Pretty simple and pretty useful as it helps to get rid of the status bar and gain a few extra screen lines.

Get URL Tooltip from Mozilla Add-ons.

Beta 2, available as both an update for Beta 1 and a full download, patches more than 190 bugs, making it a compelling update for those comfortable running betas, and a safer bet for those who daring to wet their toes in software testing.

Among the many stability bug fixes, there’s a new mechanism that will allow Mozilla to block known-bad DLLs on Windows platforms to prevent software crashes and other potentially harming access.

Tab network prioritization, a new feature that will make foreground pages load faster than those in the background has recently landed to Firefox 3.6 nightlies but is missing in the beta (frozen a few days ago).

Nightlies are currently labeled as b3pre, suggesting a third beta is planned. The Release Candidate is already targeted for November 26 according to the latest meeting notes, so we can expect another quik turnaround for Beta 3.

Fear no more thanks to Long URL Mobile Expander, a Firefox extension created by Sean Murphy, that reveals the true destination of obfuscated URLs using the LongURL web service that covers more than 200 URL shortening services.

You can get Long URL Mobile expander from Mozilla Add-ons.

Users are encouraged to update as soon as possible by selecting Check for Updates… in the Help menu. Otherwise, you should be prompted for the update in the next few hours.

You can check the release notes for more details.

Tab Progress Bar, developed by Frank Yan, adds just this feature which I found so far to be more informational than the old common progress bar in the status area.

Get Tab Progress Bar from Mozilla Add-ons.

It’s not the case however. Delphine Lebédel, a French Mozilla intern, explains: “The numbers I found astounded me: only 2% of women work in FLOSS communities, against more than 25% in proprietary software. In the development field, numbers are even lower: the percentage of Open Source women developers falls down to almost 1% (European Commission FLOSSPOL 2002-2005)”

To fix this, Mozilla has launched WoMoz, a new project that aims to increase the participation of women in open source projects: understanding why this gap exist, reaching, and making products and projects more attractive for women.

Also, the project now has a cool new logo, designed by Anamaria Stoica.

As with other platforms, the update is planned in a two phase approach.

For Firefox 3.7, plans include combining the stop and reload buttons as their function is mutually exclusive; move the home button to the tab bar, and add a progress bar to each tab instead of the throbber currently features in all platforms. Unlike Windows, however, the menu bar is kept still. Also from other platforms, the keyhole shape for the back and forward icons is in. For cleaner looks, the toolbar separator are also gone.

Firefox 4.0 goes further, following the same patterns in other platforms: the tab bar would be at the top of the UI, and the menu bar removed with most of its commands moved to new Page and Tools buttons. A Bookmarks button would also be added to display all bookmarks.

Before starting the review, keep in mind that Firefox 3.6 will be the smallest upgrade Mozilla has released to date. Before this, version jumps have been in the 0.5 (Firefox 1.0 to 1.5, 3.0 to 3.5) or 1.0 (2.0 to 3.0) order, and while version numbers are not mathematically representative, the slight 0.1 version increase reflects the overall tone of this update, and Firefox development in general which is moving to a faster release pace.

Personas

Without a doubt, the most significant addition is support for lightweight themes, also known as personas, that was previously only available with the Personas extension.

A persona, which consists of a couple of images used as backgrounds for the toolbar and status bar areas, and setting a text color, is very simple to author, yet it significantly changes the appearance of Firefox and becomes a way of expression for the user.

To try it, simply visit Mozilla Add-ons, and go to the recently added Personas section. Personas are live previewed as you hover on the thumbnails, and become permanent when you click on Wear It.

Themes after all, personas are also managed via the Themes page in the Add-ons Manager.

Tabbed browsing

Firefox has finally got tab preview, though it’s turned off by default. To activate it, you must set browser.ctrlTab.previews to true via about:config. After that, when you press Ctrl + Tab to switch tabs, you get a horizontal line of tab thumbnails.

