilla’s Mike Shaver recently posted on Twitter, the hardware-acceleration features are currently disabled by default in beta 4. If you’d like to see Firefox take advantage of Windows’ Direct2D interface — regardless of the bugs that may exist — Mozilla has some instructions on how to enable it in beta 4.

The Mozilla road map still calls for the hardware-acceleration features to make the final release of Firefox, which presumably means we’ll see at least one more beta before Firefox 4 moves to the release-candidate stage.

The latest beta also brings support for HTML5 video’s buffering property, which means Firefox can accurately determine which time segments of a native web video can be played without having to pause while more data downloads. The end result is that the progress bar appears nonlinear and makes it easy to determine which parts of the video are available.

If you’d like to know everything that’s new in Firefox 4 beta 4 since the release of Firefox 3.6, Mozilla has put together a handy list of new features (including a few that aren’t quite finished). The list is quite extensive, and Firefox 4 is shaping up to be one of the biggest updates in some time.

While Mozilla still does not have a firm release date, Firefox 4 is expected to arrive in final form some time before the end of 2010. We’re expecting it in late October or early November.

See Also:

• Tab Candy to Become a Standard Feature in Firefox
• Next Firefox 4 Beta Arrives, Now With Multi-touch
• Second Beta Release of Firefox 4 Arrives
• Firefox 4 Beta 2, Due Next Week, Adds Tabs on Top for Macs
• Mozilla Moves Tabs to the Top for Firefox 4
• Firefox 4 Beta 1 Now Available for Download
• Firefox Sync Graduates From Labs, Ready for Firefox 4
• First Look: Firefox 4 Preview Delivers Speed, Revamped Interface

View full post on Webmonkey

Mozilla’s “Tab Candy” experiment has proved so popular, the company has decided to roll it into future versions of the Firefox browser as a standard feature.

The latest nightly builds of Firefox 4 now include a new Tab Sets feature. If all goes well, the feature could be included in the final version of Firefox 4, due this autumn.

Previously referred to as Tab Candy during its development phase the last few months, Tab Sets allows you to group and quickly switch between related clusters of open tabs. Tab Sets are specifically aimed at making life easier for those of us who frequently have dozens (or more) tabs open at one time. By grouping your open tabs into sets — say a group of tabs for work and a group of tabs containing some Instapaper articles — you can keep better track of everything without needing to scroll through dozens of tabs.

Download a nightly build of Firefox and you’ll see a new Tab Sets button next to the List All Tabs button. Click it to show your tab sets. From there, just draw a box to create a new empty group, drag tabs between sets, drag a tab onto another to create a new group, re-size groups and tabs, and so on.

The feature works a bit like multiple desktops in your operating system — a la Expose on Mac OS X — except in this case it’s just web pages inside a single browser window.

Perhaps the best way to understand Tab Sets is to see them in action. The video below from Firefox designer Aza Raskin gives a nice overview of Tab Sets and why they’re incredibly useful.

An Introduction to Firefox’s Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

As nice as Tab Sets appear, they are not without some quirks. The latest nightly builds fix a number of bugs that showed up in the initial Tab Candy release, but bugs still exist and sometimes the behavior of tabs sets is a bit confusing.

For example, App Tabs, another new feature coming in Firefox 4, are included when you’re grouping tabs in the Tab Sets interface. But because App Tabs persist across groups anyway, including them in the Tab Sets UI makes things overly cluttered and a little bit confusing.

Of course, these are nightly builds meant only for testing by developers and early adopters, and things can be very rough around the edges both in design and function. Hopefully, by the time the feature freeze for Firefox 4 rolls around in a few weeks, Mozilla will have worked out enough of the kinks to include Tab Sets.

See Also:

• Next Firefox 4 Beta Arrives, Now With Multi-touch
• Firefox Offers a Taste of Tab Candy
• Second Beta Release of Firefox 4 Arrives
• Firefox 4 Beta 2, Due Next Week, Adds Tabs on Top for Macs
• Mozilla Moves Tabs to the Top for Firefox 4
• Firefox 4 Beta 1 Now Available for Download
• Firefox Sync Graduates From Labs, Ready for Firefox 4

View full post on Webmonkey

Mozilla has released the latest beta version of its Firefox 4 browser. You can grab Firefox 4 beta 3 for all major operating systems and over 30 languages from Mozilla’s beta download site.

