The procedure involves scanning some temporary folders looking for bits normally added by OS and other applications operations. Firefox 3.5 looks for more files and deeper (more subfolders) for increased randomness, but it has led to unexpected results for users with too many temporary folders or files resulting in slow startups.

Try builds are still being generated with fixes to this bug, but users report a noticeable improvement after deleting their temporary folders and  Internet Temporary Files (generated by Internet Explorer).

To clean temporary folders, check  and delete all files [you can, some may be in use] from these:
C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Local Settings\History
C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\My Recent Documents
C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Temp\

Windows Vista /7 users, replace Documents and Settings with Users

To delete Internet Temporary Folders, in the Control Panel., open Internet Options. In the Browsing History section, press the Delete… button, check all the options and press Delete.

Users report a significant improvement after doing this, even those who use Internet Explorer once in a while.

A fix to this bug should become available with Firefox 3.5.1, expected in a few weeks.

Does this mark the start of a trend where studios use personas to promote their movies? Mozilla Labs is hoping it does and has started a Films section to GetPersonas.com repository.

In the meantime, Warner is getting the eyeballs.

As in the past, this is a cool way to help make the web a better place. But now, you can do winning even more!

It is easy to do:

1.Register at Spread Firefox. I’ve been a member for about five years and can assure you you will get no spam, no annoying mail.
2. Get a banner or button with your customized affiliate code. Available in a wide variety of shapes, colors, styles, and sizes. A new smart button will even show a get, or  upgrade button depending on what browser and version a visitor is using.
3. Publish the banner or button anywhere in the web: your email signature, your blog, Facebook, tweet it, IM it, spread as you wish. Just make sure not to spam, spim, or otherwise annoy or cheat.
4. Track how many people have followed your links to learn about Firefox.
5. Win! With as few as 5 referrals a quarter you enter a draw to win cool prizes. For September, the prizes are a Flip Video Camera, an iPod Touch, an iPod Nano, Amazon Gift Certificates and exclusive Top Fox T-shirts.

The theme covers mostly everything: all built-in toolbar icons, sidebars, Add-ons Manager, Library, Options, Download Manager, all with a wink to good old Macintosh look. My only complain is that the buttonization of most icons in the managers results in some too small icons to be recognizable at a glance as they should be.

Get Rein at Mozilla Add-ons.

Si te interesa participar en la creación de esta comunidad y vives en Lima o cerca por favor deja un comentario en este post con un email donde contactarte o directamente a , de preferencia antes del sábado 11 de julio (por si acaso, 2009) para planificar una primera reunión de encuentro y celebración.

Posteado también en Mozilla Perú.

También puedes registrate aquí para mantenerte en contacto. Pronto tendremos mejores medios de comunicación incluyendo foros, twitter, Facebook, etc.

As good as this is, it has no option for showing the video in full screen. But as usual, it didn’t take much time before a extension came to the rescue to provide the necessary feature (in fact it has been available before Firefox 3.5 final).

Full Screen Video, by Dao Gottwald adds an option to video’s context menu to view a video in full screen mode. Right-click, select and watch.

There are a couple of caveats though: the video restarts when switching to full screen but I found it to be a problem much less annoying than I thought it would be. Also, full screen is only achieved on Windows. On other platforms it’s just a maximized window.

And if you don’t like the native video controls or get bored of them, you can customize them as almost everything else, Firefox audio and video controls are customizable (more work for theme authors!).

Long time community member, Ken Saunders, has released some cool skins you can try simply editing your userChrome.css file in your profile folder. Check Ken’s cool video player themes.

Within the web today, a browsing transformation is underway.  We’re seeing constant advancement from the static browsing Middle Ages of old and the ushering in of a new Modern Era of openness, speed and security.

With this words, Mozilla’s Sean Martell presents his cool Da Vinci-esque A Web Browser Renaissance wallpaper available for 4:3 and widescreen formats. Also available as a persona.

While it may seem a low number compared with Firefox 3’s record setting 8 million downloads on day one, it’s hard to compare because unlike Firefox 3, Firefox 3.5 is also available as an update, so users clicking on Check for Updates… in the Help menu, will get it without counting as a Firefox download. Last year, there was no other way to get Firefox 3 at that time, but downloading  it in full.

