Mozilla has bumped Personas to version 2.0. The company has upgraded its set of lightweight themes for Firefox in anticipation of Firefox 3.6, which will be the first version of the browser to support Personas out of the box. Other versions of Firefox, like the current Firefox 3.5, still require that you download and install the Personas add-on to manage your themes.
While Personas 2.0 offers a few new features — like an icon in the status bar that allows you to quickly switch themes — the primary focus has been on redesigning the Personas gallery and making the installation process smoother and easier.
The gallery has a host of new ways to discover Personas, and browsing through it is now much more like browsing the halls of the Firefox add-ons gallery. New means of filtering and sorting themes by category, popularity or related Personas make finding what you want a bit easier.
Personally I’ve never understood themes, for Firefox or anything else. Themes are a bit like putting stickers on hammer — You can, but why spend the time? I like my browser, but I like because its useful, not because it has pictures of Harry Potter in the menu bar. However, according to Mozilla, the Personas site will likely see its 40,000th design uploaded by the end of 2009, so clearly at least some of you are enjoying Personas.
While Personas aren’t likely to convince hesitant users to switch to Firefox, they do offer an easy way to make your browser a bit more, well, personal. If you’re a fan, head on over the revamped Personas site and be sure to install the Personas add-on if you aren’t using the Firefox 3.6 beta.
In the current browser wars, just as in rounds past, Internet Explorer is the agreed-upon common target. Google’s Chrome, Mozilla’s Firefox and, though it’s less vocal about it, Apple’s Safari, are all after IE’s vast market share much more so than each others’.
But Google has recently been touting a new capability in Chrome that was once wholly owned by Firefox — browser add-ons. Earlier this week, the company launched official support for add-ons in Chrome which means Firefox fans accustomed to tricking out their browser with dozens of extensions can now do the same with Google’s faster upstart. It also puts these two key players, who would otherwise be considered allies against Microsoft, even more at odds than they were before.
Unfortunately for Google, due to technical shortcomings and some license restrictions, Chrome’s extensions are unlikely to ever match the power and variety of what’s available for Firefox.
On the plus side, Chrome extensions are remarkably easy to build. Using common web tools like HTML and JavaScript, Chrome extensions require no special programming knowledge and development is fast — at a developer event held at Google’s office Wednesday night, Chrome’s developers showed off how easy it is to build a Chrome extension by doing so live onstage in five minutes.
No doubt, that’s very impressive. And you quite simply could not do that with Firefox. But Mozilla is already moving toward an easier-to-build extensions system as well. Mozilla’s JetPack experiment, a Mozilla Labs project that will eventually allow developers to build extensions using simple JavaScript and HTML, is already well on its way to maturity and will be heading to Firefox in the near future.
What’s more important, however, is that despite how easily you can build them, Google’s terms of service for its extensions and its lack (thus far) of low-level tools mean Google Chrome extensions are still playing catch-up with what you’ll find in Firefox.
In fact, if you search through the Chrome extensions gallery looking for the kind of extensions popular with Firefox users, you’ll notice there are very few available and, more importantly, entire categories are absent.
For example, there’s no extension for downloading YouTube movies or any of the many BitTorrent helpers (or full-fledged clients) that exist for Firefox.
It might be that no one has developed such add-ons yet, but even if they did it would most likely run afoul of Google’s Chrome extension guidelines, which outlaw things like copyright infringement, hate speech and any extension to “enable the unauthorized download of streaming content or media.”
You also won’t find any add-ons that selectively block scripts — like Firefox’s NoScript or FlashBlock. As NoScript developer Giorgio Maone points out on his blog, “Chrome is still lacking the required infrastructure for selective script disablement and object blocking.”
That doesn’t just mean that NoScript doesn’t work, it means that the Flash blockers and even the ad blockers you’ll find in the Chrome extension gallery are, as Maone has demonstrated in his post, “ridiculously easy to circumvent.”
Ad blockers are an area where Google must certainly be hesitant. After all, if Chrome were to achieve IE’s market share and support extensions that block ads in a way that won’t be easy to circumvent, it could have a very real, very negative affect on Google’s bottom line.
So if Chrome extensions lack the power of those in Firefox, and Google’s terms restrict what developers can build, what’s left?
