Top: Maximized window with tabs in the titlebar. Bottom: Normal tab bar

Firefox 4 has entered the home stretch. The recent release of beta 8 added the last of the major new features for Firefox 4, including a new add-ons interface, better syncing and more hardware accelerated WebGL support. From now until the final release later this year, Firefox development will primarily focus on squashing bugs and refining the user interface.

The Firefox 4 UX roadmap outlines the user interface changes that Mozilla is hoping to complete before Firefox 4 is released. Most of the changes are very small — improving the contrast of the type in the URL bar or tweaking the session restore dialog — but there’s one welcome change in the list that many Firefox fans have been clamoring for — tabs in the titlebar.

The idea of saving screen real estate by smashing tabs up into the title bar of the browser windows started with Google Chrome and has since been copied by other browsers and applications.

It’s a tiny tweak, probably not more than a few dozen pixels are saved, but it can make all the difference when you’re using a netbook or other small screen device. Putting tabs at the top of the browser window also adheres to Fitts’ law, which says that the closer things are to the edge of the screen, the easier they are to click.

In Firefox’s case Fitts’ law seems to be the main reason for the new look — tabs are only pushed into the title bar when the window is maximized, making it easier to flick the cursor to the top of the screen and click a tab.

The new tabs-in-the-title-bar look is expected to arrive in Firefox 4 beta 9 (which will be the next release in Firefox’s beta cycle), but you can preview it today by grabbing a special build of Firefox for Windows and Linux. The builds are the work of Firefox developer Bill Gianopoulos, and as such are not official releases nor are they supported by Mozilla.

Also bear in mind that the code used to create these experimental versions of Firefox comes from Firefox’s nightly builds, which means there may be more bugs than you’ll find in the latest Firefox beta. That said, these builds worked just fine for us on Windows 7 and XP.

If you’ve got a small screen or have been looking for a way to make Firefox’s tabs a bit more like Google Chrome’s, grab the experimental builds. If you prefer to wait for something official, Firefox 4 beta 9 should be released in the relatively near future.

See Also:

• Firefox 4 Beta 8 Arrives With Faster Graphics, Better Sync
• New Privacy Icons Aim to Save You From Yourself
• New Beta Release Gives Firefox a Shot of Jäger

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If you have children than you know the #1 question they are constantly asking during this time of year (especially if they’re under the age of 4) — and that question is "How many more days until Christmas?" Well with the Santa Tracker application by Kathryn Lahrs, you can answer them down to the second! Also included in the app is the option for your children to write a letter to Santa and even have Santa respond. I’m usually not a fan of paid apps (only $1.99) especially for something I won’t use often, but with a 3 year old in the house I thought this would be fun. Keep reading for more details.

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CrackBerry.com‘s feed sponsored by ShopCrackBerry.com. Santa Tracker for BlackBerry – Keep tabs Saint Nick on Christmas eve

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Less than two months after launch date and after less than a month after its release on T-Mobile, Samsung has officially sold 1 million Samsung Galaxy Tabs. In comparison, Apple sold 2 million iPads in its first two months, though that was not during a holiday shopping season (nor was there competition).

Two weeks ago, Samsung had sold 600,000 Galaxy Tab units and projected that they would reach 1 million units sold by the end of the year. Now that 1 million units sold has been reached, Samsung has upped that end of the year sales projection to 1.5 million. Samsung has also sold 3 million Samsung Galaxy S phones in the US alone. Clearly, Samsung and Android is a strong bond.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab has found a market with its smaller form factor, dual cameras, Google’s Android 2.2 OS, and its compatibility with Adobe Flash. It is now available through some 120 mobile carriers in 64 countries.

Samsung sells a million Galaxy Tabs, up 50% from 2010 estimates

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

‘Tab Stacking’ in Opera 11 beta

Opera software has released the first beta of the upcoming Opera 11 browser.

New in Tuesday’s release is an innovative feature called “Tab Stacking,” which gives you the ability to stack and group your tabs together to better organize the pages you’re viewing.

An alpha release of Opera arrived earlier this autumn, and it gave us a taste of some other new features, like lightweight browser add-ons and some hardware acceleration features new to version 11. Those features have been refined and are included here along with the new tab tricks.

If you’d like the take the beta release for a spin head over to Opera download page.

Tab Stacking is the standout feature in this release. It is ingeniously simple and works a little bit like the way you create folders of apps on the iPhone’s home screen. You group related tabs by dragging them on top of each other. Your “stack” then collapses down into a single tab. To access the tabs in a stack, you simply mouse over the group and it expands, or you can click the arrow to the right of the grouped tab, which has the same effect.

