Firefox — Tag

Today Google released it’s long rumoured, hotly anticipated, entry into the web browser market – Google Chrome.

It is another back-to-the-basics web browser, it provides nothing revolutionary to the layman user, but the insides is a bit of an evolution for your basic web browser. In an essence, Chrome looks at the web as a powerful platform rather than a series of pages. You could be forgiven for completely missing this swing, as it has happened all rather quickly. However the moment Google’s email product Gmail hit the market, we knew the web was going to start turning into something special.

It has gotta be named Chrome for a reason.

Google Chrome is just a web browser, but one that has been completely optimised so the web apps run as if they were on your desktop. The user interface is also optimised – the home page contains your most visited websites, and you have the most minimal toolbars I’ve seen in a browser. It contains back, forward, refresh, an address bar, and two buttons that pop open menus. The tabs are at the very top of the browser window, a place that has always made the most sense to me.

It loads in a snap, the pages wait for no one to draw. Whilst Firefox has a draw delay, even removing this still did not match the performance of Chrome. Some say that Chrome runs slower, but after running one of the selector tests, it wiped the floor with Firefox 3. Stuff just runs fast.

Chrome’s memory management is also a plus, with the task manager loaded, opening Gmail and then closing it again, I was able to regain all the memory Gmail took, it was as if I never opened it.

I think this is a huge kick for web browser makers to get their act into gear and start thinking the same way. Microsoft is already coming up with tab sandboxing for Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla are on their way into making Tamarin work with Javascript 2 (it’s Mozilla’s Javascript Virtual Machine, and it runs code almost as fast as native programs) (Mozilla also have Prism, which I see Chrome takes a page from). I have a feeling that this is Google pulling the best stuff that is incoming and forcing it onto us right now, and boy do we need it!

I have my thoughts about Firefox with this though. Mozilla has no excuses now for its rather sluggish performance and memory guzzling ways. We may see some major changes in this arena with Gecko 2, which will be the base for Firefox 4, but we have over a year before then. This is also true for Internet Explorer, but I’m not in a mood to care about that web browser just yet (although, I do like what they’ve done with the auto-complete).

An actual release time has now been announced, 10am PDT (California time). So that means that here in New Zealand will be 5am the 18th of June (tomorrow). When you wake up, you’ll find Firefox 3 all ready to download for your enjoyment

Extensions have already been busy updating, All-in-one sidebar, Greasemonkey, Firebug, etc etc. Firefox 3 will let you know which extensions are broken when it first starts so there shouldn’t be any troubles.

Expect to see Firefox 3 released tomorrow. Help it get into the record books for most downloads over 24 hours by hitting the image below,

In Firefox 3, the location bar learns some new tricks. This has given in the unofficial name of Awesome Bar because it gives a lot more control. Here are some tips to using it,

Tags make it easier

Bookmarking has been made a lot easier thanks to the Star icon to the right of the location bar. Click once, and you’ve bookmarked it. You might not know that you can click again to change the bookmark properties, with a new feature known as “tags.” Fill out the Tag field with keywords about the bookmark. When you want to go back to this page, just type one or few tags in the location bar to see it.

Name and then some

I follow a forum thread which gets increasingly bigger, and I don’t want to subscribe to the forum. Creating a bookmark is useless as it would quickly go out of date as the thread is quite popular. But, as forum software tends to put the first post ID in the URL, I can use that to get to the page quickly. I could easily type in the web site name, but you can also type in parts of the URL and it will still match.

So, if I want a GP Forums thread, each URL contains the word “thread” in them, so I can type “gp forums thread” and it will give me all threads that I have been to on GP Forums, despite “GP Forums” appearing in the title, and “thread” appearing in the URL. I can add the word “gta” and then I get all threads that have “GTA” in the title.

If I want all New Zealand sites I’ve been to about Vodafone, I could go “.co.nz vodafone” and get a list that way.

