Upcoming releases
Upcoming Releases
| Name | Scheduled Release Date | Links |
| SeaMonkey 2.0rc2 | Mid October | Build |
| Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 | October 21 | Build, QA |
| Firefox 3.0.15 | October 27 | Build, QA |
| Firefox 3.5.4 | October 27 | Build, QA |
| SeaMonkey 2.0 | NET October 20 | Build |
| Thunderbird 3.0rc1 | Start build: 3rd November (est 10th Nov) | Build, QA |
| Firefox 3.0.15 -> 3.5.4 MU | TBA | B |
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
One complaint I have heard time and time again is that Firefox doesn’t document the “how to” process very well, when it comes to building a Firefox add-on. Well, thanks to the Add-on Developer Hub, I think that is one complaint I will not hear again. The Mozilla team has put in a lot of hard work and effort into creating a place to centralize the help, tutorials and guidance you’ll need to build the next great Firefox extension.
Here are the main three categories to dive into:
- How-to Library – Get add-on development guidance in a top-notch collection of tutorials, articles, and more.
- API & Language Reference – The official documentation on APIs and languages. What you need, when you need it, to create your masterpiece.
- Case Studies – Start-to-finish success stories. See how add-on developers made magic with Mozilla.
They also have a couple of tools to help you along the way too:
- Add-on Builder – Auto-generate add-on packaging by entering basic info and picking UI parts. Get working without setup.
- Add-on Validator – Check your add-on for common problems and errors. Open to anyone, not just add-ons hosted here.
I would also suggest checking out both the developer forums and blog for more help on how you can build that extension you’ve always wanted, or how to make your current add-on for the browser even better.
All in all, the Mozilla team has put together a fantastic guide to help you build an extension onto the Firefox browser. No matter if you have always wanted to write an add-on (but didn’t know how) or your just interested in finding out how the sausage is made, the Add-on Developer Hub is a resource well worth diving into.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
What else is mozilla capable of?
Mozilla Applications
These applications are developed by the Mozilla community and their code is hosted on mozilla.org.
-
BugzillaBugzilla™ is a bug tracking system designed to help teams manage software development. Hundreds of organizations across the globe are using this powerful tool to get organized and communicate effectively.
-
CaminoCamino® is a Web browser optimized for Mac OS X with a Cocoa user interface, and powerful Gecko layout engine. It’s the simple, secure, and fast browser for Mac OS X.
-
FennecFennec is the code name of the effort to build a browser for mobile phones and smaller non-PC devices that provides the full web experience you get with Firefox on your desktop today.
-
FirefoxThe award-winning Web browser is now faster, more secure, and fully customizable to your online life. With Firefox® 3, we’ve added powerful new features that make your online experience even better.
-
Lightning and SunbirdLightning is a popular extension to add calendaring, scheduling and task management capabilities. Sunbird® is a cross-platform application that brings Mozilla-style ease-of-use to your calendar.
-
SeaMonkeySeaMonkey® is the all-in-one application formerly known as the “Mozilla Application Suite”, containing a web browser, a mail and newsgroups client, an HTML editor, web development tools, and an IRC chat client.
-
ThunderbirdThunderbird™ is Mozilla’s next generation e-mail client. Thunderbird makes emailing safer, faster and easier than ever before and can also scale to meet the most sophisticated organizational needs.
Mozilla-Based Applications
These applications are built by individuals and organizations using Mozilla technologies. If you would like to suggest other applications to feature here, please let us know.
-
Atmail Webmail ClientAtmail allows users to access POP3 and IMAP Mailboxes on any server of your choice. You and your users can experience webmail via a fluid, intuitive interface that excels aesthetically and functionally.
-
Facebook Open PlatformThe Facebook Open Platform uses Mozilla technology as part of its infrastructure and enables you to build full applications that deeply integrate into a user’s Facebook experience.
Mozilla Labs Experiments
-
BespinBespin is an experiment that proposes an open, extensible web-based framework for code editing that aims to increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote open standards.
-
UbiquityUbiquity is an experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common tasks more quickly and easily.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Firefox tips and tricks
Everybody’s favorite open-source browser, Firefox, is great right out of the box. And by adding some of the awesome extensions available out there, the browser just gets better and better.