Well, Chrome is undeniably faster than Firefox, and even though it’s been only a few days since extensions became official for Windows and Linux (but not Mac) users, Chrome has almost 500 extensions available. Obviously, Chrome is going to be a popular platform to develop for in spite of its restrictions, limitations and its complex connection to the business model of its corporate parent, which may at times run in opposition to the demands of users on the open web.
We look forward to seeing what developers can do to extend Chrome and hope that in the future Google will give developers more access and refrain from censoring apps the company doesn’t like. Otherwise, Chrome extensions will end up looking more like apps in Apple’s tightly controlled App Store and less like the type of hacker-centric creations we’re hoping to see.
When Google ships the Mac version of its Chrome browser later this month, it will arrive without Gears, the company says.
Google is phasing out Gears, its software for powering things like offline access, geolocation and local data caching in web apps, in favor of similar browser technologies being driven by the wider adoption of HTML5.
As Google prepares to release its first beta version of Chrome for the Mac (a developer preview has been available for months), the company is letting the sun set on its Gears project.
“We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites,” wrote a Google spokesman in an e-mail.
Milian also reports that Google arrived at this decision partially because of a technical hurdle: Gears won’t run properly on Snow Leopard, Apple’s latest operating system. Gears is built into Chrome on other platforms, and Google will continue to support Gears as long as it’s out there.
This is big news for web apps, which are rapidly becoming more powerful as browsers adopt HTML5 and other proposed standards designed to increase their functionality.
By and large, this move was expected — Gears was always intended to simply fill in the gap between the forward-thinking design of productivity apps like Gmail and Google Docs and the capabilities of most browsers. Now that browsers have largely caught up to the promises of HTML5 (except for IE, of course), there’s less of a need to patch today’s web to meet tomorrow’s needs.
Google is getting ready to offer widespread support for extensions in Chrome, launching a program which will allow third-party developers to add features to its browser.
The company released more details about its new Chrome Extension Gallery Tuesday. Developers can now upload their extensions to the Chrome Extensions Gallery, in effect publishing their extensions even before the browser officially supports them. Support for Chrome extensions is available in the current developer release, but they will probably arrive in the browser for all users before the end of the year.
At the moment, there isn’t much to see in the Chrome gallery — it’s just a form for developers to upload their extensions. However, Google is clearly hoping Chrome will one day support an extension ecosystem similar to the one Mozilla enjoys with its highly successful add-ons community for Firefox. The site will offer the ability to search and browse for extensions, and Google is encouraging developers to upload videos and screenshots explaining what each extension does.
The company has also posted guidelines outlawing things like copyright infringement, hate speech and any extension to “enable the unauthorized download of streaming content or media” — which means we probably won’t see extensions for ripping videos from YouTube.
To that point, Chrome extensions will be reviewed before they become publicly available. The Chrome Blog says that, for most extensions, “the review process is fully automated.” However, if your extension plans to use low-level components or access file:// URIs, Google will require a manual review and may ask developers for additional information before such extensions end up in the gallery.
Mozilla Labs has released a new version of Jetpack, its system for extending Firefox using common web tools like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Designed to simplify the process of building Firefox Add-ons, Jetpack is still an experimental Labs project, but the latest release sees Jetpack moving closer to prime time.
While Jetpack is still very much a nascent project, there’s considerable promise in even these early release. If Jetpack succeeds in its goal of making add-ons easier to develop it will mean even more developers and in turn even more add-ons for Firefox users to enjoy.
The menu mod functionality in the new API means you can use simple JavaScript commands to add items to, for example, Firefox’s right-click context menu, which brings Jetpack much closer to the capabilities of full-fledged Firefox add-ons.
From a user’s point of view the nice thing about JetPack add-ons are their simplicity — there’s no need to restart Firefox when installing JetPack add-ons, and JetPack add-ons will be compatible across multiple versions of Firefox. Because the tools JetPack offers — namely the various APIs — are baked into Firefox, subsequent browser updates won’t affect the JetPack add-ons.
For an overview of what you can do with the new Jetpack APIs, check out the following video. Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla, shows off some of the new possibilities for Jetpack:
Mozilla has bumped Personas to version 2.0. The company has upgraded its set of lightweight themes for Firefox in anticipation of Firefox 3.6, which will be the first version of the browser to support Personas out of the box. Other versions of Firefox, like the current Firefox 3.5, still require that you download and install the Personas add-on to manage your themes.
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