The idea of grouping tabs is nothing new. Firefox 4 will also introduce a new interface for grouping tabs when it is finalized in a few months.

Only a slim one or two percent of the desktop browser market uses Opera daily. Still, the company is known for building innovative user interfaces into its browsers ahead of its larger, more widely-used competitors. Things like mouse gestures, or the page that shows thumbnails of your favorite sites when opening a new tab were first introduced in Opera. So it’s a change of script to see the company in the position of playing catch-up to the big names when it comes to grouping tabs and supporting lightweight add-ons.

However, Firefox 4’s current implementation (also still in beta) suddenly looks awkward and primitive next to Opera’s take on the same idea. It more elegant, and it plays on a behavior many users — those with iPhones or iPads — are already familiar with.

The best way to understand Tab Stacking is to see it in action:

Opera’s mouse gestures have been improved in this release, though there’s still not much support for gesture-based trackpads. In my testing, gestures like pinching zoomed in and out, but other options like three or four-finger swipes aren’t supported.

Also new in Opera 11 is a a visual interface that highlights mouse paths and makes it easier to understand and customize mouse gesture shortcuts. Check out Opera’s guide to mouse gestures for more details.

The beta release also sees the launch of a new website for publishing and searching Opera extensions. Thanks to Opera’s decision to base its extensions framework on the W3C Widget specification (which defines a “widget” as a downloadable and locally stored web application), it should be relatively easy to port existing Chrome and Safari extensions to Opera’s platform. So easy, in fact, that Opera reports developers are submitting between 10 and 20 new extensions each day and users have already downloaded some 500,000 add-ons.

Opera’s extensions framework also gains an automatic update system in this release, enabling add-on developers to push updates to users browsers. This means you’ll never need to worry about making sure you have the latest version of your favorite add-ons.

One thing you may not find in the new extensions store are Flash-blocking add-ons. Actually you probably will, but you don’t need them. Opera 11 can now be set to load plug-ins (like Flash or Silverlight) only on demand. Just head to the preferences menu, select the Advanced tab and then click Content. There, you’ll see a new option to only load plug-ins on demand. The feature is disabled by default.

Of course, all the new features would be less exciting if they slowed things down, but luckily they don’t. Opera hasn’t given any hard and fast numbers, but in our experience Opera 11 is faster than its predecessors and on par with Firefox 4 and Chrome 7.

Linux fans will be happy to hear that the platform has seen a bit of extra attention in this release. Opera claims that the beta is 15 to 20 percent faster on common benchmarks than Opera 10.63 for Linux.

Perhaps even more impressive, Opera 11 is actually 30 percent smaller than previous releases, saving you a bit of download time and disk space.

Other noteworthy features in the Opera beta include a revamped, simplified URL bar, which, like Google Chrome, dispenses with the “http://” bit at the front of URLs and highlights the security status of the current page. Unlike Chrome though, when you click inside the URL bar, Opera will reveal whether you’re connected using http or https.

Another trick borrowed from Google Chrome is support for Google search predictions. The feature works in both the search field and from the address bar when you start your query with the “g” shortcut.

With hardware acceleration, add-ons support and the innovative interface of Tab Stacking leading the way, Opera 11 is shaping up to be a great release both for Opera fans and those who use other browsers, which, if history is any guide, will soon be mimicking Opera’s lead.

See Also:

• Opera’s Next Act: Add-ons, Hardware Acceleration, Android
• Opera 10.6: WebM Video, HTML5 and More Speed
• Chrome 8 Adds Google Instant to the URL Bar
• Happy Birthday Opera: The Innovative Web Browser Turns 15

View full post on Webmonkey

What better way to start the week off than to talk about some Android tablets? To kick this Monday off, we’ve learned that the Pandigital Novel – a 9-inch eReader – is now shipping from TV-centric retailer QVC for $213.80. That’s $13.81 more than what Pandigital offers this thing for (and that doesn’t even include the price of shipping!) Get it from QVC, if you want, but we don’t see a reason to unless you can’t find it anywhere else.

Next up, the Samsung Galaxy Tabs on AT&T, Rogers, and Bell have all gotten hacked to make voice calls. It doesn’t surprise us that these groups of tablets show up in the same hackery report considering they have identical radios. Instructions and disclaimer can be found at XDA. Just remember that anything you do to your Tab is your own business and that no one is responsible for it but you.

