Archive for the ‘Browsers’ Category

Again: New tab switching interface in Firefox 3.1

I've previously written about new tab interface in Firefox 3.1.

Well, now it's changing again — this time for the better.

Pictures (click for original sizes):

New session restore handling in Firefox

I'm running the latest Firefox trunk version (currently "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1b2pre) Gecko/20081015 Minefield/3.1b2pre ID:20081015032107") and when my browser just crashed (it does repeatedly at the time, the builds are seriously unstable), I saw this window:

Click image for larger version | View on Flickr

It looks as if there's going to be a new session restore handling coming in Firefox 3.1. In the smaller window (with the columns "Restore" and "Windows and tabs") Firefox lists all windows and tabs in every window that were opened when Firefox crashed.

Consider this: You know what page made Firefox crash. And you know reloading that page will make Firefox crash again. So a session restore is no good. Well, no more - because now you can just uncheck that page in the list and it won't be restored. Nice.

By the way, the session restore local URL in Firefox is "about:sessionrestore" in case you wanted to know.

See what others are saying about the "about:sessionrestore" feature
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Danish TV 2 to cut Internet Explorer 6 support

Following in the footsteps of 37 Signals Danish broadcaster TV 2 will cut their support for Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 on the tv2.dk website.

TV 2 developer Martin Gausby has announced this in his Twitter stream:

Today we start to inform the users of Internet Explorer 6, that they should upgrade their browsers to IE7 or get Firefox http://xrl.us/osepc

Users of Internet Explorer 6 will see a gray box on the tv2.dk website telling them that their browser is outdated and will no longer be supported. They are told to upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 or switch to Firefox, the open source alternative.

In my view this is a good move by TV 2. IE6 has long been a thorn in the eye of web developers who need to design especially custom CSS for the browser, since it sometimes has its own way of interpreting the code.

Now it'll be interesting to see whether or not other Danish media websites will do the same.

Updating your Mozilla Prism to the latest build

I have already twittered about it but figured I'd might as well share it here.

You may know Prism - Mozilla's lightweight version of the Firefox browser. It makes the perfect browser for online applications that you might have running the entire day, such as Gmail or Google Docs that can slow down your browser.

What you might not know is that Prism (formerly known as "Web Runner") is built on Mozilla's XUL Runner runtime:

XULRunner is a Mozilla runtime package that can be used to bootstrap XUL+XPCOM applications that are as rich as Firefox and Thunderbird.

Now, Prism doesn't have nightly builds (a daily developer version of the software for testing purposes) like for instance Firefox, but XUL Runner does. This means that if you (like me) are a sucker for having the latest build, you can update the engine which Prism runs on (XUL Runner).

The recipe can be found here but all you really need to do is to download the latest XUL Runner build (from ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/xulrunner/nightly/latest-trunk/), extract it and put the content of the "xulrunner" folder in the already existing "xulrunner" folder in your Prism installation.

This actually solved an issue with my Prism which sometimes wouldn't load right. Now it does, and all it took was a bit of nerding around :-)

Create a link to the lastest Chromium build (using PHP)

You may have heard of Chrome, but have you heard of Chromium?

Chromium is (according to the Google Operating System blog) »the open source project created for Google Chrome«.

As with, for instance, Firefox, Chromium also has nightly builds, which are less stable builds but with bleeding edge features. In Chromium these are labeled 'snapshots'.

In the Google Operating System blog post there's link to where you can download the most recent snapshop/build of the open source browser (for Windows only!). Some kind developer has left a file in the 'chromium-rel-xp' folder called 'LATEST'. All this file contains is the number of the latest build/snapshot.

We can use this number to create a direct URL to the most recent snapshop/build.

For this you use the PHP function called 'file_get_contents' and put the 'LATEST' file in it.

Here's how it looks when it's all done.

If you're curious you can look at the source code behind the 'latest Chromium' page.

Google Chrome has been released into the wild

You may have heard (you probably have if you're reading this post) but Google has announced it's web browser named "Chrome". Read more about the announcement at TechCrunch.