At the same time, web usage tracking site whos.amung.us, which has been reporting Firefox 3.5 market share since its launch, is currently showing numbers around 2.4%, based on approximately 850,000 sites and 300 million daily page views reported.

Accessing about:config through the location bar, checking some setting, updating a file, or installing an extension, there’s usually a way to make things work your way.

Here are the first 7 tweaks and tips to keep you in control of your tabs.

1. Disable tab tearing

With Firefox 3.5, you can drag tabs out of the current window to their own. But if you find yourself accidentally activating the feature or just miss the ability to drag tabs to the desktop to create shortcuts, you can install the most weirdly named extension:
bug489729 (Disable detach and tear off tab) by WhiteAlice0775. Despite its name it will solve your problems like a charm. Once installed, access its options through the Add-ons Manager and check Disable detach tab. You can even restore the ability to drag tabs to the desktop to create shortcuts checking the other option.

You may also want to remember that you can still create shortcut icons by dragging the web page’s favicon to the desktop or bookmarks by dragging to the bookmarks menu or toolbar.

2. Hide the new tab button in the tab bar

While most users (specially new ones) will appreciate the new tab button added to the tab bar, some may find it useless. You can make your Firefox look cleaner by removing it. Add the line below to your userChrome.css file (*):

.tabs-newtab-button {display: none;}

3. Hide the tab bar when there’s only one tab open

To restore Firefox 3.0’s default behavior of hiding the tab bar when there’s only one tab, in Options/Tab, uncheck Always show the tab bar.

4. Switch to new tabs opened from links

When you open a link in a new tab, you may want to switch to it immediately to cut some procrastination. To set this behavior, in the Options window, open the Tabs page and check When I open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately.

5. Keep the window open when you close the last tab

In Firefox 3.5, when you close the last tab, it also closes the window. While I can’t remember when was the last time I had only one tab open, there may be people annoyed by this. For those types, set browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab to false via about:config to keep Firefox open in those cases, just like in Firefox 3.

6. Show the close button in the last tab

By default, when you only have one tab left it doesn’t have a close button, because if you close it it would close the whole window which may be unexpected. You can still close it pressing Ctrl + W, or selecting Close Tab in the File menu. But if you just have to have your button, add the following code to userChrome.css (*).

.tabbrowser-tabs[closebuttons="alltabs"] > .tabbrowser-tab > .tab-close-button {
display: -moz-box !important;
}
.tabbrowser-tabs:not([closebuttons="noclose"]):not([closebuttons="closeatend"]) > .tabbrowser-tab[selected="true"] > .tab-close-button {
display: -moz-box !important;
}

7. Change the number of recoverable windows (and tabs)

In Firefox 3.5 you can recover your recently closed windows through the History menu. By default you can only recover the last three tabs, but you can change it to a value that better suits your needs.

Access the advanced preferences entering about:config in the location bar and search for preference browser.sessionstore.max_windows_undo and set it to the number of windows you want to be able to restore.

You can do the same for the number of recoverable tabs from the default 6 to the desired value modifying browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo.

* The userChrome.css file is located in the chrome folder in your profile folder. If you can’t find the file, but there’s a userChrome-example.css, just copy or rename it and make the change in it.

Is there something you dislike in Firefox 3.5 so far, leave a comment and I’ll check if there’s a fix for it. Check out for another batch of helpful tips and tweaks. coming soon.

As you surf around the web for more news about what’s going with Firefox 3.5 launch, you may want to pay careful attention and see if you spot one of several pandas hidden around in Mozilla related sites and blogs.

To participate, register at MozHunt. Then follow mozhunt on twitter or mozillaca, Mozilla community’s microblogging, and check out for the hints.

When you see the panda, just click on it to add it to your list of found critters. Top hunters (your truly at this moment) are listed here.

Enjoy!

But this is just the first of a total of 24 waves during the next 24 hours at :50 each hour. The big final will be tomorrow (Wednesday 30) at 3:50pm GMT where Firefox fans will cause one big Shiretoko shock through the web.