Turn the frequent search terms into bookmarks

If you find yourself doing a rather common search, you can turn it into a dynamic bookmark that you can access from your bookmarks toolbar or menu. Just go to Bookmarks » Organise Bookmarks, and in Search Bookmarks type in your terms (i.e. “.co.nz vodafone”). Change your Search Area to History and you should get your results that look similar to the location bar ones (without the bookmarks though). Click the Save button and give it a name. It will automatically go into the Bookmarks Menu, you can drag and drop it to where ever you please.

What are your tricks? Comment!

Firefox 3 has reached a new milestone today with the release of Release Candidate 1. For those not into the naming conventions, alpha is best to avoid, beta is mostly stable but not done, and a release candidate is something that is completely finished but need to find any outstanding major bugs.

It is quite a nice step-up from beta 5. It is a bit speedier, and with lots of polish, as we like. I’m running the Vista build, so things may be different on other peoples machines, but they’ve added nice little Vista elements around the place. For example, the search box is italicised and grey just like the rest of the search boxes. They also appear to be using the Segoe UI font through out. Lots of blue is present. (Remember that Firefox 3 uses operating system dependent themes now, so things will look completely different on XP, Mac OS X, and Linux. The Mac OS X version looks fantastic.)

The Library, the new one-stop location for your bookmarks and history, looks a lot nicer too. Icons are present for each of the different stores (Bookmarks Toolbar, Bookmarks Menu and Unfiled Bookmarks). There are more stores for History and Tags. They have cut down on the search though, unfortunately. In the beta builds, the search operated much like the Vista search in Windows Explorer (you could add boolean searches, last access dates, etc). Now you can only restrict a search to a location and save it. Slightly disappointing, but the catch with the beta versions was that the functionality didn’t actually work perfectly, so shame they couldn’t finish it. Hopefully someone will release it as an add-on at some point in the future.

The Downloads window finally gets the Clean Up button, but they’ve named it “Clear List.” Hurrah! (Clean Up gives me the impression they’re going to wipe all my downloads).

Some extensions are having problems. Look here for information on turning off compatibility checks (but be warned and find your shortcut to Safe Mode!).

If you are using Vista, I highly recommend getting the Glasser extension. It makes the program look even more polished. Add the CSS to your userChrome.css file to make it even better.

If, like me, you use PriceSpy all the time to find the cheapest deal on computer hardware, then listen up! I made a microsummary generator for Firefox. It will give you the cheapest price for any product on the website.

• Add the microsummary generator to Firefox (2.0+, incl. 3.0)
• Go to PriceSpy and find your item.
• Click on the ## prices link.
  
• Go to Bookmarks ⇒ Add Bookmark (or in Firefox 3, click on the Star in the address bar twice).
• Click on the down arrow next to the name and then select the new Live Title.
  
• Click Done or OK.

It shouldn’t matter where you save it, however it is best if you put it in the Bookmarks Toolbar.

Firefox 3 beta 1 is finally here and I’ve installed it on two different machines and had two completely different experiences.

The first setup I installed on was at work, and I will just say Windows XP SP2 with 512MB of RAM. After installing, Fx3 would just consume all the RAM for some unknown reason until I could kill it or hard-restart my machine. I never found out what went wrong, and probably won’t.

The second setup I installed on was at home, and this was a lot smoother. Note though that depending on the extension, it can break Fx3 hard. So just be careful. My impressions, excellent. This is a beta, and Mozilla betas tend to be good. There are lots of user interface tweaks, but the big changes are yet to happen with a new theme for each operating system. For now it is fine.

It feels a lot faster than 2.0. Possibly due to the new rendering engine it uses (Cairo). It also doesn’t eat as much RAM as 2, but there is still room for improvement (and this is only if you discount my first experience).

Places is finally in this build, and unfortunately I think it adds a bit of confusion. Places was originally a concept for 2, but was dropped due it needing a lot more time. Places replaces your bookmarks and history as a single repository of everything that you go to or have been. It replaces these with a database driven system using SQLite to provide some performance improvements. This also means that the old Netscape 2.0 bookmarks.html is now retired, and the hideous history system is taken out back.