You can also press Ctrl + Shift + Tab to get a preview of all currently loaded tabs, and even search the tabs’ titles which comes very handy when having more than 20 or so at a time.

about:

A couple of special about: pages have been added. about:support, should become a troubled user’s best friend as it provides a helpful page with most details of your current Firefox settings including version number, customized preferences, and installed extensions; all of which can be easily copied to a support forum, email or chat window.

about:memory, is a first try on providing details about the current Firefox memory consumption.

Usability

Native videos now have a full screen option: right click on a video and select Full screen. On related news, a new full screen button is now available to add to the toolbars.

Tabs opened from a page (like when middle-clicking on a link) now open to the right of the current tab making it easier to reach content that we know is related to what we’re currently on.

A small but significant change: if you attempt to launch Firefox while only non content windows are open (like the Add-ons or Downloads Manager), Firefox won’t create a new window as before but restore the last closed window.

Autocomplete suggestions in previously filled web forms are now sorted by frecency, a combined indicator that tells how frequently and how recently an option was used. A nice addition useful in very particular cases though.

Internals

As announced before, Mozilla is now supporting the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) which has the advantages of smaller size thanks to compression, and the ability to trace the source of a specific font without the burden of DRM.

TraceMonkey, the JavaScript just-in-time optimization technology introduces with Firefox 3.5 is now also enabled by default for the user interface, which relies on JavaScript for much of its functionality as well.

Finally, this beta introduces support for the new Windows 7’s taskbar previews feature. Don’t get too attached to it though, as it is buggy right now and may be pulled back depending on how it evolves in the next few days.

Next

Further Windows 7 integration like showing a download progress bar in the taskbar and jump lists are also in the works but unlikely to be ready for Firefox 3.6.

The current nightlies are labeled pre 3.6 beta 2 suggesting a second beta may be the next step. This would be in line with the latest roadmap.

Not much is left for future development releases. One final feature could be per tab network prioritization which will make Firefox allocate more bandwidth for the currently viewed tab, less for other tabs in the current window and even less for other windows, enhancing the perceived responsiveness.

As usual, a critical subject are add-ons. Right now about half of them have been updated to some 3.6 development release. You can help increase this number by installing the Add-on Compatibility Reporter. Once installed, all your extensions will be enabled. You can then check and see if they work or not, then go to the Add-ons Manager and report whether it works or not.

On November 9, 2004, a brand new product stroke the web, and it changed. After a halt of 5 years , innovation became again part of the game and it hasn’t stopped since then bringing on millions of users, locales, communities, and equally importantly, competitors: Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Opera are all in the game of exploding the web again, and maybe not breaking it this time.

To celebrate, Mozilla is organizing Light the Web with Firefox.

The idea is simple: do something that involves light and Firefox: project it on a public place, make a Firefox signal with a flashlight, use candles, your cell phone, your house, your car. Take a picture, upload it to Flickr with the firefox5 tag and join the celebration.

Cool Firefox swag is available for the best entries!

You can also use a twibbon to share the celebration on Twitter, host a party. Whatever you do, use the #firefox5 tag.

Fans of the classic Mozilla Internet Suite rejoice. A major update to SeaMonkey has been released featuring a large number of significant improvements.  Here are a few of them:

• Crash recovery: if SeaMonkey crashes, your previous session is restored
• Window restore, go to File/Recenty Closed Windows to restore a closed window
• Customizable toolbars, right click on the toolbars and select Customize… to add and remove buttons.
• Cross session resumable downloads
• Support for RSS and Atom web feeds in the Mail/News module
• Emails open in new tabs instead of new windows for better organized email reading
• Redone download, forms and password managers
• An updated theme on Mac OS X

SeaMonkey 2 is available in 18 locales for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

Get it from the SeaMonkey project web site.

As usual, you will be prompted to update in the next few hours or you can force it by selecting Check for Updates… in Firefox’s Help menu.

More details in the release notes.

Here are my favorite five, but there is something for everyone: really scary, cute , and even pink ones!

Remember you need to install the Personas extension, at least until Firefox 3.6 arrives. If you are really eager to try it, stay tuned as it should arrive next week.