On tweet, be sure to link to http://bit.ly/ShiretokoShock and add the hashtag #fx35.

More details at Shock Shiretoko page.

But you don’t have to wait for the mail. Just grab a wallpaper with the same design now and let people know what makes you so cool. Available in a wide range of desktop sizes.

Via musingT.

Let’s take a look at what’s new in Firefox 3.5.

A new icon

Firefox 3.5 introduces an updated Firefox icon, that aims to reflect the evolution Firefox has gone through in the last three releases since the last update for Firefox 1.5. The new icon features a stronger 3D look with deeper shadows over the globe, and flames actually surrounding the globe. It also adds detail to the hand and snout and furrier snout and ears.

In low resolutions like Windows and Linux taskbar icons, the changes will go almost unnoticeable but for a slight change in colors and saturation.

Privacy

A new  private mode is now available from the Tools menu. Whatever you visit, search, or download is cleared as soon as you return to normal mode or exit Firefox, including cookies, passwords, and web forms. At this time the only hint you get while in private mode is some text added to the title bar. Future versions of Firefox may revisit the user interface for a better way to let you know you’re in private mode while not letting others which would be counterproductive.

What happens when you forgot to enter private mode before entering a site you want to keep for yourself? You have two options. One, tell Firefox to forget about that site: open the Library (Bookmarks/Organize Bookmarks…) look for any page in the site in your History, right click on it, and select Forget About This Site.

Option 2, tell Firefox to forget about the last  few hours, the day or everything. In the Tools menu, select Clear Recent History…,  the amount of time, the specific elements you want to discard, and you are done.

The Privacy options page has been updated with a dramatically streamlined interface where you can opt for Firefox defaults which remembers your browsing and allows cookies (like Firefox 3), set it to always run in private mode, or customize for something in between. You can also exclude history and bookmarks from the location bar suggestions in a new separate option.

Tabbed Browsing

Tabbed browsing is now the default browsing mode as the tab bar is always visible. This is a setting many people has requested as default for years before and the decision was finally made. There are two direct consequences: the throbber (activity indicator) is gone from the menu bar since each tab already has sits own. While it may seem a great idea, it has the inconvenience of being a moving target, so if you want to know if the current page is loading you have to first locate the current tab’s place in the tab bar. Fortunately, it is still available in the Customize Toolbar dialog so you can add it back in a blink.

The other consequence, is that when only one tab remains open, it doesn’t have a close button; and, if you close it (with a keyboard shortcut or menu File/Close Tab) the whole window goes along.

The tab bar now sports a new tab button next to the last tab making it discoverable for  new comers. Tabs can be dragged out of the current window into their own and dragged back  if wanted. An option in the tab context menu allows to do the same thing.

A new option in the History menu now let you to restore recently closed windows and not only individual tabs as in previous versions.

Native <audio>/<video> support

As part of Mozilla’s commitment to web standards, Firefox 3.5 implements the <audio> and <video> tags defined in the HTML 5 specification, making the inclusion of video and audio content on web pages as easy as images. But, most importantly, to help make the web an open environment, it bundles Ogg Vorbis and Theora decoders so web content authors can publish their audio and video content in these formats knowing that (at least) Firefox users will be able to listen, watch, and save with no need for any additional plugin on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, the supported platforms.

Conveniently, the tags specifications provide easy fallback options to other video formats like MP4 for Mac OS X users, or even to a Flash video if a codec is not available. This will help progressive transition for sites like Dailymotion, and more recently The Video Bay (from the makers of The Pirate Bay), which have started adopting the standard and tags.

Web standards

More support for web interface and language standards is a highlight of this release. Among the most relevant, the support for the @font-face CSS attribute which means web authors can now redistribute the fonts they need to make a web page look exactly as they imagined it to all users and not depend on what fonts are installed in your computer.

Web designers get powerful CSS media queries that improve developers customization options to deliver content appropriate for the user’s screen size, resolution and color capabilities. Support for color profiles introduced in Firefox 3 is now enabled by default.

Experimental support for CSS transformations and SVG effects for HTML elements dramatically expand the possibilities for web designers with options to rotate, scale, blur, or solarize web elements in a couple of lines.

