Posts Tagged: firefox

Web — View Comments
2
Aug 09

Opera 10: Why I've Switched

I’m what you might call a browser vagabond. I switch web browsers every few months, sampling the latest releases and trying to find that perfect fit for what I want and need out of the single most important piece of software on my desktop. I think I may have found the closest thing to perfect with Opera 10.

Opera 10 Beta 2 (Unite Build)

Opera 10 Beta 2 (Unite Build)

For the last 6 months or so I’ve been using Google Chrome, and really enjoying it. It’s blazingly fast, has a tremendously elegant user interface, uses my favorite rendering engine (WebKit), is open source, and is updated very frequently (I run off the dev builds.) But it was far from perfect, especially in comparison to what I had left behind with Firefox. Namely, it lacks extensions, a robust web developer toolset (the Inspector is broken and falls way behind tools like Firebug) and suffers from a lack of customization options.

The last time I had tried Opera was with the release of v9. I had tracked the improvements the company had made to browser for many years, and tried each major release. Although I had always found it’s performance to be top notch, the user experience really bugged me. The interface was… bizarre, in my opinion. Although it could be customized I never managed to come up with a layout that rivaled the simplicity of Firefox.

Like many, I was intrigued when I heard about Opera’s “Unite” system. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s an experiment (of sorts) in expanding upon the concept of the browser from just a viewer of the Internet into a participant; it embeds functionality (exposed as modular “services”) that transform it into a server. There are a variety of services, from a file browser and web server to a streaming media player and social note sharing hub. Heck, it can even serve as a personal OpenID provider. The concept is pretty exciting, and I’m already in love with the file sharing and media playing functionality, but after playing with the beta I realized that Unite isn’t really the big seller for me: the browser itself is.

In one release, Opera managed to fix everything that bugged me about the browser. The tabs, the navigation controls, the panels/sidebar; they repackaged the chrome in a way that is minimal (which I love), flexible/customizable (important for many) and easily transitioned to from other browsers. With the user interface problem resolved, I was able to sample the features old and new that Opera has to offer;

  • Unite — As I said, it turns your browser into a server, offering media streaming, file sharing, etc.
  • Turbo — I’ve already fallen in love with this on my laptop. When you’re on a low bandwidth connection (like when I’m tethered to my Blackberry) it dynamically compresses assets on a page to reduce download time. Image quality is dramatically reduced, but it gets the page to you dramatically faster than it would normally. LOVE this feature.
  • Link — Sort of like Xmarks or Mozilla Weave on steroids. Syncs your bookmarks, notes and other data between browser installations on different PCs and on Opera Mini, which I am quickly growing to love on my Blackberry.

If you haven’t given Opera a try lately, please do. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with what you find. The latest beta version can be found here, the Unite-enabled beta builds can be found here, and the general release version is available from their homepage.

Tips — View Comments
20
Oct 08

Getting your extensions to work in the Firefox 3.1 Beta

If you’ve been running the Firefox 3.1 beta for the last few days like I have, you’re probably beginning to miss all those fun extensions you took for granted in 3.0. Sure, you could install nightly tool addons to disable version checking for you, but I feel dirty having a hack like that running all the time in the browser. Instead, I discovered a far more elegant solution: just edit the XPI.

First, grab 7zip. It’s a free archive manager like WinZIP or WinRAR, but it plays nice with the XPI format. Now, go to the Mozilla Addons site and find the extension you’re looking to install. The “Install” option will be disabled, but no worries, just scroll down and hit the “All Versions” link. Now you’ll have one or more versions listed with enabled Install buttons, but using those won’t work: they’re marked internally as working with Firefox versions up to 3.0.*. This is what we’ll need to change.

Right click the Install link for the most recent plugin version, and save the XPI file to your desktop. Now, load 7zip and open that XPI file in it. Find the “install.rdf” file, right click and pick Edit. There’s a lot of nonsense in these files, but all we’re worried about is one string:

em:maxVersion="3.0.*"

Once you locate this line, change it to read:

em:maxVersion="3.1.*"

Save the file, allow 7zip to update the archive, then close 7zip. Now, in Firefox, go to the Addons window from the Tool menu and switch to the extensions tab. Drag the XPI from your desktop into your addons list. Firefox will install the addon for you without complaint. Restart Firefox and you’re done!

This hack will work for most extensions as there has been very few changes to the core functionality of Firefox in 3.1; most of the changes are to the Gecko rendering and JavaScript engines. I’ve successfully installed all my essentials in 3.1 without any problems, but if you do end up running into an addon incompatibility issue you can always start Firefox in Safe Mode from the Mozilla Firefox group in the Start menu.

Hope this helps!

Projects — View Comments
13
Jul 08

FriendFeed "Neo" released

FriendFeed Neo

It should come as no surprise to any of you that I really, really like FriendFeed, given the things I’ve done with the API and the unholy amount of time I spend browsing, commenting and liking people’s stuff. However, I’ve had a hard time converting most of my friends into “true believers” and using the service. I know it’s not for everyone, but the potential value of the service to some users seems to get lost in the UI. Me? I love it. It’s simple, it’s elegant, it’s precisely what I need and nothing I don’t. But, again, it’s not for everyone.