Like GetPersonas.com, you just hover the personas thumbnails to live preview it on Firefox. If you like it, just press Wear it to keep it. To choose another theme, open the Add-ons Manager and select a different one in the Themes tab.

For the easiest way of creating and sharing personas, GetPersonas.com is still the place to go.

To make it an even greater success, Mozilla Labs is organizing a design contest aimed towards design school students. If you are one, you just need to create one (a couple of images) and submit it through the contest entry page by October 18th.

Winners will be awarded a Wacom Intuos Tablet an pen (large, medium, or small for first, second and third places), a CandyBar software license. The winning design also takes GetPersonas frontpage.

Hurry up and set your creativity free!

First, tabs can now be previewed from the task bar directly just hovering over the Firefox icon (Namoroka’s in the screenshot). Previews for all windows are displayed at a time, and like other Windows 7 applications you can select or close a tab from there.

Second, support for jump lists: right click on the Firefox task bar icon to get quick access to the most frequently visited sites, create a new tab or window or close Firefox. This features is not yet available in Namoroka, but the trunk (the source for future Firefox versions). It will most likely land after the Beta 1 freeze.

Finally, we should be able to check download status directly from the task bar thanks to a progress bar integrated with the Firefox icon. A green progress bar indicates downloads are currently in progress while a yellow one menas downloads are currently paused. This one hasn’t been landed yet on either source repository.

Like other file sharing systems, MediaFire download links take you to a web page where the download link is displayed along several ads which generate its revenue. For an ad free experience, users can upgrade to a Pro account for $6.97/month or less depending on the length of the subscription.

SkipScreen circumvents the download page, navigating to the download link immediately. So users don’t get to see the served ads, so they won’t click on them, or feel inclined to get a Pro account, effectively hurting MediaFire’s revenue and business model.

It remains to be seen what Mozilla will do with the request: SkipScreen definitely harms MediaFire’s business but it’s also about the user experience and how she interacts with a public resource like MediaFire’s hosted content.

In the meantime, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has sided with Worcester, LLC, the maker of SkipScreen, and has taken them as clients and sent a letter to Mozilla making the case for the continued hosting of the extension:

MediaFire probably would prefer that we all sit, transfixed, while they display ads for us, just like certain Hollywood executives wish we would never leave the couch or hit FFWD when commercials run during our favorite TV shows, and certain websites wish they could ban Firefox ad-blockers. Fortunately, there’s nothing in the law that says that by simply visiting a website, I give up the right to control my desktop.

EDIT: This post originally stated that MediaFire forced a 45 seconds delay before making the actual download link available. This was incorrect due to a confusion on my side: Media Fire download links are available as soon as a user reaches the file download page.  My deepest apologies to readers and MediaFire.

Like the planned Windows theme refresh, updates will happen in two phases:

In Firefox 3.7, expected around mid-next year:

Main changes (in case you don’t notice them):

• combined stop/reload buttons
• tabs hanging from the toolbar
• home button moved to the tab bar
• more rounded tabs
• less rounded buttons

In Firefox 4.0, the most dramatic change is moving the tab bar above the navigation bar, the combination of the location and search bars, and the addition of an identity button to the upper right corner.

You can see more screenshots including some other variations still under consideration, as well as the rationale behind the changes.

With the latest Firefox 3.5.3 update, Mozilla introduced a simple check to its first run page that looks for new versions of the Flash plugin if it is currently installed. If it isn’t up to date, a link is provided to get the new version.

As planned, Mozilla is now extending this Flash check to other well known plugins to ensure users are running the latest versions and minimize the risk of exposure to known and fixed security vulnerabilities, and other bugs that may impact a user experience.

It is currently in beta status, but you can try it right now. Disregard the invalid certificate warning, and let the page check for your plugins to get a quick diagnostic.

Note that some plugins don’t declare their version number properly so Firefox will always show these as Potentially Vulnerable. This was the case for Adobe’s Reader plugin. I updated to the latest version using Reader’s own update mechanism, but still got the warning.

According to Mozilla, you may have similar experiences with Windows Media Player plugin and the Real Player plugin.