Web developers get query selectors as a more effective way to access relative page elements with better applications performance. Cross-site XMLHttpRequests support is back in Firefox 3.5 (it was pulled back form 3.0) now that the specification is complete. It allows AJAX web applications to pull content from other web domains if the server allows it.

Native JSON support for easier and more secure data exchange between a web application and the server.

A standard way to declare, create and run web page background processes (like JavaScript code) called web workers, will enable web developers to create more responsive rich internet applications where complex scripts don’t put the whole interface on hold. HTML 5 drag and drop is also implemented, again for easier development, better performance, better user experience.

You can check these and more cool new web techniques at the highly recommended Mozilla Hacks.

Geolocation enables Firefox to pass the current user location to web sites that ask for it to provide customized content.

Usability

Support for recent MacBooks’ multitouch trackpads is also available, with gestures for navigating back and forward (three finger left or right swipe), move to the top or the bottom of the page (swipe up and down), zoom (pinch in or out), and swithc tabs (twist clockwise or counter clockwise). With Windows 7 expected to include support for multitouch interfaces sometime in 2010,  good to know Firefox will be ready and awaiting.

Gestures can be customized via about:config:

Links to external resources such as JavaScript files or CSS files are now clickable when viewing a page source code.

A new session restore dialog now lets you select what windows and tabs you want to restore after a crash helping isolate the problematic tab or plugin and prevent. As a side benefit you can always can always enter about:sessionrestore in the location bar to check what tabs you had in your previous session

Library management gets a tad easier with the ability to edit several bookmarks at a time. Tagging can be faster now with tag autocomplete for bookmarks and history.

The themes have been very slightly updated this time with new tab buttons and new full screen icons on Windows XP and Vista, a removed back/forward keyhole etch on Mac OS X, and a new blocked plugin icon on Linux.

You can restrict suggestion in the location bar to history, bookmarks or tags only, enter ^, * or + respectively somewhere between your terms. To include titles or addresses only, you enter # or @, and you can combine them with the previous operators to refine your suggestions.

Firefox update dialog windows are now more informative and show how long it will take. Add-on updates (specially large ones) also benefit of this enhancement.

Performance

Performance-wise, this release is significantly faster that Firefox 3 running web applications, thanks to the introduction of TraceMonkey, a technology that allows just in time JavaScript compilation for faster execution. Despite these improvements however, Chrome currently holds the crown for speed with better results in the main JavaScript performance tests, thanks in part to its V8 JavaScript engine.

Places, the history+bookmarks database is now significantly faster due to several improvement to the querying. Web feeds refresh has also been optimized so it won’t hang Firefox if updating several feeds at the same time.

More coolness

In the accessibility front, text formatting such as alignment and font weight, as well as the new audio and video play controls are exposed to assistive technologies via AT-SPI and IAccessible2 attributes properties which are well interpreted by popular screen readers Orca, NVDA, and JAWS. Text formatting even works in rich text areas like Gmail compose area, easing the task  for people with visual disabilities.

Firefox 3.5 is available now in 68 locales for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux platforms, making it the current web browser available in most languages at this time.

According to the last Mozilla Add-ons report, over 80% of add-ons are already compatible with Firefox 3.5, an important achievement and good news for users who may be too attached to their favorite extensions and themes to leave them behind.

Conclusion

Firefox 3.1 was originally planned as a completion release to get in some features that didn’t make it for Firefox 3 like new tab switching, private mode and video, but in the end it took a purpose of its own, prompting  a version push to Firefox 3.5 and extending the originally targeted last year’s end release to mid-2009. But I find it completely worth it. I’ve been using 3.5 since the betas as my main browser (about 8 months now) and have to say  I just don’t remember when was the last time it crashed.

Firefox 3 retirement starts today at update number 11 (3.0.11), and according to Mozilla policies it will go out of support six months from now, on December 31, 2009. But with 80% of add-ons ready and a very nice set of new features and performance gains it’s hard to justify not upgrading now.

Weave is now capable of synchronizing preferences in addition to tabs, forms, passwords, history and bookmarks as seen in previous versions.It also improves startup performance, provides a better API for extension developers, and most notably, the ability to automatically log into sites, as initially demonstrated last May.