Finally, Notion Ink is still showing signs of life as they’ve let out a new promotional video to let folks know that their Adam tablet is still around. The publishing of these official marketing tools seem to indicate that we’re getting close to a launch in time for the holidays, but I’m just jumping ahead of myself by assuming that much. For now, just enjoy the video embedded below.

[via Android Community, TalkAndroid, IntoMobile]

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Samsung released the open source code of their Galaxy Tab OS to any and all interested parties to grab.  Chances are, only select third parties are going to download the code and do all the wonderful hacking and modding.  Having said that, it’s nice to see Samsung stepping up to offer whatever open source data they can.  So far, T-Mobile and Sprint are the only US versions available, but that may change with the releases of Verizon and AT&T flavors down the road.

The Galaxy Tab presents new and unique challenges to hackers and modders in that it is the first largely available Android tablet from a major manufacturer.  It will be fun to see how the development community gets behind the device.

Via AndroidCentral

Samsung Releases Source Code for Galaxy Tabs originally appeared on AndroidGuys.

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With the success of the Galaxy S line of phones, Samsung has some high expectations for their upcoming Galaxy Tab.  Hankil Yoon, A Samsung product executive, told the Wall Street Journal that his company expects to ship over 10 million units, as well as take a third of the global tablet market next year.

This is certainly a bold expectation for Samsung, although, Apple did manage to sell 3 million iPads in only 80 days.  Samsung is obviously hoping that recent trends in Android growth will make this target possible, and perhaps they will prove to be right.

View full post on Google Android News Android Forums

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

Firefox fans, your tabs are headed for the top of the browser. Opera started it, Safari flirted with it, Chrome brought it to the masses and now Mozilla is falling in line as well — Firefox 4 will feature the tabs above the URL bar by default.

Alex Faaborg, Mozilla’s Principal Designer on Firefox, has posted a short video explaining why tabs on top will be the default look for Firefox in Firefox 4, set to arrive at the end of 2010.

Before you panic, bear in mind that the location of tabs will still be a preference. No one is forcing you to use the new tabs on top look, but that will be the look for new installations of Firefox.

Frankly, after watching Faaborg’s video, which outlines the four main reasons that led to Mozilla’s decision to switch, we’re hard pressed to offer a counter argument. As Faaborg says in the video, the change is less about a trend and more about the evolution of the web as a platform.

Here are Mozilla’s reasons for moving tabs above the URL bar:

• Conceptual model — The URL bar contains state information about the tab, therefore it makes more sense to place the URL bar within the tab. Visually, having the tab above the bar makes the URL bar part of the tab.
• App tabs — App tabs are smaller, semi-permanent tabs designed to hold web applications you want to keep open all the time — Gmail, Facebook, Pandora, etc. App tabs are coming in Firefox 4. Because app tabs don’t really need a URL, having tabs on top makes it easier to display the app tab without a URL bar.
• The new tab-based Firefox UI — Firefox 4 will move Firefox’s dialog boxes into the browser window itself. For example, the add-ons manager is now just a page displayed in a tab. As with app tabs, there’s no need to display the URL bar.
• Notification — Firefox 4 will have a new panel-based notification system. Small overlay windows drop down from the URL bar giving you an easy way to log in to sites or authorize geolocation requests. Tabs below the URL bar will be hidden by these overlays, making it impossible to see or interact with other tabs at the same time.

While Faaborg doesn’t mention it and the mockups he uses don’t take advantage of it, tabs on top also use less screen real estate — at least if they’re designed like those in Google Chrome. Because Chrome’s tabs are nearly flush with the top of the application window, there’s a bit of extra room on the screen. It’s not a huge amount of space, but it really can make a difference on small netbook screens.

Still not convinced? Well, you’ll always have the option to revert to the old, tabs-below-the-URL-bar look, but check out the video below to see if Faaborg doesn’t convince you that tabs on top are the way to go.

Keep in mind that everything Faaborg shows in the video is still in the mockup stage and will no doubt change a bit before it works its way into Firefox 4.

See Also:

• First Look: Firefox 4 Preview Delivers Speed, Revamped Interface
• Firefox Ditches the Dialog Box
• Firefox Sync Graduates From Labs, Ready for Firefox 4

View full post on Webmonkey

Traditional phishing attacks are reasonably easy to avoid, just don’t click links in suspicious e-mails (or, for the really paranoid, any e-mail). But Firefox Creative Lead Aza Raskin has found a far more devious way to launch an attack — by hijacking your unattended browser tabs.

