All posts tagged ‘mozilla’

File Under: Browsers
Aug
24
2010

Fourth Firefox 4 Beta Adds ‘Panorama,’ Hardware Acceleration

By

Firefox 4 beta

Mozilla has released the fourth beta for the upcoming Firefox 4 browser. The latest pre-release version of Firefox 4 brings several new features including a new tab-organization tool, hardware acceleration in Windows 7 and support for the HTML5 video-buffered property.

If you’d like to help Mozilla test beta 4, you can grab Firefox 4 beta 4 for all major operating systems (and more than 30 languages) from Mozilla’s beta download site.

The big news in beta 4 is the Panorama feature (it used to be called Tab Sets, and Tab Candy before that — hopefully this name sticks). We looked at in depth when it hit the nightly builds.

Panorama allows you to group and quickly switch between related clusters of open tabs. Designed for those of us over-stimulated freaks who frequently have dozens of tabs (or more) open at one time, Panorama allows you to conquer tab chaos: for example, grouping tabs for work together and tabs for fun together, and then quickly switching between groups.

The feature works a bit like multiple desktops in your operating system — a la Expose on Mac OS X — except in this case it’s just web pages inside a single browser window. Here’s a video by Firefox designer Aza Raskin showing the latest version of Panorama in action:

Firefox beta 4 also brings what’s fast becoming the new hotness in web browsers: hardware acceleration. Like graphics-intensive games, the idea behind hardware acceleration is to shift some of the work from your PC’s main processor to the graphics card, which will speed up page-rendering, particularly text and graphics. The coming Internet Explorer 9 and future versions of Google’s Chrome browser will both take advantage of hardware acceleration.

Firefox is planning to do the same, but, as Mozilla’s Mike Shaver recently posted on Twitter, the hardware-acceleration features are currently disabled by default in beta 4. If you’d like to see Firefox take advantage of Windows’ Direct2D interface — regardless of the bugs that may exist — Mozilla has some instructions on how to enable it in beta 4.

The Mozilla road map still calls for the hardware-acceleration features to make the final release of Firefox, which presumably means we’ll see at least one more beta before Firefox 4 moves to the release-candidate stage.

The latest beta also brings support for HTML5 video’s buffering property, which means Firefox can accurately determine which time segments of a native web video can be played without having to pause while more data downloads. The end result is that the progress bar appears nonlinear and makes it easy to determine which parts of the video are available.

If you’d like to know everything that’s new in Firefox 4 beta 4 since the release of Firefox 3.6, Mozilla has put together a handy list of new features (including a few that aren’t quite finished). The list is quite extensive, and Firefox 4 is shaping up to be one of the biggest updates in some time.

While Mozilla still does not have a firm release date, Firefox 4 is expected to arrive in final form some time before the end of 2010. We’re expecting it in late October or early November.

See Also:

Tags: , , , ,
File Under: HTML5, Multimedia
Aug
20
2010

Mozilla’s Popcorn Project Adds Extra Flavor to Web Video

By

Video on the web has always been a bit disappointing.

After all, it’s pretty much just like television, only smaller. And unlike the rest of the web, video is just as much a passive experience in your browser as it is anywhere else.

Mozilla would like to change that. Developers at the browser maker’s Drumbeat project — an initiative that advocates new open web technologies — have created Popcorn, a tool intended to make web video every bit as interactive as the rest of the web.

Popcorn is a very new effort and still a bit rough around the edges, but results are already impressive. Popcorn adds metadata to HTML5 native web video, annotating videos with information like location, details about the people and topics in the video, subtitles, and licensing details. The metadata can be used in real time to add to the experience.

For example, the subtitles attached to the video can be sent to an online translation tool and converted to whatever language you want on the fly. JavaScript handles the syncing. Also, the location data associated with a video can be plotted on a map, and the viewer can browse the map while the video plays.

The most-cited advantage of HTML5 is that it allows for videos to be played in the browser without the use of plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight. But HTML5 affords another layer of utility — its native multimedia capabilities allow video and audio clips to be manipulated and enhanced by other things happening inside the browser. The look, size, position and controls of the video or audio file can be altered by JavaScript, CSS and Canvas animations. Playback can be enhanced with data pulled from the web’s many APIs. More than just a technology to side-step Flash, native video in HTML5 opens up a whole new set of interactive possibilities for video experiences on the web.

