Archive for the ‘Firefox’ Category
Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 | Posted in Firefox | No Comments »
At the last Firefox 3 Status Meeting, Mozilla planned the release schedule for the second beta of Firefox 3.
The development tree will close for checkins at midnight tonight, then several days will be spent fixing little errors before the QA and build teams start working on it. Code freeze is scheduled for December 7 and the final ship date for beta 2 is currently planned for December 21, but could still be postponed into early January.
I am currently running Firefox 3 beta one as my primary browser, and I’m quite happy with it’s performance, and I look forward to the release of Beta2 , too see if the little bugs have been fixed now.
Sometimes, these things amaze me.
Source
UPDATE: Here’s how you actually make them.
Rumors say that Firefox 3 will have the long expected full page zooming feature. It will be able to zoom in the images as well, just like you can do with Opera and IE7.
This specific feature request was originally suggested in Bugzilla, 8 years ago, but was delayed and eventually bypassed since it was not considered practical in today’s HTML rendering engine for Firefox (Gecko 1.8). Like I said above, this feature is scheduled for inclusion in Firefox 3 since the new version of Gecko (1.9) will also include a large number of significant improvements.
Even if the feature is fully implemented and functional, the regular interface does not show the functionality to the regular user.
In order to test it out, you have to use Firefox’s built-in JavaScript error console, and here’s the code sequence you need to validate:
Components.classes["@mozilla.org/appshell/window-mediator;1"]
.getService(Components.interfaces.nsIWindowMediator)
.getMostRecentWindow(”navigator:browser”).getBrowser()
.mCurrentBrowser.markupDocumentViewer.fullZoom = 3;
This experimental code will zoom the current page you’re browsing to 3x. You can also experiment with different values so you can see different levels of zoom. For zooming out, use decimals like 0.5 for example.
This is yet another example of how brilliant Firefox 3 is.
We’re all waiting for the new Firefox 3 to be released ( and that would be somewhere later this year, see the schedule for more details ). But until then let’s see some of the features that would be available in the new release.
Malware protection
- By working together with Google the Firefox browser will be able to prevent you from entering sites that will potentially harm your computer. This will work in a similar way to how Firefox prevents you now from entering sites that could steal your personal information.
Location bar changes
- The way URLs are displayed in the address bar might change, the favicon for example might not be displayed at all. Other visual changes might be made as well, such as all text besides the main domain name (as in subdomain.domain.com/page.htm) to be grayed out.
Places
- This is supposed to be the new bookmarks and tagging system. The innovation lays in the way you can organize saved sites by using the above mentioned bookmarks or tags, and even store page visiting history for each site.
Private Browsing
- This one is expected by many of the people I know for a long, long time. When in Private mode the Firefox browser will not store any information of your browsing session ( that includes history, cookies, etc).
Coming soon
- There are other features on the developers map that were not detailed enough at this time but are most likely be part of Firefox 3. Here are some of them:
- Offline Web applications
- Improved password manager
- Microformat detection
This is it for now and keep posted for new updates on the development process.
It seems that FileHippo presented us with Firefox v. 2.0.0.4 before there was any official announcement on Mozilla’s FrontPage, but taking a short trip in the past, I noticed that FileHippo has done this before. If you’re dying to try the new version of Firefox, you can download it from here, or you can wait for the official announcement of the release.
As a noticeable feature for this version, they say it delivers easier navigation for everyone, including those who are visually or motor-impaired.
Enjoy,
UPDATE: It seems this version is now available on Mozilla’s official page – http://www.mozilla.com/firefox
