#mozilla


Google Chrome Open Source Web Browser Released


As announced in their blog yes­ter­day, Google released its open source web brows­er today at 12pm PDT. It is called Google Chrome (Beta). It was built with the help of com­po­nents from Apple’s WebKit and Mozil­la’s Fire­fox, and some oth­ers. It is only cur­rent­ly avail­able on Win­dows; though they are work­ing on the Lin­ux and Mac ver­sions sup­pos­ed­ly.

I took it for a quick test run ear­li­er and I can say its fast and “min­i­mal” as to what they say. Although most of the key fea­tures are already in Fire­fox, I do like the “crash con­trol”. Here are the ones that have been high­light­ed:

  • One box for every­thing — Web search. Web his­to­ry. Address bar. Sug­ges­tions as you type. One uni­fied box serves all your brows­ing needs.
  • New tab page — Every time you open a new tab, you’ll see a visu­al sam­pling of your most vis­it­ed sites, most used search engines, and recent­ly book­marked pages and closed tabs.
  • Appli­ca­tion short­cuts — Use web apps with­out open­ing your brows­er. Appli­ca­tion short­cuts can direct­ly load your favorite online apps.
  • Dynam­ic tabs — You can drag tabs out of the brows­er to cre­ate new win­dows, gath­er mul­ti­ple tabs into one win­dow or arrange your tabs how­ev­er you wish — quick­ly and eas­i­ly.
  • Crash con­trol — Every tab you’re using is run inde­pen­dent­ly in the brows­er, so if one app crash­es it won’t take any­thing else down.
  • Incog­ni­to mode — Don’t want pages you vis­it to show up in your web his­to­ry? Choose incog­ni­to mode for pri­vate brows­ing.
  • Safe brows­ing — Google Chrome warns you if you’re about to vis­it a sus­pect­ed phish­ing, mal­ware or oth­er­wise unsafe web­site.
  • Instant book­marks — Want to book­mark a web page? Just click the star icon at the left edge of the address bar and you’re done.
  • Import­ing set­tings — When you switch to Google Chrome, you can pick up where you left off with all the book­marks and pass­words from your exist­ing brows­er.
  • Sim­pler down­loads — No intru­sive down­load man­ag­er; you see your down­load­’s sta­tus at the bot­tom of your cur­rent win­dow.

So after giv­ing it a spin, would I use it in my dai­ly work­flow? Not quite yet. As not­ed, it is still in Beta and only avail­able to the Win­dows-user demo­graph­ic. It will be inter­est­ing to see where it goes for sure, or how peo­ple react to it as it approach­es more and more to main­stream. That, and how Google would mar­ket it with their oth­er appli­ca­tions and ser­vices.

That being said, I over­heard through the grapevine that Google’s inten­tion for releas­ing this is due the fact that Mozil­la Fire­fox makes 85% of its rev­enue through Google Search. It does makes sense though. Whether that is total­ly true or only par­tial, its still a good idea if that’s the case. Why make some­one else mon­ey when you keep that mon­ey for yourself—right?

Anoth­er ques­tion that came to mind was: is it bad for every­one else, the every­day users? Not quite… yet. Unless every­one has been fol­low­ing Google’s blog, or are tech­ni­cal­ly savvy and keep track of Tech news, the reach of Google Chrome’s release would most like­ly be by word of mouth between those in the Tech indus­try (for now). But when it does make its stake in the brows­er mar­ket share, it can be bad and good at the same time. Bad, that there will be anoth­er brows­er to add to the list to sup­port and care for by web­sites. And good, that it can be the one true brows­er to rule them all1.

Update
Kevin Pur­dy of Lifehacker.com recent­ly released some Beta Brows­er Speed Tests ear­li­er today com­par­ing IE 8b2, Fire­fox 3.1b and Google Chrome 0.2. There are 3 impor­tant find­ings from his tests:

  1. In terms of start­up time, Chrome wins. On a cold start2, Fire­fox leads the pack. How­ev­er, on a warm start where the brows­er has just been closed and reloaded, Chrome sur­pris­ing­ly takes the deci­sive lead.
  2. In load­ing JavaScript & CSS, both Fire­fox and Chrome are near half of that of IE’s.
  3. Last but not least, with regards to mem­o­ry use, Fire­fox is undoubt­ed­ly the win­ner. But this might be arguable as can be not­ed in Chrome’s fea­ture set. That is, its abil­i­ty of “crash con­trol” which makes each tab load its own process, rather than a sole Chrome process like that of IE and Fire­fox.
  1. Will there ever be one? I real­ly don’t think so. That’s what’s good and bad about Tech­nol­o­gy, there’s always improve­ment to be done and it is wide­ly open for every­one to inno­vate. []
  2. Refer­ring to a com­put­er that just has been turned on or restart­ed. []