The attack works by first detecting that the tab the page is in does not have focus. Then the attacking script can change the tab favicon and title before loading a new site, say a fake version of Gmail, in the background.

Even scarier, the attack can parse through your history to find sites you actually visit and impersonate them.

For example, using Raskin’s method an attacker can hijack your page, detect that you frequently login to Citibank’s website and impersonate that site, complete with a message about automatically ending your session and asking you to login again.

Because most of us trust our tabs to remain on the page we left them on, this is a particularly difficult attack to detect. As Raskin writes, “as the user scans their many open tabs, the favicon and title act as a strong visual cue — memory is mailable and moldable and the user will most likely simply think they left [the] tab open.”

The only clue that you’re being tricked is that the URL will be wrong.

Raskin has set up a demonstration on his blog post. Visit the page, switch to another tab and then notice that Raskin’s site will reload to look like the Gmail interface (Raskin uses an image for the demo, obviously easy to detect, but a real attack would offer a login page just like Gmail).

In my testing the attack worked in Firefox 3.6, 3.7a, Opera 10 and Safari 4. It did not work in Google Chrome on OS X when the tab was in the background, though it did work when I switched from Chrome to another application. Also, some browsers don’t change the favicon, though it’s possible that they could with a little tinkering to Raskin’s script.

So how do you stop this attack? Well, Raskin points out that Firefox’s coming Account Manager — which delegates tasks like logging in to the browser — is one possible fix, since it always looks at the URL, even if you don’t. Similar tools like 1Password would also work, provided you use them every time you login to a website.

The other fix is on the developer side, just make sure your site doesn’t load any remote scripts. Even if you trust the site your script is loading from, it’s possible that site could be compromised.

In the mean time, up your paranoia level and start paying attention to the URL bar.

A New Type of Phishing Attack from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

See Also:

• Mozilla Gets It Right, Moves Identity Management Into Firefox
• Warning: This Site May Be Sharing Your Data
• A Look at the ‘Clickjacking’ Web Attack and Why You Should Worry

View full post on Webmonkey

TapDo goes beyond the traditional to-do checklist to bring more robust features for task management.

TapDo will appeal to those who like to organize their tasks into a system of files and aggregate them by due date. There are plenty of different ways to label and categorize tasks in TapDo, so if this is an unfamiliar concept it may take a bit of getting used to. Fortunately there is a fairly good help feature that you will be prompted to read the first time using the app.

The major difference in TapDo is the system of phrases that are available for quickly creating a task. They are divided into common categories and offer further choices based on what you select. For example, after tapping the word “business,” the phrases “meet with” or “finish” appear. Tap on “meet with” and then the next choices are “family” or “friends.” If these phrases don’t really describe what you do, there is the ability to customize your own. If you are really feeling creative the icons that accompany the phrases can also be customized. These tasks can then be categorized and viewed as folder tabs for quick access. (…)
Read the rest of Keep Tabs on Tasks with TapDo

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Keep Tabs on Tasks with TapDo | Best iPad Apps | Best Free Apps

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The popular Xmarks browser extension has added a new feature to sync open tabs across browsers and platforms. Xmarks, which started as a Firefox extension, is now also available for Google Chrome, IE and Safari, so this new feature has the capability to keep all of those browsers in perfect sync. It will now even allow you to sync your open tabs to the iPhone using the Xmarks web-based interface.

The new features bring Xmarks closer to Firefox’s own Weave syncing tool. Although Weave can handle some things Xmarks cannot — like form data and browser settings — Weave only syncs between Firefox installs.

If you frequently switch not just computers, but browsers (as many of us do), Xmarks offers a more universal syncing solution.

Once Xmarks is installed, you’ll need to create a web-based account if haven’t already. The new tab syncing feature is disabled by default, so make sure you head to the preferences panel (or page, it varies by browser) and turn it on. Once open tab syncing is enabled, just click the “open remote tabs” menu item and you’ll have access to any tab in any browser where Xmarks is installed.

Xmarks has long been a favorite for syncing bookmarks across browsers, but the new tab syncing features make it even more useful. Weave is nice, but for true cross-platform, cross-browser syncing, Xmarks is the way to go.

See Also:

• Mozilla Gets Ready to Weave Syncing Into Firefox
• New Firefox Designs Rethink Browser Bookmarks
• Opera Link Connects Your Bookmarks Across Browsers

View full post on Webmonkey