With autologin, Weave displays a golden key icon in the location bar when it recognizes a site you have already logged in in the past. You can click on the icon to select an identity and press Sign In to access the site, which is no real gain compared to what Firefox already provides. But you can also activate automatic login for the site. Once activated, Weave will fill the form and submit as soon as it recognizes it effectively removing the login step.

Auto login also support OpenID identities, perhaps the most popular and the best chance of getting a unique federated identity management system.

You can get Weave 0.4 at Mozilla Add-ons. More details on Mike Connors blog post.

As you may recall, Taskfox, is a project that aims to integrate some of Ubiquity’s command line abilities into Firefox to for example perform searches with inline previews, alter page contents, insert maps, schedule events, share web pages, search tabs, and a very long, etc.

This early release brings all your search engines to the awesome bar: as you start typing in it, search engines which name match the typed strings are suggested, press space bar to select it and then some keywords to perform a search.

Another command that has been implemented is map. Type it, along with some city or address and you get a map of the area served by Yahoo! Maps.

As an early release, it’s not short of problems. For example if I enter “mozilla links” in the search bar, I’m stuck in the search plugin and can’t move down with the keyboard. Despite this and the limited number of commands, it is very encouraging to see such progress for the next Firefox release while Firefox 3.5 is still in the oven (and ready for Tuesday’s great day).

You can see Taskfox in action in the screencast below posted by Blair.

As noted in Stuart Parmenter’s blos post, these new releases feature a new theme that improves usability, better performance and reliability, and work has started to make web forms easier to use.

While both, Windows Mobile and Maemo versions are based on the same code base, the different version numbers reflect the different levels of maturity in usability.

Get Fennec for Maemo, or Fennec for Windows Mobile.

As detailed in the creative brief, the update would keep the general layout and palette, could add an @ to the envelope, make the icon more 3D with more layers wrapping the envelope, make the icon more round, and extend the head feathers to the back.

Below, some historic sketches of the original Thunderbird icon.

The updates remove some pixelation in high resolution versions of the icon, better blends it with Mac OS X system generated icon shadows, and delivers a sharper 16×16 icon in all platforms.

For further details on what’s new in Firefox 3.5, check Mozilla Links’ previous Firefox 3.5 review.

Get Firefox 3.5 RC3 from Mozilla RC web page. Available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, in more than 70 languages. Keep in mind that as final as this may seem (and it seems pretty much), it’s still considered a development release.

Firefox 3.5 RC 2 users can update selecting Check for Updates… in the Help menu.

Available at the equally cool and revamped Mozilla Add-ons.

The 16×16 version of the Firefox icon looks much better known (as you can see in the image below FF3, RC2, an interim version, and RC3), the icon shadow has been moved a little to the left  on Mac OS X to better blend with OS generated shadow, and some pixelatoin has been removed from the 512 x 512 version.

Since the changes are pretty trivial, it won’t require a new QA cycle as it usually takes, so the new RC most likely won’t affect the targeted final release date by the end of June (next week).

Powered by Laconica, the open source microblogging engine, and setup and operated by a team of volunteers, it is pretty simple to follow and use  thanks to its simple interface and functionality.

It nicely integrates with Twitter, and supports OpenID  and SMS status updating for a long list of carriers.

Here’s the latest pearl from a Mozilla -inspired cook.

Get your mozillaca.com id now!

Chris Jones, a member of the Electrolysis team, along with Benjamin Smedberg, Boris Zbarsky, Ben Turner, Joe Drew, and Jason Duell among others, has released a demo video that shows a very basic implementation with a process running Firefox’s UI and another that takes care of displaying the content (gecko in-frame). As you can see in the video, the content process is manually terminated, and then restored, simulating a “page gone bad” crash.

The team is on track to the targeted mid-July release of a very early implementation that should do exactly this. Electrolysis uses the IPC message-passing and setup code from Chromium (the open source code base for Chrome) which, like Internet Explorer 8 have a multi-process architecture.