Check out Mozilla’s Popcorn demo page. You’ll see a number of widgets surrounding the main video. Popcorn.js pulls topics, places and people out of the video and plots the locations on a map and searches Wikipedia, Google News, Flickr and Twitter for more info on the people and topics in the video.

The result is what Mozilla developer Tristan Nitot calls “hypervideo.” What Nitot means is that Popcorn is connecting video to the rest of the web, linking it into the hypertext world.

If you’re not using a browser capable of running the demo, you can watch a video of the demo on the Drumbeat website.

As cool as this initial demo is, Popcorn is a long way from a finished product or even usable tool for anything beyond experimenting. Also, the demo shows off several widgets all at once, which makes the experience seem a little chaotic and crowded. But used as a spice, only where appropriate, Popcorn provides extra depth around videos, and the possibilities are thought-provoking.

See Also:

Tags: , , , ,
File Under: Browsers
Aug
16
2010

Tab Candy to Become a Standard Feature in Firefox

By

Mozilla’s “Tab Candy” experiment has proved so popular, the company has decided to roll it into future versions of the Firefox browser as a standard feature.

The latest nightly builds of Firefox 4 now include a new Tab Sets feature. If all goes well, the feature could be included in the final version of Firefox 4, due this autumn.

Previously referred to as Tab Candy during its development phase the last few months, Tab Sets allows you to group and quickly switch between related clusters of open tabs. Tab Sets are specifically aimed at making life easier for those of us who frequently have dozens (or more) tabs open at one time. By grouping your open tabs into sets — say a group of tabs for work and a group of tabs containing some Instapaper articles — you can keep better track of everything without needing to scroll through dozens of tabs.

Download a nightly build of Firefox and you’ll see a new Tab Sets button next to the List All Tabs button. Click it to show your tab sets. From there, just draw a box to create a new empty group, drag tabs between sets, drag a tab onto another to create a new group, re-size groups and tabs, and so on.

The feature works a bit like multiple desktops in your operating system — a la Expose on Mac OS X — except in this case it’s just web pages inside a single browser window.

Perhaps the best way to understand Tab Sets is to see them in action. The video below from Firefox designer Aza Raskin gives a nice overview of Tab Sets and why they’re incredibly useful.

An Introduction to Firefox’s Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

As nice as Tab Sets appear, they are not without some quirks. The latest nightly builds fix a number of bugs that showed up in the initial Tab Candy release, but bugs still exist and sometimes the behavior of tabs sets is a bit confusing.

For example, App Tabs, another new feature coming in Firefox 4, are included when you’re grouping tabs in the Tab Sets interface. But because App Tabs persist across groups anyway, including them in the Tab Sets UI makes things overly cluttered and a little bit confusing.

Of course, these are nightly builds meant only for testing by developers and early adopters, and things can be very rough around the edges both in design and function. Hopefully, by the time the feature freeze for Firefox 4 rolls around in a few weeks, Mozilla will have worked out enough of the kinks to include Tab Sets.

See Also:

Tags: , ,
File Under: Browsers, Mobile
Jul
16
2010

Firefox Home Syncs Your Faves to Your iPhone

By

Mozilla’s new Firefox Home app for Apple mobiles is now available for download. You can get Firefox Home for the iPhone and iPod Touch in iTunes. It’s a free download.

As we mentioned when we first told you about it, the Firefox Home app is not Firefox on your iPhone. It’s a companion to Firefox.

It securely syncs your bookmarks, browsing history, user preferences and open tabs from the last time you used Firefox, and it brings them down to your iPhone or iPod Touch so you can access that stuff on your mobile. It works in tandem with Firefox Sync, Mozilla’s hosted, cloud-based service that keeps all of your installations of Firefox synced up with one another.

Browsing my Firefox bookmarks on the iPhone

It’s especially welcome now, as most of us use multiple screens every day — one or two computers, and at least one smartphone with a web browser. Firefox Sync tied our work machine and our home machine together by syncing all of our browser data in the cloud, and Firefox Home completes the circuit for iOS users, making all the hard-to-remember stuff — your myriad “starred” favorites and bookmarked URLs — available in your pocket.