Spread Firefox — Download Day 2008

spreadfirefox.com/worldrecord/

Sounds like a good deal, right? All you have to do is get Fire­fox 3 dur­ing Down­load Day to help set the record for most soft­ware down­loads in 24 hours — it’s that easy. We’re not ask­ing you to swal­low a sword or to bal­ance 30 spoons on your face, although that would be kind of awe­some.

By the way, the offi­cial date for the launch of Fire­fox 3 will be post­ed here soon — so check back! Join our com­mu­ni­ty and this effort by pledg­ing today.

The Journey to Update Firefox from 1.0.7 to 1.5

Just a few weeks ago, Mozil­la released Fire­fox 1.5 RC3. This seems to be the same as the final release. So, if you haven’t con­vert­ed yet (most­ly IE6 users) nor have tried out Fire­fox, now is the time.

Mozilla Firefox

I final­ly decid­ed to update my Fire­fox ver­sion from 1.0.7 to the newest 1.5. I will be imple­ment­ing this on my work PC as it has the most exten­sions installed. This should be inter­est­ing.

Here are the exten­sions:

  • Web Devel­op­er 0.9.4
  • Wizz RSS Read­er 1.1.0
  • gTrans­late 0.2.6 gTrans­late 0.2.7
  • ShowIP 0.7.11
  • Col­orZil­la 0.8.2 (New ver­sion: 0.8.3)
  • Grease­mon­key 0.5.3 Grease­mon­key 0.6.2
  • fireFTP 0.88.3
  • Site­bar Side­bar 1.02
  • Tab­brows­er Exten­sions 1.14.2005092501 (New ver­sion: 2.0.2005113001)
  • View Ren­dered Source Chart 1.2.03
  • Screen­Grab 0.6
  • HTML Val­ida­tor 0.7.6
  • Aut­ofill 0.2
  • IE Tab 1.0.5 (New ver­sion: 1.0.6.4)

Here goes noth­ing, or some­thing. To be con­tin­ued

Updates
The striked-out exten­sions above were not­ed as incom­pat­i­ble with Fire­fox 1.5. Fire­fox Update auto­mat­i­cal­ly “dis­abled [them] until com­pat­i­ble ver­sions are installed.” I then not­ed the newest, avail­able ver­sion of the exten­sion that is com­pat­i­ble with Fire­fox 1.5, as stat­ed by Fire­fox Update.

Also to note, I need­ed to update my theme “Noia 2.0 (extreme)” as it was caus­ing a dis­play bug on the URL-address bar. This went from 2.88 to 2.991 and appar­ent­ly fixed the dis­play issue. This took a while to fig­ure out. Maybe in the future, Moz-dev team can have a note to check one’s theme if there are any dis­play issues being encoun­tered.

All in all, the update went quite well. It seems that Fire­fox 1.5 loads a tad faster than its pre­de­ces­sor. I’m just bummed about not hav­ing some exten­sions: Site­bar Side­bar (which is my links depos­i­to­ry) and Grease­mon­key (which is one of the best exten­sions to have for a Fire­fox user).

Note: Grease­mon­key 0.6.2 seems to be hav­ing bug issues at the moment. Peo­ple have been address­ing this issue, so there should be a fix soon. It’s prob­a­bly going to roll out with ver­sion 0.6.4 of the exten­sion.

Firefox Extensions Makes My Mouth Water

Firefox Extensions Makes My Mouth Water

Just hap­pen to stum­ble upon what I think would be a poten­tial­ly great exten­sion (amongst oth­ers) for Web Designers/Developers—IETab. Its slick that you can open/view a web­page in IE but embed­ded in a Fire­fox tab. That, and you can run “Win­dows update from Fire­fox!”

Oth­er exten­sions that are on top of my list and use cur­rent­ly would be:

Hope those help. Hap­py extend­ing!

PS. Any oth­er great exten­sions? Let me know… I’m always look­ing for some­thing that can make things eas­i­er, as well as inter­est­ing.

Addi­tion­al ones to look at…