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16 Dec 2008
I’ve been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix[1], and for the past few major releases, I’ve been trying to test the beta versions. I grabbed the first 3.1 beta in October, but it was unstable, and some of the features were jarring. The tab switching behavior was a special challenge to my productivity, and the new JavaScript engine (TraceMonkey) was probably a source of a lot of the instability.
Last week, Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 was released, and it’s much nicer. I haven’t had a single crash yet, and it does feel a bit snappier. And all of the tab switching stuff has been backed out. Us web developers are excited about some new stuff like HTML 5 <video> and <audio> tags, cross-site XHR support, and CSS-like DOM selectors. But besides the speed, I don’t think end-users are going to be rushing to this release.
[1] – I’m pretty sure I installed Phoenix 0.3 way back in fall of 2002. Look, you can still get it!
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20 Apr 2008
jssh is a Firefox addon that allows you to control your browser through a telnet session. -
13 Mar 2008
Add this to your "Why you should be looking forward to Firefox 3" pile
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11 Mar 2008
And it seems like the only thing anyone can talk about is the speed.
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31 Dec 2007
Some have made the idiotic suggestion that Firefox be renamed to "Netscape" now that AOL has abandoned the latter.
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18 Dec 2007
Lightweight theming; fast and simple. It's a great idea, and there's apparently web-driven dynamic theme support right around the corner.
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6 Dec 2007
I noticed this when I came back on Tuesday. I like it, but right now it's a bit slower than the old location bar. I hope that's temporary.
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20 Nov 2007
Officially, it's only recommended for developers. But I think it's so awesome that anyone who's interested should risk it.
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16 Nov 2007Firefox 3 page zoom
In Firefox 2, zooming just changes the size of text. In Firefox 3, it resizes images, buttons, padding, form elements, everything. View full size to see what it looks like zoomed all the way out.
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15 Nov 2007Firefox 3 location bar autocomplete
Another side-effect of Places is that the auto-complete dropdown is so much faster and so much better at searching your history. Instead of just looking at the start of the URL, it searches through all title and URL substrings. Here, "API" gives me more or less exactly the history results I wanted.
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9 Nov 2007Firefox 3 smart folders
The third in an unbounded set of the things I love about Firefox 3. There's a new backend for history and bookmarks (called "Places") that makes things way faster and easier to do neat things with, like search and statistics. The Page Info dialog's number-of-visits value, for instance, is definitely pulled from there. Firefox 3 also comes pre-configured with some smart folders like these.
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7 Nov 2007Firefox 3 page info dialog
The page info dialog was one of the 2007 Summer of Code projects.
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6 Nov 2007
An intro to the best feature in Firefox 3, and a preview into how it's very soon going to be even better.
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6 Nov 2007Firefox 3 file:// listing
RIP unformatted file listings 1994-2007
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31 Oct 2007
This is so freaking awesome. I've been following that bug for probably four years.
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27 Aug 2007
Facebook has a lot of good things going for it, but openness is definitely not one of them.
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16 Aug 2007
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19 Jun 2007
The interesting thing here for me isn't the improvement from 1.5 to 2.0, but rather it's the overall speed at which the automatic upgrading system makes widespread massive upgrades.
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29 May 2007
Firefox's new open-source crash reporting system is going to be another big change in Firefox 3.
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16 Apr 2007
A great new code improvement landed on the Firefox 3 codebase last Friday: Enhanced Page View. It adds a lot of information and makes it so much easier to find. But the notable thing about it is that — like APNG support — it was a Summer of Code project. For the second summer, Google paid college students for the summer to work on code for open source projects. In 2005, none of the Mozilla projects got very far, but the story was decidedly different this year. Gervase Markham’s lookback indicated that 5 of the 12 projects were checked in (or nearly so). And a couple of the others made significant progress.
Google’s doing a lot of good things here: indirectly supporting open source projects, helping college students do something for the summer that’s related to their degree, and (probably most importantly) introducing the students to the experience of working in the open source community. Not just Mozilla, but plenty of other projects, big and small, got help: Gaim, Drupal, WordPress, and dozens of other groups all owe Summer of Code for new features and bug fixes.
I only wish Summer of Code had been around when I was in college.
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8 Dec 2005
I was inspired yesterday to work on a new Greasemonkey script. Reminded about Jesse Ruderman’s Bash.org Instant Voting script, I made a similar script for flagging posts and comments on Metafilter. Metafilter Asynchronous Flagging allows you to flag posts and comments without having to go through the two interstitial pages and losing your line of thought in the thread.
(I had to flag one of my own comments approximately thirty times while I was testing it. I wonder what Mathowie thought about that.)
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23 Nov 2005
I updated the Greasemonkey script “Flickr More Home” today. It used to get its data from the RSS feelds, but I’d had problems with the feeds not actually showing my contacts’ most recent photos. Plus they’d always be missing non-public photos that I had access to.
So now it uses the HTML pages to get the list of photos instead. I don’t know if that’s harder on Flickr’s servers (it’s certainly less elegant), but since it caches them, it’s only really two more hits per Flickring session.
Update 14 Dec – Fixed to work with Greasemonkey 0.6.4
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25 May 2005
I’ve created a new Greasemonkey user script awkwardly named “Metafilter mark contact contributions”. I mark people that I’ve met at meetups as contacts on MetaFilter, and I like to be able to have a reminder when I see something from that user. Slashdot has a feature like this built in (it uses small green and red globes), and I figured that with some of GreaseMonkey’s cross-site XMLHTTP functions, this would be pretty easy. It was.
Install Firefox and Greasemonkey and right click here to install the user script. Here is a sample screenshot.
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23 Dec 2004
Non-modality, instant-apply, and a nice new look are in store for Firefox’s preferences dialog. Although it hasn’t been checked in yet, this is just one of the reasons to stay up to date with the nightlies. (But these are all the reasons not to.)
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16 Dec 2004
Firefox’s New York Times ad is in today’s issue. Here’s a PNG version, including a blowup on yours truly.
Dang, now I have to run out to the store and buy a newspaper. (Apparently Napoleon Dynamite uses Firefox.)