The biggest complaint I get? Hard on the eyes. No, not the design. But the color scheme. Black on white isn’t the best pallet choice when you’re potentially spending hours browsing pages. Thus, my theme FriendFeed Neo was built. It inverses the scheme, placing white text on a black background. It also softens the blues, removes the rounded edges and does nifty little things like highlight friend’s comments in threads to make them more noticeable.

I have more plans for the theme, but for now I’m releasing it so I can start getting feedback. So, please, give it a try and let me know what you think- preferably in the evansims.com room on FF or here in my blog comments.

Grab it at Userstyles.org

Thanks!

Tips / Web — View Comments
21
Jun 08

Take advantage of Firefox 3's color profile support

One of the big complaints I’ve heard from the more photographically inclined about Firefox 2 was the lack of color profile support in the browser. The simplest way to explain color profiles (or embedded ICC) is to look at some examples of images rendered in browsers that don’t support color profiles (in the left frames) and those that do (in the right frame.)


Images provided by SmugBlog.

What do you immediately notice? For me, it was the depth of shadowing. What you being to realize as you look at the difference between the images, however, is how much more “real” the image feels to you; the expanded range of colors really makes the images pop out.

When you’re seeing an image on the web with a color profile in a browser that supports color profiles you’re seeing it in a closer representation to what the author intended. At this time, Firefox 3 and Omniweb are the only browsers to fully and properly support color profiles. Safari has a buggy implementation of it, and Internet Explorer… well, it’s Internet Explorer. They’re still scratching their heads over how to CSS working.

How do I enable color management support in Firefox?

Shockingly, Firefox 3 doesn’t come with color profile support enabled by default. This feature was one of the most praised and eagerly awaited aspects of the new version, so I have no idea why they would chose to not enable it from the get-go. Apparently Mozilla chose not to enable the feature by default over performance concerns. On a page with lots of color profile-enabled images this feature can slow down rendering time.

None the less, enabling color profiles is very simple, you can either:

  • Install the Color Management extension; keep in mind that the extension is still in the experimental/review phase as of this writing, so you’ll need an account with the Mozilla Addons site to get it.
  • Alternatively, you can enable profile support by hand, which is actually very simple and the method I recommend. In Firefox 3, type about:config. If you get a warning, just say OK and continue on. In the filter bar, type: gfx.color_management.enabled. It should have a state of “false”. Double click it to turn it bold and toggle it to “true”. Restart Firefox.

You can test if your color profile support was successfully enabled at this site. Another great demo page is over at SmugMug- try loading it in Firefox 3 with color profiles, then Internet Explorer or Safari. Big difference, no?

How do I export my images from Photoshop with ICC profiles?

By default Photoshop does not embed color profiles in images exported using the Save to Web & Devices interface. To enable this, choose the JPEG format and checkmark “ICC Profile”. Simple as that.

Web — View Comments
17
Jun 08

Firefox 3 lands; download it now!

Download Day

Firefox 3 is arriving today, and brings with it a whole host of lovely new features that I’ve grown to love using the betas and release candidates these last few months.

Some of the features I love in particular:

  • The “awesome bar” (a new aspect of the address bar) gives me a central location to not only search my history but also my bookmarks and tags (see the new feature on those.) I can start to type “opendns” and not only will I find any pages I’ve visited recently with opendns in the URL or page title, but also any of my bookmarks with that word in it and bookmarks with that tag. It makes getting from A to B just that much faster.
  • The all-new Bookmarks system is a huge improvement over not only Firefox 2 but every other offering out there on the browser market right now. The new system uses a SQLite database to store your bookmarks, reducing potential instances of data corruption and speeding up read/write time over the traditional .HTML file.

    The new UI makes things faster from the user experience, too. Want to bookmark a page your on? No problem! Just hit the star. The page is instantly bookmarked and sorted un an “unfiled” section of your bookmarks so you can manage it later. If you want to customize your bookmark right now, hit that start again and a little dialog pops up allowing you to name your link, tag it, describe it and so forth. All of this additional meta information is used for the “awesome bar” and really allows you to customize your browsing experience.

  • Firefox 3 is fast! The new version of the Gecko rendering engine they’ve implemented is noticeably peppier than previous versions. And I can’t forget to the mention the drastically reduced memory consumption- Firefox 3 beats out every other browser on the market in that regard.
  • It’s more secure; Mozilla has really beefed up their phising and malware detection system, and what’s more have made it much more obvious in the user interface when you’re browsing a secure site and when you’re not.
  • Firefox finally has a native look on every platform. Now it doesn’t matter what OS you’re running the browser on, it’ll fit right in and look great. OS X, Windows 2000/XP, Windows Vista and Linux all have great default UIs that won’t make you cringe anymore.

So, download Firefox 3 today, and tell ‘em Evan sent ya’.

Use OpenDNS And hey, while you’re at it why not switch to OpenDNS? It makes your browsing experience that much safer, not to mention faster. Like Firefox it’s free, and unlike Firefox it doesn’t even require a download to set up. Just set your DNS servers to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 and you’re done. Not sure how to do that? OpenDNS has a great guide on on the matter right here.