The big addition to this beta is support for touch events inside the browser on Windows 7 machines. Windows 7 ships with built-in support for multi-touch actions on touchscreen tablets, desktops and laptops, and now Firefox is able to access that magic and let you interact with websites by touching them. The result is stuff like this:

Also new to this release is an enhancement to the JavaScript capabilities within Firefox. If you’ve been keeping up with all the latest JavaScript and HTML5 web app demos we’ve been showing you over the last few months, you’ve probably noticed that animations with many moving parts tend to be much smoother and faster in Chrome and Safari. This new version of Firefox gives scripted animation performance a significant boost, so the speed difference is less noticeable.

These new features join the enhancements already introduced in previous pre-release versions of Firefox 4, like the new tabs-on-top interface and the addition of App Tabs.

The tabs-on-top setting can be toggled in the browser’s View menu.

The move to tabs-on-top is a growing trend among browser vendors. Chrome and Opera do it, and Safari has flirted with the look. While some within the Firefox user community fear Mozilla is making the switch just to chase the latest design fad, the change is less about a trend and more about the evolution of the web as a platform — these UI tweaks turn the tab bar into something much closer to a dock or a task bar.

Keep in mind, Firefox 4 is still a pre-release browser, and it may not be entirely stable. But it should be stable enough for daily use, and it will give you a heads up on all the new goodies on the way when Firefox 4 is officially released this October or November.

See Also:

• Second Beta Release of Firefox 4 Arrives
• Firefox 4 Beta 2, Due Next Week, Adds Tabs on Top for Macs
• Mozilla Moves Tabs to the Top for Firefox 4
• Firefox 4 Beta 1 Now Available for Download
• Firefox Sync Graduates From Labs, Ready for Firefox 4
• First Look: Firefox 4 Preview Delivers Speed, Revamped Interface

  View full post on Webmonkey

The second beta release of the next version of Firefox is now available.

Download Firefox 4 Beta 2 from Mozilla and test it out. Windows, Mac OS X and Linux builds are available in multiple languages. We were originally expecting it to arrive last Friday, but the release was delayed a few days for quality assurance testing.

Keep in mind, this is a pre-release version of the browser, and it may not be entirely stable. But it should be stable enough for daily use, and it will give you a heads up on all the new goodies coming in Firefox 4 when it’s officially released this fall.

Tuesday’s release has a number of new features, including support for CSS 3 transitions, better handling of retained layers on pages and a new feature in the add-ons manager that confirms when an add-on has been installed. There are also the requisite performance boosts and stability improvements, so if you’re running beta 1, definitely consider upgrading.

The feature sure to generate the most chatter is something new for Mac OS X users: a new tabs-on-top interface. Windows users got the tabs-on-top look as the default interface in beta 1 earlier this month. With beta 2, the change arrives on Macs. The new beta also enables App Tabs, a similar concept that lets you miniaturize the tabs for common web apps — e-mail, your calendar or other apps you use multiple times a day — and store them in the tab bar for quick access.

The tabs-on-top setting on Mac OS X can be toggled in the browser’s View menu.

The move to tabs-on-top is a growing trend among browser vendors. It was popularized by Google Chrome, which has shipped with top tabs as the default since its birth two years ago. Reaction has been mixed — Opera now puts the tabs on top, and Safari tried the same thing in a beta release thing before abandoning it. And there are some within the Firefox user community who fear Mozilla is making the switch just to chase the latest design fad.

Mozilla’s lead user experience designer Alex Faaborg defends the decision, saying it has nothing to do with fashion. By putting the tabs on top, he says, Firefox 4 will be better equipped to run web applications that sit in their own tab.

These UI tweaks turn the tab bar into something much closer to a dock or a task bar — a fitting change, since the browser is becoming something much closer to a GUI for an operating system. Of course, if you don’t like your tabs up top, you can always choose the old look in the browser’s View menu.

The final browser is expected in October or November, and you can read our preview of Firefox 4 on Webmonkey.

Illustration at the top courtesy of Mozilla.