If you’ve been following Firefox 3.5 development you may realize there was no RC1 as expected. In fact, this is a new approach Mozilla is taking for this stage. As explained by Mike Beltzner, Firefox product director,  basically, the first RC (not as thoroughly tested as a public RC but considered safe)  is offered to beta users only so this large audience (around 900K users) can provide feedback while full QA is done on the build. With beta feedback and QA results a second RC is produced, quickly tested (as changes are minimal) and this one is released to the public, which has been the case. In short, RC1 existed but it didn’t make it for public availability.

There is not much new in this candidate. As expected at this stage, work is mostly polishing. In particular, the Windows themes got some update tab scrolling, tab list and new tab icons to better match Windows’ style.

In Linux, there are new icons for blocked plug-ins, while in Mac, the etch was removed from the Back/Forward keyhole shape introduced in Firefox 3.

Also, as unveiled a few days ago, there’s an update to the Firefox icon to reflect the many changes that have happend since it was modified around Firefox 1.5 release. Below is the new updated icon with a more 3D aspect, and more detail in the firefox’s snout, ears, and hands.

Privacy is a main topic in this release: a new Private Mode (accessible from the Tools menu) has been introduced that lets a user browse knowing that all his tracks (downloads, history, forms, passwords, cookies, etc.) will be cleared as soon as he returns to normal mode or exists Firefox.

It can also be set to be the default mode through the revamped Privacy preferences page in the Options window.

Another big aid for privacy is an option to delete all traces of a web site through the Library or the History sidebar by right-clicking on a web page and clicking on Forget About this Site.

If you prefer to delete tracks based on time (like for the last 4 hours), the Clear private Data option in the Tools menu has been replaced with Clear Recent History, which lets you select what to delete and for what period of time (1, 2, 4 hours, the day or everything).

Users previously concerned with the awesome bar providing too much information through its autocomplete menu, can now disable History and/or Bookmarks suggestions from appearing.

Tabbed browsing gains a new tab button (without losing the classic you can put anywhere in your toolbar), options to drag tabs out of the window to their own, getting them back, true tab cloning. The tab bar is now visible by default making the throbber unnecessary as it is already present in each tab. Plus, you can now restore a recently closed window with all its tabs unlike previous versions.

Performance-wise, this release is significantly faster that Firefox 3 running web applications, thanks to the introduction of TraceMonkey, a technology that allows just in time JavaScript compilation for faster execution. Despite these improvements however, Chrome currently holds the crown for speed with better results in the main JavaScript performance tests, thanks in part to its V8 JavaScript engine.

Places, the history+bookmarks database is now significantly faster due to several improvement to the querying. Web feeds refresh has also been optimized so it won’t hang Firefox if updating several feeds at the same time.

But despite all the good , significant improvements Firefox 3.5 has stacked in the last year of development, it’s its web development oriented enhancements which will make this release most memorable: support for geolocation enabled sites, which means Firefox is now able to tell a site where you are if you agree to do so, for a more customized experience; support for @font-face, a CSS feature that allows embedding of fonts in web pages so visitors get the content as intended; media queries, a blurry name for a cool feature that will allow sites deliver content based on the specific device characteristics such as aspect ratio, resolution, color capabilities, and more; cool 3D and image/font effects thanks to the <canvas> element; and lots of others.

Among these, the most significant is the added support for <audio> and <video> tags, plus the bundle of a Theora/Vorbis (video and audio) decoders, so developers can now create audio and video content for free in these great performing, open source, royalty free codecs that will enable better web video applications as the Flash plugin barrier has a viable option.

This new video option is starting to attract attention, with YouTube making some tests with it, and Dailymotion already announcing the support for the HTML5 video tag and the codec.

Mozilla is running a series of cool examples of what can be done with the new capabilities that Firefox 3.5 will feature at http://hacks.mozilla.org/. It’s definitely worth a look.

For Mozilla, a release candidate means “what will be shipped unless a major bug is discovered”, so if you download RC2 you may as well be using the final version as it would just be renamed.

Firefox 3.5 final is expected by the end of June. The Firefox team is now focused on the next major update, tentatively named 3.6, but more safely called by its code name: Namoroka.

Get Firefox 3.5 RC 2 available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in over 70 languages.