But look under the hood, and there are a bunch of hidden (and some not-so-secret) tips and tricks available that will crank Firefox up and pimp your browser. Make it faster, cooler, more efficient. Get to be a Jedi master with the following cool Firefox tricks.
1) More screen space. Make your icons small. Go to View – Toolbars – Customize and check the “Use small icons” box.
2) Smart keywords. If there’s a search you use a lot (let’s say IMDB.com’s people search), this is an awesome tool that not many people use. Right-click on the search box, select “Add a Keyword for this search”, give the keyword a name and an easy-to-type and easy-to-remember shortcut name (let’s say “actor”) and save it. Now, when you want to do an actor search, go to Firefox’s address bar, type “actor” and the name of the actor and press return. Instant search! You can do this with any search box.
3) Keyboard shortcuts. This is where you become a real Jedi. It just takes a little while to learn these, but once you do, your browsing will be super fast. Here are some of the most common (and my personal favs):
* Spacebar (page down)
* Shift-Spacebar (page up)
* Ctrl+F (find)
* Alt-N (find next)
* Ctrl+D (bookmark page)
* Ctrl+T (new tab)
* Ctrl+K (go to search box)
* Ctrl+L (go to address bar)
* Ctrl+= (increase text size)
* Ctrl+- (decrease text size)
* Ctrl-W (close tab)
* F5 (reload)
* Alt-Home (go to home page)
4) Auto-complete. This is another keyboard shortcut, but it’s not commonly known and very useful. Go to the address bar (Control-L) and type the name of the site without the “www” or the “.com”. Let’s say “google”. Then press Control-Enter, and it will automatically fill in the “www” and the “.com” and take you there – like magic! For .net addresses, press Shift-Enter, and for .org addresses, press Control-Shift-Enter.
5) Tab navigation. Instead of using the mouse to select different tabs that you have open, use the keyboard. Here are the shortcuts:
* Ctrl+Tab (rotate forward among tabs)
* Ctrl+Shft+Tab (rotate to the previous tab)
* Ctrl+1-9 (choose a number to jump to a specific tab)
6) Mouse shortcuts. Sometimes you’re already using your mouse and it’s easier to use a mouse shortcut than to go back to the keyboard. Master these cool ones:
* Middle click on link (opens in new tab)
* Shift-scroll down (previous page)
* Shift-scroll up (next page)
* Ctrl-scroll up (decrease text size)
* Ctrl-scroll down (increase text size)
* Middle click on a tab (closes tab)
7) Delete items from address bar history. Firefox’s ability to automatically show previous URLs you’ve visited, as you type, in the address bar’s drop-down history menu is very cool. But sometimes you just don’t want those URLs to show up (I won’t ask why). Go to the address bar (Ctrl-L), start typing an address, and the drop-down menu will appear with the URLs of pages you’ve visited with those letters in them. Use the down-arrow to go down to an address you want to delete, and press the Delete key to make it disappear.
User chrome. If you really want to trick out your Firefox, you’ll want to create a UserChrome.css file and customize your browser. It’s a bit complicated to get into here, but check out this tutorial.
9) Create a user.js file. Another way to customize Firefox, creating a user.js file can really speed up your browsing. You’ll need to create a text file named user.js in your profile folder (see this to find out where the profile folder is) and see this example user.js file that you can modify. Created by techlifeweb.com, this example explains some of the things you can do in its comments.
10) about:config. The true power user’s tool, about.config isn’t something to mess with if you don’t know what a setting does. You can get to the main configuration screen by putting about:config in the browser’s address bar. See Mozillazine’s about:config tips and screenshots.
11) Add a keyword for a bookmark. Go to your bookmarks much faster by giving them keywords. Right-click the bookmark and then select Properties. Put a short keyword in the keyword field, save it, and now you can type that keyword in the address bar and it will go to that bookmark.
12) Speed up Firefox. If you have a broadband connection (and most of us do), you can use pipelining to speed up your page loads. This allows Firefox to load multiple things on a page at once, instead of one at a time (by default, it’s optimized for dialup connections). Here’s how:
* Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Type “network.http” in the filter field, and change the following settings (double-click on them to change them):
* Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
* Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
* Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to a number like 30. This will allow it to make 30 requests at once.