See Also:

• Firefox 4 Beta 2, Due Next Week, Adds Tabs on Top for Macs
• Mozilla Moves Tabs to the Top for Firefox 4
• Firefox 4 Beta 1 Now Available for Download
• Firefox Sync Graduates From Labs, Ready for Firefox 4
• First Look: Firefox 4 Preview Delivers Speed, Revamped Interface

View full post on Webmonkey

The second beta release of Firefox 4 won’t arrive until the middle of this week at the earliest, Mozilla says.

We were expecting Firefox 4 beta 2 last Thursday or Friday. But the Mozilla Wiki page for the browser has been updated with this statement: “Hi! We’re glad you’re interested in Firefox 4 Beta 2 – it’s not quite ready yet. Our candidate builds are still going through quality assurance tests.”

The new proposed release dates are July 27-29.

As we’ve pointed out many times before, Mozilla’s release dates are only targets and not hard-and-fast deadlines. No worries, we can wait.

The final version of Firefox 4 is still expected in October or November. It will ship with increased support for emerging web standards like HTML5 and CSS 3, a new look, and the usual speed improvements. We reviewed the first beta and gave a rundown of the new features. You can always download the most current beta release from Mozilla’s Firefox Beta page.

See Also:

• Firefox Offers a Taste of Tab Candy
• Firefox Home Syncs Your Faves to Your iPhone
• Firefox 4 Beta 1 Now Available for Download

View full post on Webmonkey

For the second time in two months, Mozilla has rushed out a fix for Firefox to patch a problem with a browser update issued just days before.

View full post on Macworld

Are you one of those hyper-multitaskers (aka insane weirdos) who keeps a bazillion browser tabs open at once?

Here’s something for you, and for the tab-curious: Tab Candy, a new experimental feature in Firefox that groups tabs into topical clusters to improve your workflow. It’s made entirely with JavaScript and HTML.

Firefox creative lead Aza Raskin offers this synopsis:

With one keystroke Tab Candy shows an overview of all tabs to allow you to quickly locate and switch between them. Tab Candy also lets you group tabs to organize your work flow. You can create a group for your vacation, work, recipes, games and social sites, however it makes sense to you to group tabs. When you switch to a grouped tab only the relevant tabs are shown in the tab bar, which helps you focus on what you want.

Here’s a video of Tab Candy in action.

An Introduction to Firefox’s Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Tab Candy has been kicking around as a pre-release for a while, but it’s just now getting to the point where the Mozilla folks feel it’s ready to be tested by a wider audience.

If you want to try it out, head to Raskin’s site where you can download a TabCandy-enabled build of Firefox. Note that this isn’t an extension, it’s a bleeding-edge build of Firefox with Tab Candy built in, so plan accordingly.

There’s also an FAQ, and a feedback forum you can use to get answers or submit requests.

See Also:

• Firefox 4 Beta 2, Due Next Week, Adds Tabs on Top for Macs
• Mozilla Moves Tabs to the Top for Firefox 4

View full post on Webmonkey

Mozilla’s new Firefox Home app for Apple mobiles is now available for download. You can get Firefox Home for the iPhone and iPod Touch in iTunes. It’s a free download.

As we mentioned when we first told you about it, the Firefox Home app is not Firefox on your iPhone. It’s a companion to Firefox.

It securely syncs your bookmarks, browsing history, user preferences and open tabs from the last time you used Firefox, and it brings them down to your iPhone or iPod Touch so you can access that stuff on your mobile. It works in tandem with Firefox Sync, Mozilla’s hosted, cloud-based service that keeps all of your installations of Firefox synced up with one another.

Browsing my Firefox bookmarks on the iPhone

It’s especially welcome now, as most of us use multiple screens every day — one or two computers, and at least one smartphone with a web browser. Firefox Sync tied our work machine and our home machine together by syncing all of our browser data in the cloud, and Firefox Home completes the circuit for iOS users, making all the hard-to-remember stuff — your myriad “starred” favorites and bookmarked URLs — available in your pocket.

Needless to say, this app is only going to be useful to you if you’re a Firefox user with an iPhone or iPod Touch. Android users have had Mozilla’s mobile version of Firefox available on their phones since April.

