firefox

If you are a techie, you pretty much know that Mozilla Firefox has pwnd Microsoft Internet Explorer for quite awhile despite the fact that IE has a greater user market share (70+% vs. 18%). Although IE is the primary choice for most users, many users in the tech world believe Firefox dominates by offering the most customization and features and will continue to do so, even with the news of the upcoming IE8 version. Although Firefox has had tons of success with these particular users, it was inevitable that a competitor would come onto the scene. Unfortunately, that competitor is Google, with the recent release of Chrome, their incredibly hyped new browser.

As web developers we do a lot of browser testing. It would be nice if everyone used the same browser (Firefox 3, for example) but they don’t. Believe it or not, there are still people out there who are using Firefox 2, which is why we need a way to install and run this now outdated web browser. Unfortunately, Firefox does not make this easy.

It's not uncommon for me to download numerous tools over a period of time while I'm online. Today I had spent the last few hours reading blogs, checking twitter, downloading a few SEO tools, and so forth. All of a sudden I notice that all of my links are highlighted in red!

Annoyed, because it was happening on every page no matter where I went, I did a little research and found the answer: The SEO toolbar I downloaded defaulted the setting that had caused this highlighting occurrence. If this has happened to you, the fix is simple:

Go to Tools/SEO for Firefox/Options. The setting is 'nofollow links.' Click the box "enable/disable highlighting." Refresh your page, and the links should go back to normal.

"With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do."

Yesterday Mozilla Lab launched Ubiquity, an interactive search tool that takes web usability to another level.

Ubiquity is in version 0.1, so it's okay to be skeptical. Sometimes you want to wait until the Company knocks out all the bugs (i.e. iPhone), or until enough buzz is created around it that you have to see what's all about (i.e. Twitter), but you don't have to this time. Jump on the train before it leaves the platform.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo

Firefox is an open source web browser maintained by the Mozilla corporation. It is the second most popular web browser today with millions of users. It is developed by a core team with contributions from hundreds of volunteer developers. Firefox is built to allow custom user configuration, and users can author extensions that can be integrated into the browser interface as seamlessly as the normal toolbar.

The opera web browser is the flagship product of Opera Software. It is a web browser that competes directly for market share with Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer and other popular web browsers. It has historically had a minuscule share of the browser market, in part due to its price and partly because it has no way of persuading users; which are satisfied with whatever comes on their computer out of the box. Opera has a very robust version of its web browser for PDAs, cell phones, and other hand held devices called Opera mini.

Acid2 is a test page for web browsers published by the Web Standards Project (WASP). It has been written to help browser vendors make sure their products correctly support features that web designers would like to use. These features are part of existing standards but haven't been consistently supported by major browsers. It is not supposed to resemble a real-world web page and it is not solely designed to test browser support for CSS; it contains complex rules that cascade in the most advanced ways possible.

A web browser is the informal name for a piece of software that can request and display text multimedia from the World Wide Web. The most common web browsers are internet explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari for OS-X users. They are all designed to display information on a large graphical monitor, but other web browsers have been specially developed to display textual information only render small screen versions for PDAs or speak the information aloud to a person who has vision problems.

Shortcuts are essential if you want to make the most when you're working or browsing on the web. I have listed the basic, and a few advanced, shortcuts for Firefox users. Sure, you won't use all of them, but at least try a few throughout the next couple of days and see if one, two, or maybe three work for you. You'll start to see how productive being online can be without having to constantly reach for your mouse.

Download Day 2008 has been launched by Mozilla Firefox to beat the Guinness Book of Records for most downloads in one day. Their goal is to reach 5 million downloads. As of 4:08pm CST the total number of downloads is 2,623,432. There is even a map of total region downloads and a rollover feature for each country's total downloads. Sleek.

There are over 15,000 new features in Firefox 3, including:

• One-click bookmarking
• "Awesome Bar" which recommends sites that you have visited before
• Better security
• Easy to use password management
• Simplified add-on installation
• Improved performance of speed and memory usage

Mozilla's open source project started back in 1998. Today it's known as Mozilla Corporation. The Company has over 800 code contributors, supports 35 languages, and has 3 affiliates in China, Europe and Japan.