So what benefits does this make? Well, personally I hope that the interface to Places is improved as even I’m confused by it. Fx3 will add a folder to your bookmarks toolbar called “Places,” which is actually full of predefined searches – Recently Starred Pages, Recently Visited Starred Pages, Most Visited Starred Pages, Recently Used Tags, Most Used Tags and Most Visited Pages. Now you are probably starting to see what the Places system can do.

“Starred” pages are actually bookmarks. Why they have two different terms for the same thing I do not know. Adding bookmarks is a snap, next to the Go button is a new Star button. Click it once, and it’s bookmarked. But it doesn’t appear anywhere, except for those “Recently Starred” folders in your Places folder and it gets a little star in the new autocomplete (more on that soon). To get it to appear somewhere in your bookmarks, you have to click the Star again (no this button doesn’t toggle) and change its location from All Bookmarks to Bookmarks Menu. People may remember I hated this with Safari, and I’m hating it now. When I Bookmark stuff I expect it to be under Bookmarks!

While you are editing the “Starred” Bookmark (?) you can add tags. Another UI gripe here, it doesn’t indicate how to enter tags. Separate with space, semi-colons or commas? I first tried with spaces and then realised that it was just making one long tag, so commas was the next choice and it worked. Hopefully they’ll fix this up by beta 2.

But why would you want to tag bookmarks? Well, there is this new autocomplete that puts the old one to shame. Don’t you hate it when you are trying to find that page on Wikipedia you went to again, and you have to start typing “en.wikipedia” to get anything? Well, now you can start typing “wikipedia”, or the name of the Wikipedia page you were after or, well, whatever was in the title or URL of the page, and if you have starred it, whatever tags you gave it. Finally, a smart autocomplete! Well, not that smart, there is a patch in the works to implement adaptive learning into the new autocomplete, so when you type stuff into it it learns what you wanted when you typed it. Cool stuff.

These are the biggest changes to Firefox 3, and I’m really liking it. Other changes include a new way to save your passwords. One thing I hate is if I’m unsure of a password, so I dismiss saving it and then if it works, I can’t be bothered logging out and logging in again. They’ve now replaced this dialog with a bar along the top of the page that hangs around for a while so you can tell it that you do want to save the password if it worked. The other new feature is resuming downloads between browser sessions – a much requested feature.

Did you know that YouTube does have RSS feeds available? Yes, it’s true! The only thing is, they don’t make this fact very well known, you have to know which page to go to to find out where it is. Interestingly, these RSS feeds are enclosure feeds, as in you should be able to use them in a podcast client (like iTunes) and it’ll download the shows (however, for these I recommend Miro).

I decided to create a Greasemonkey script that exposes these RSS feeds in a better location. It only works on the beta version of the pages (probably won’t make a normal version, but the beta pages are better anyway).

1. If you haven’t already, download Greasemonkey for Firefox.
2. Click here to open the script, and select Install from the notification bar at the top
3. Go to any video, and if you want the RSS feed for the user click on the RSS icon in your address bar.

Clearly YouTube/Google don’t really want average Joe user to use these, but then, does average Joe user use web feeds?

Microsoft Open Source Software Labs (Port 25) have released a plugin that fixes a problem in the latest version of Windows - there is no Netscape Plugin for Windows Media Player built into Vista. It is backwards compatible down to version 6.4 (yes, long before WMP went all media-library like).

• Download the plugin at Port 25

This diminishes the need to go and download each DLL separately from a strange website.

It has also been announced that they will soon release a plugin to enable CardSpace in Firefox, the identity management system in .NET 3.0 for web sites. (In Vista, press the Windows key, and type cardspace, though card does seem sufficient)

Well, I made a TradeMe microsummary generator for Firefox 2.0 some time back when the feature was first announced. Since then I don’t think it has actually worked, especially now that TradeMe has updated their look.

So, here is a new one.

• TradeMe item price

How to use it:

1. Go to a TradeMe auction page, like this one.
2. Click on Bookmarks, then Bookmark this Page.
3. Click on the little arrow on the Name combo and select the live title.
   
   You may want to put it on your Bookmarks Toolbar.
4. Click OK, you’re all done!

Now it is time to get back to work.