You also need to have Firefox Sync set up to use it. If you don’t have an account, you can sign up when you install the app on your phone. You will also need the Sync add-on for Firefox (newer versions of Firefox will ship with Sync pre-installed). As Charlie Sorrel notes in his Gadget Lab post, this is a bit more work than syncing your desktop Safari data to your iPhone, which just involves checking a box in iTunes (and you can keep Safari and Firefox in sync — and by extension, the iPhone — using Xmarks, but only on the Mac). Opera’s mobile browsers have easy syncing as well. But unlike those choices, this isn’t a new browser or a half-way-there solution, it’s a direct line to the same browser data that’s on your desktops and laptops.

Once the app is set up, you can search your history, access your Firefox bookmarks and see the tabs you most recently had open when you walked away from your computer. All of this info is accessible from within Firefox Home’s search bar, which is sort of a miniature version of the “Awesome Bar” in Firefox. It will search both page titles and URL strings, and it will auto-suggest results as you type.

Searches use the Awesome Bar approach

Just like using the Awesome Bar in Firefox, everything shows up in a single list as you type, and a little icon shows up next to each item to tell you what sort of result it is — a bookmark, a piece of history, an open tab.

Click on an item and the page opens inside an in-app browser. It’s your standard iOS WebKit browser in a pretty blue wrapper, and it performs about the same as the built-in browser inside other popular apps like Twitter.

So Firefox Home is not Firefox on your iPhone, which is something we’re not ever likely to see. Mozilla’s brass has made it clear that Apple’s app policies are too restrictive for Firefox, and the company doesn’t want to dumb the browser down for the iPhone. For people who use Firefox as their primary browser everywhere else, this app is the next best thing.

You can read Mozilla’s announcement for more links, troubleshooting tips, and feedback channels.

See Also:

• Firefox Home App Syncs Firefox Faves to Your iPhone
• Early Version of Firefox Lands on Android Phones
• First Look: Firefox 4 Preview Delivers Speed, Revamped Interface

View full post on Webmonkey

Mozilla hopes to deliver the second beta version of Firefox 4 to users before the end of next week, according to the minutes from its recent developer’s meeting.

Tuesday’s meeting notes show the team has picked next Thursday, July 22 as the proposed ship date for Firefox 4 beta 2.

There are several enhancements on the way in beta 2, but the one sure to raise the most interest (or the biggest stink) is the new tabs-on-top interface for Mac OS X users. Windows users got the tabs-on-top look as the default interface in Beta 1 earlier this month. With beta 2, the rollout continues to other OSes.

The tabs-on-top interface is a growing trend among browser vendors. It was popularized by Google Chrome, which shipped with top-tabs as the default within its initial release. Reaction was mostly positive — Opera now puts the tabs on top, and Safari tried the same thing in a beta release thing before abandoning it. But there are some within the Firefox user community who don’t want to see Mozilla’s browser make the switch just to chase the latest design fad.

Mozilla’s lead user experience designer Alex Faaborg defends the decision, saying it has nothing to do with fashion. By putting the tabs on top, he argues, Firefox 4 will be better suited to running web applications that sit in their own tab. It turns the tab bar into something much closer to a dock or a task bar — a fitting change, since the browser is becoming something much closer to a GUI for an operating system.

Here’s a mock-up showing several web apps running in top-placed tabs in Firefox. The browser may not end up with this design, but it nicely illustrates Faaborg’s idea.

Here’s a seven-minute video his team produced that furthers the debate:

Of course, if you don’t like your tabs up top, you can always revert to the old look in the browser’s View menu.

Some other stuff due in Firefox 4 Beta 2: CSS transitions, better handling of retained layers on pages and a new feature in the add-ons manager that confirms when an add-on has been installed.

As always, Mozilla’s ship dates and feature lists (especially for beta releases) aren’t final. The team usually sticks to the proposed plan, but don’t be angry or surprised if the release slips to the following Monday.

The final browser is expected within a few months, and you can read our preview of Firefox 4 on Webmonkey.

Illustration at the top courtesy of Mozilla. Firefox mock-up by Stephen Horlander and Alex Faaborg/Mozilla/CC.