* Also, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.
13) Limit RAM usage. If Firefox takes up too much memory on your computer, you can limit the amount of RAM it is allowed to us. Again, go to about:config, filter “browser.cache” and select “browser.cache.disk.capacity”. It’s set to 50000, but you can lower it, depending on how much memory you have. Try 15000 if you have between 512MB and 1GB ram.
14) Reduce RAM usage further for when Firefox is minimized. This setting will move Firefox to your hard drive when you minimize it, taking up much less memory. And there is no noticeable difference in speed when you restore Firefox, so it’s definitely worth a go. Again, go to about:config, right-click anywhere and select New-> Boolean. Name it “config.trim_on_minimize” and set it to TRUE. You have to restart Firefox for these settings to take effect.
15) Move or remove the close tab button. Do you accidentally click on the close button of Firefox’s tabs? You can move them or remove them, again through about:config. Edit the preference for “browser.tabs.closeButtons”. Here are the meanings of each value:
* 0: Display a close button on the active tab only
* 1:(Default) Display close buttons on all tabs
* 2:Don’t display any close buttons
* 3:Display a single close button at the end of the tab bar (Firefox 1.x behavior)
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Migrating to firefox
For all those who have been using the old,odd IE, Firefox is can offer lot of exciting features. There are certain terminology differences between firefox and IE. Thats why my very first post is about migrating from IE to firefox.Firefox offers tabbed viewing. For all those who say “Hey IE 7 gives you tabbed view!”, i ve got a counter for you. IE 7, as the name goes, 7th version.But firefox started supporting tabbed view right from its intital version! And regarding the terminology differences, the Temporary Internet Files is Cache in Firefox. All other terminologies are more or less the same. So the basic requirement to migrate to firefox is basic english knowledge…. For instance,refresh is reload in here.. If you are alreay convinced that,firefox is the browser of your choice and ready to migrate to it, but pondering about the favourites which you have marked in your IE…. Not to worry…. While you install firefox, it asks if you would like to import all of your IE settings and the favourites and bookmarks on to firefox. Just say yes, and its done! Apart from the tabbed browsing option, there are other exciting features too. Pop up window controls – It allows us to suppress both popup popunder windows. Cookie manager – Allows you to configure what cookies firefox must accet and what it should not. Download manager – This is the most exciting feature according to me. I say so because,it clusters all the downloads into a single window and you can pause, resume and manage the downloads that are currently active. Image manager- Another great tool, which gives you an option so as to display pics automatically whenever a page is loaded. Depending upon the configuration, you can enable or isable loading of images in a page. This option increases the speed of your browser. This is a basic jist of what Firefox can over you…… Convinced with this???!!!! But this is just a trailer of Firefox’s features…. Main picture is still under production….. I m using firefox for the past three years…. To me it is the best.. Not only to me, but to many. I say so because, Firefox 3, on its release day made a record break of 3 million downloads in a day!!!! Doesnt this figure seem to be a big one!!! The tale of firefox is still not over…. Firefox is growing day by day…. Open source, loads of addons and whatmore do you want… You ask for it…. And you will surely have it developed by the community…. Still waiting for good reasons to switch to Firefox…. I leave it to you to explore…. For all those who have already started admiring Firefox’s magic sprawl… I’d post the following link for you….
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Firefox – Lord of browsers
There are plenty of reasons why firefox can be termed the lord of all browsers. Firstly, most of the computer magazines term, it as the most secured browser. Opera, Safari, Chrome… (IE is out of the pic long back) all have loads to offer, but inspite of all these things, firefox stands out the entire clan. Is it because of the fact ha it has got loads of addons and stuff… One of the most exciting features of Firefox is that, you need not always remember the name of the site you wish to visit, type the phrase in the address bar, and firefox can do the rest for you. Isnt it really nice???!!!!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Why this blog?
As a computer science and engineering student, I m not just crazy about computers but more crazy about Mozilla and its open source propaganda. The basic instinct behind me starting this blog is not only to spread Mozilla and its products but also to create awareness among the less aware clan about what lot it can offer. The best thing about Mozilla is that it allows us to take part and contribute to it. So what is it you are waiting for folks…. Get up, lets promote Mozilla.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Search
-
Blogroll