You can leave your comments at Mozilla Web Development blog.

Just right click on the video and select Full Screen. While on full screen, press Esc to return to the normal view.

There’s still a half second pause while switching modes that should be ironed in the next days, but is far better than the current Full Screen extension which forced a full video restart when switching modes.Neat!

• In the late nineties, the South Korean government wanted a strong encryption mechanism for Internet transactions. 128-bit SSL was not ready yet.
• So they created their own mechanism, called it SEED, and implemented as a Netscape plugin and as an ActiveX control for Internet Explorer.
• As Internet Explorer got 95% of the market, SK government felt it wasn’t worth updating the plugin, so businesses deployed their solutions relying on the ActiveX implementation of SEED. As a result, now 128-bit encrypted transactions like shopping and banking, can only be done on Internet Explorer. Preferably IE6, because newer IE versions tend to be more restrictive and complicated (read secure) for both business and users.
• So everybody needs Windows to run IE, even Mac OS X and Linux users!

This is a sad example of what happens when the web is built on closed proprietary technology. In this extreme case, a whole country is now locked into a technology that is already a decade old.

You can read the complete article at Korean Times, pointed by Mozilla Japan’s Gen Kanai, who also described the situation and the consequences a few years ago.

Koreans are taking action: www.ie6nomore.kr

Get your cool wallpaper from Foxkeh’s blog. Available in several resolutions for most screen sizes and ratios.

Like with Mozilla Labs’ Personas extensions and unlike full fledged themes, personas only customize the toolbars and status bar backgrounds, and the menus text color, just a couple of elements of Firefox UI that makes a large share of what we perceive as customization.

To install or even preview a lightweight theme, the web site owner must call a JavaScript API, and get authorization from the user to preview or install the theme if it is not served by getpersonas.com or another whitelisted site.

To change or uninstall lightweight themes, proceed just like with regular ones: open the Add-ons Manager, open the Themes page and change themes at will.

Lightweight themes have been a wild success. Since its launch earlier this year, GetPersonas.com now counts more than 27,000 personas, thanks in large part to the fact that they are very easy to author: create a couple of images (3000 x 200 pixels for the header, 3000 x 100 pixels for the footer), upload them to GetPersonas.com and once approved, they become available for users everywhere.

GetPersonas.com still not fully supports Namoroka, but it is being worked right now, and we should be able to preview and install personas in the next few days. I tried a staging server and found functionality and performance just as good as with the Personas extension.

In the meantime you can try a few lightweight themes provided by Dao Gottwald, one of the developers involved with the Personas uplift, the first Mozilla Labs’ project to get into Firefox’s core. Practically all the other projects are now expected to contribute experience and code in future releases: Ubiquity (via Taskfox), Jetpack, Prism, and Weave.

There are still a few issues to resolve like supporting RTL languages which tend to have menus and button in the right side, where the theme just doesn’t look good.

Also, it’s not clear at this time whether Personas’ option to define a custom persona will be available. In Personas, you are able to load a couple of images yourself and try them as a persona before submitting them to getpersonas.com.

EDIT: Updates to GetPersonas.com have already been pushed and it now supports Namoroka: you can preview by just hovering themes thumbnails and install with a single click!

(Not that) Surprisingly, there is a Firefox extension that will help anyone create a MathML expression of really complex mathematical equations. FireMath, created by MrBont gets the job done, and allows you to save the formula as a full XHTML file, a stand alone or inline equation, or an image file.

There’s some obvious work to be done on the user interface front, but for science paper authors, this should come in handy.

FireMath is labeled experimental in Mozilla Add-ons, so you will need to mark the checkbox to get it installed.

Auto Shutdown is a Firefox extension developed by InBasic that monitors your active downloads and will shutdown your computer when they are done.

Actually, Auto Shutdown is much more flexible than that. It can execute any command your enter when downloads are completed, shutting your computer down is just the default (which by the way, I think should be stand by).

It also supports the popular DownThemAll! extension which provides more powerful download management options.

You can get Auto Shutdown from Mozilla Add-ons.