See Also:

• Mozilla Moves Tabs to the Top for Firefox 4
• Firefox 4 Beta 1 Now Available for Download
• Firefox Sync Graduates From Labs, Ready for Firefox 4
• First Look: Firefox 4 Preview Delivers Speed, Revamped Interface

View full post on Webmonkey

Wondering what changes the Firefox 4 beta introduces to your browsing experience? Rob Griffiths spends some time with the new browser to see how it differs from its predecessor.

View full post on Macworld

The next major milestone of the Firefox browser has been released into the wild.

Firefox 4 Beta 1 is now available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. We were expecting it last week, as Mozilla had initially estimated the first beta would be available in June, but it’s here now. This release is for the adventurous only — it’s the first beta so it’s stable enough, but not rock-solid. So, if you’re eager to get an early peek at the next generation of Firefox, go forth and download.

The thing that probably matters most to everyday users is speed, and after using it for an hour or so, I can report that Firefox 4 is noticeably much faster than the various 3.x builds on my desktop.

Page load times are speeding up substantially across all the browsers now — Chrome and Safari recently received upgrades with hefty speed boosts, the new Opera 10.6 is on par with those releases, and the new Microsoft IE 9, due later this year, is also showing off some impressive speed in its current release, Platform Preview 3. Speed is one area where Firefox has recently drawn low marks, with some users switching to Chrome simply because it’s so nimble. But Firefox 4 appears set to change that when the final version arrives in a few months.

We covered much of what’s new in our Firefox 4 preview in May, but there are two new features in Tuesday’s release.

First, there’s a new look for Windows users. Tabs are now on top by default (a la Chrome). Mac and Linux users will get this feature as a default in subsequent betas. If you want to try it now, just go to View > Toolbars > Tabs on Top to enable it. Windows users, you can switch the option off using the same method if it’s not your thing. Also new for Windows people is the new orange “Firefox” button in the top left. Click it and you get a drop-down filled with the most popular application menu items.

The new Firefox button. Click for larger.

The other new feature — and this is for all OSes — is an integrated Feedback button next to the search box. Click it to report anything that Firefox did to “make you happy” or “make you sad” (Mozilla’s actual wording). The Feedback system incorporates the Test Pilot add-on from Mozilla Labs to collect an anonymize the feedback.

Other big stuff in this beta:

• Support for WebM video
• More support for emerging web standards like CSS 3, Canvas and Web Sockets
• Better page rendering performance, including a new HTML5 parser
• Crash protection that prevents bad plugins from blowing up the whole browser
• New add-ons manager
• Recently updated Jetpack SDK for new-style lightweight add-ons

Syncing, hardware acceleration and new themes for Mac OS X and Linux are coming soon, probably in the next beta release. So stay tuned.

See Also:

• Firefox Update Gives Flash 45 Seconds, Then Pulls the Plug
• Mozilla Moves Tabs to the Top for Firefox 4
• First Look: Firefox 4 Preview Delivers Speed, Revamped Interface

View full post on Webmonkey

If you ever doubted Firefox’s add-ons have played a major role in the browser’s success, Mozilla has some staggering numbers to prove you wrong.

The Firefox add-on website recently passed the two billion downloads mark.

That’s more add-ons downloaded than there are people on the web. Of course, that doesn’t mean everyone has add-ons installed — many of us have a dozen or more add-ons installed at any given time — but Mozilla has previously shown that some 150 million add-ons are in use every day.

Of course the word “add-on” is a little vague. Mozilla isn’t just counting web developer favorites like Firebug or YSlow, but also things as simple as Personas, which might explain why the numbers are so high. For instance, if you frequently change Personas, you’re downloading a new skin every time, and that drives the numbers up.

Still, while Personas may be inflating the numbers a bit, there’s no question that Firefox users love their add-ons, and Mozilla has the McDonalds-esque number to prove it.

If you’re looking to extend Firefox, or just curious about what other people are using, check out the new “Best of 2 Billion Firefox Add-ons” collection Mozilla has posted. There are number of web developer favorites, including the aforementioned Firebug and YSlow, as well as some other must-haves like NoScript, Xmarks and Greasemonkey.

See Also:

• Finding the Best Firefox Add-ons Gets Easier With New ‘Collections’
• Xmarks Syncs Open Tabs Across Browsers, iPhone
• The Best Chrome Add-ons for Web Developers

View full post on Webmonkey