Webby's World » Mozilla

Firefox over the years

Joe Anderson — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:08:17 +0000

Do you, like me, remember when Firefox 1.0 was released?

Our little browser has come a long way since then with RC1 of Firefox 3.0 having just been released.

Firefox today commands about 20% of the web browser usage share so it is no longer exclusively the browser-of-choice of the nerd, but of many ‘normal’ people too. Most websites will now support Firefox when a couple of years ago if you complained over the lack of Firefox support, you would get sniggered at!

So how has Firefox changed since 1.0 which was released nearly 4 years ago on 9 November, 2004?

Firefox 1.5 (29 November, 2005) lacked canvas and SVG support, the latter is now something all proper browsers have. These features are fairly minor additions compared to what was added in 2.0 (24 October, 2006): web feed previewing, search auto-suggest, anti-phishing protection, an improved addon manager and a search plugin manager. Firefox 3 will see an improved history and bookmark manager and much better OS X integration.

The beauty of Firefox, unlike IE, is that they don’t add dozens of pointless features to each new version but instead just make their product seem more polished and finished. I always find that Firefox seems ‘fresh’ due to the relatively frequent, minor twitches which are made to it.

Long live the Fox!

Restoring Firefox bookmarks and preferences

Joe Anderson — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 21:15:23 +0000

If there’s a power outage, or for some other reason your Mozilla Firefox bookmarks disappear, this article might help you restore them.

Suggestion 1: Assure Firefox is closed. Rename bookmarks.bak in your profile folder details (C:\Documents and Settings\Joe\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\68y597g2.default, obviously changing the italic details, if you need help read this) to bookmarks.html, deleting that first.

Suggestion 2: Assure Firefox is closed. Go to C:\Documents and Settings\Joe\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\68y597g2.default\bookmarkbackups and replace bookmarks.html in your profile folder with the the latest working backup.

Suggestion 3: In the future, use software like MozBackup!

MozillaZine has some suggestions on this, too.

Minimo

Joe Anderson — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 20:46:27 +0000

Minimo is a web browser, which is currently only for Windows Mobile 4.2 (PocketPC 2003) and Windows Mobile 5, which is based on the Gecko. It takes many of Firefox‘s features onto a PDA; the most useful being tabbed browsing. In my opinion, it is interestingly Web 2.0.

Like Firefox, it probably takes more resources up than Internet Explorer, but PIE isn’t a pre-alpha, however it does boast some useful features Pocket Internet Explorer does not have. For those not familiar with PocketPCs, Pocket Internet Explorer does not allow more than one site to be open at a time. As you may imagine, this lowers productivity. Another advantage of Minimo is the fact it complies to more standards than PIE.

The browser shares many of Firefox’s characteristics. The most notable is that the tab view is basically the same, as is the options. Naturally, it differs greatly from Firefox as it needs to fit onto a small screen. So the navigation buttons (back, forwards and refresh), the menus and status bar are lost. Many features are placed into the two menus, which are launchable by the icons on either side of the address bar.

The user can choose to view a page as either a single column, under small screen rendering, or as it would look on a desktop PC. Overall, I would say this rendering is superb, and pages load well in both portrait and landscape. In desktop mode, it literally opens the page how I would expect it to on a desktop. It can even reads RSS, and converts it into a headline view. However, it is not an aggregator.

You also get bookmarks, which is pretty aesthetic. Sadly, I cannot get a screenshot of this, but the bookmark list opens into a tab. In this tab it displays a list, with favicons.

The program lacks the ability to add extensions, and also it lacks a search box. I hope these will be added nearer to it’s 1.0 release (currently it is 0.016!). I believe Mozilla should promote this project more, as Pocket Internet Explorer is subpar, and Opera costs money.

Digg!

Tags: minimo, mozilla, software, pocketpc, windows, windowsmobile, pda, firefox, web 2.0, browsers, webbrowsers, web browser, WAP, mozilla firefox

w.bloggar with Mozilla!

Joe Anderson — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 20:11:25 +0000

At the moment, by preferred blogging software is w.bloggar. In all fairness, I though the project had been abandoned, as it hadn’t been active between August 2005 and March 2006. Due to this, I had stopped checking for updates until I read Sarah’s post on a piece of blogware, which I don’t respect as one of their employees spammed this blog, called Qumana. For some reason, this reminded me to check for updates.

To be frank, I was amazed to see there had been numerous updates in March. The two main ones were support for MSN Spaces and an optional Mozilla-powered preview!

Like most programs, w.bloggar uses/used an Internet Explorer-powered preview, the reason for that been it’s ease to integrate in Visual Studio applications. However, a new version of w.bloggar (which is 4.4MB bigger than the IE version) uses the gecko and the Mozilla ActiveX control to give a much smoother Mozilla-powered preview.

With the IE preview, it often took time to load the preview; now it’s instant. The downside is that w.bloggar (any version) doesn’t work on any non-Windows OS – though that’s not a problem for me.

(official blog post)

Tags: mozilla, blogs, blogging, w.bloggar, wbloggar

150 million!

Joe Anderson — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 19:53:00 +0000

I don’t really check SFX out much at the moment; but they’ve announced there’s been 150 million of Firefox. Naturally, many of these will be multiple downloads; but still – it’s pretty high! Well done to everyone involved in Mozilla.

Tags: Mozilla, Firefox, Mozilla Firefox