Chrome is now available for download, as a matter of fact, I'm typing this in Chrome. It's fast. It's really fast. But I lack some features, most of which I get from extensions for my Firefox browser.

TechCrunch also a first review of the browser.

Now, I've only been using Chrome for a short amount of time, but it still needs to impress me. Just signed into Gmail expecting Chrome to say something like "Wow, I can see you're using Gmail - good choice! Since Gmail and I have the same parents check out these cool Gmail features that were built into me".

But it doesn't.

Chrome seems, after at first test, as a fast browser. But that's not gonna make it my preferred choice for browsing. I might use it for Gmail and Google Calendar, but I already have Mozilla Prism for that.

I think I'm going to have quite the struggle finding a place for Chrome in my browsing habits.

This just out: WordPress MU 2.6, Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1

WordPress MU 2.6
The new version of the multi user version of blogging software WordPress it out, and it now matches the feature of the "standard" WordPress 2.6. Download at mu.wordpress.org | Donncha has more info

Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1
The first alpha in the Firefox 3.1 branch has just been released. New features include a new tab switching interface (which I have already disabled) and »several improvements« to the Awesome Bar, the new address bar introduced in Firefox 3.0. Read more at Mozilla Developer News

New tab switching interface in Firefox 3.1

I just updated my Firefox nightly to the latest build (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1a1pre) Gecko/2008072103 Minefield/3.1a1pre ID:2008072103) and noticed a visual update to the tab switching interface.

It appears when you have three (or more) tabs opened in your browser. It looks very Mac'ish, if you ask me. You can activate it by pressing CTRL+TAB.

Of course it may be a plugin, but if so, I think I would have noticed earlier. Anyhow, it looks cool. Notice how the favicon is included. Click image for a larger version.

Update 1:
Okay the new tab switching interface might be pretty, but so far also pretty useless.

CTRL+TAB (previously one tab to the right) allows you to flip through the two most recent tabs, and CTRL+SHIFT+TAB (previously one tab to the left) flips through the tabs sorting by last visit, starting with the oldest. Quite the useless feature when you're use to the old right/left interface…

Update 2:
I should mention that the above is when you press a shortcut combination and then release the keys. If you press for instance CTRL+TAB and hold the CTRL key down you can jump right by pressing the TAB key again. Going the other way? Hold CTRL and SHIFT keys down and press TAB.

So if you use it like that (which I have to get accustumed to :-)) you can actually use the feature in the same way as you used to.

Update 3:
I just couldn't get along with flipping through the history of the tabs instead the location of them (forward/backwards contra left/right), so I deactivated the new tab switching interface. Here's how to do it:

Type "about:config" in the address bar and change browser.ctrlTab.mostRecentlyUsed to false. Restart Firefox and you're done.

Update 4:
Just discovered that my solution is also listed in this thread.

Firefox 3.1 alpha code freeze approaching, might be out July 25

Although it seems that Firefox 3 has only just been released there's no rest in the Firefox code. The work on Firefox 3.1 (due to be released at the end of 2008/beginning of 2009) is already underway, as you can see in the about box for the Firefox nightly builds:

(Although the screenshot is some days old the Firefox trunk is still called "3.1a1pre" - meaning a prelease of Firefox 3.1 alpha 1.)

Paula Rooney reports that the code freeze for Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 is next monday which could mean a release of the first alpha on July 25.

As you can read in Paula's post the list of new features in Firefox 3.1 is far from finished.

Firefox 3 Download Day hits the Mozilla servers…hard

At this moment the Mozilla servers (including Mozilla.com, Mozilla.org, GetFirefox.com, SpreadFirefox.com) are taking a serious pounding at Firefox 3 Download Day - news service MozillaZine is still up.

The Download Day is an attempt to get Mozilla and the Firefox browser in the Guiness Book of Records.

If you want to follow the development of the Download Day and the server outages, auto updating Twitter search tool Summize is your best friend.

Hint: Firefox 3 can be downloaded at:
http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0/

Update:
The Mozilla servers appear to be back up - except addons.mozilla.org, as Spiri points out.

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