Needless to say, this app is only going to be useful to you if you’re a Firefox user with an iPhone or iPod Touch. Android users have had Mozilla’s mobile version of Firefox available on their phones since April.

You also need to have Firefox Sync set up to use it. If you don’t have an account, you can sign up when you install the app on your phone. You will also need the Sync add-on for Firefox (newer versions of Firefox will ship with Sync pre-installed). As Charlie Sorrel notes in his Gadget Lab post, this is a bit more work than syncing your desktop Safari data to your iPhone, which just involves checking a box in iTunes (and you can keep Safari and Firefox in sync — and by extension, the iPhone — using Xmarks, but only on the Mac). Opera’s mobile browsers have easy syncing as well. But unlike those choices, this isn’t a new browser or a half-way-there solution, it’s a direct line to the same browser data that’s on your desktops and laptops.

Once the app is set up, you can search your history, access your Firefox bookmarks and see the tabs you most recently had open when you walked away from your computer. All of this info is accessible from within Firefox Home’s search bar, which is sort of a miniature version of the “Awesome Bar” in Firefox. It will search both page titles and URL strings, and it will auto-suggest results as you type.

Searches use the Awesome Bar approach

Just like using the Awesome Bar in Firefox, everything shows up in a single list as you type, and a little icon shows up next to each item to tell you what sort of result it is — a bookmark, a piece of history, an open tab.

Click on an item and the page opens inside an in-app browser. It’s your standard iOS WebKit browser in a pretty blue wrapper, and it performs about the same as the built-in browser inside other popular apps like Twitter.

So Firefox Home is not Firefox on your iPhone, which is something we’re not ever likely to see. Mozilla’s brass has made it clear that Apple’s app policies are too restrictive for Firefox, and the company doesn’t want to dumb the browser down for the iPhone. For people who use Firefox as their primary browser everywhere else, this app is the next best thing.

You can read Mozilla’s announcement for more links, troubleshooting tips, and feedback channels.

See Also:

Tags: , , , , , ,
File Under: Browsers
Jul
6
2010

Firefox 4 Beta 1 Now Available for Download

By

The next major milestone of the Firefox browser has been released into the wild.

Firefox 4 Beta 1 is now available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. We were expecting it last week, as Mozilla had initially estimated the first beta would be available in June, but it’s here now. This release is for the adventurous only — it’s the first beta so it’s stable enough, but not rock-solid. So, if you’re eager to get an early peek at the next generation of Firefox, go forth and download.

The thing that probably matters most to everyday users is speed, and after using it for an hour or so, I can report that Firefox 4 is noticeably much faster than the various 3.x builds on my desktop.

Page load times are speeding up substantially across all the browsers now — Chrome and Safari recently received upgrades with hefty speed boosts, the new Opera 10.6 is on par with those releases, and the new Microsoft IE 9, due later this year, is also showing off some impressive speed in its current release, Platform Preview 3. Speed is one area where Firefox has recently drawn low marks, with some users switching to Chrome simply because it’s so nimble. But Firefox 4 appears set to change that when the final version arrives in a few months.

We covered much of what’s new in our Firefox 4 preview in May, but there are two new features in Tuesday’s release.

First, there’s a new look for Windows users. Tabs are now on top by default (a la Chrome). Mac and Linux users will get this feature as a default in subsequent betas. If you want to try it now, just go to View > Toolbars > Tabs on Top to enable it. Windows users, you can switch the option off using the same method if it’s not your thing. Also new for Windows people is the orange “Firefox” button in the top left. Click it and you get a dropdown filled with the most popular application menu items.

The new Firefox button. Click for larger.

The other new feature — and this is for all OSes — is an integrated Feedback button next to the search box. Click it to report anything that Firefox did to “make you happy” or “make you sad” (Mozilla’s actual wording). The Feedback system incorporates the Test Pilot add-on from Mozilla Labs to collect and anonymize the feedback.

Other big stuff in this beta:

  • Support for WebM video
  • More support for emerging web standards like CSS 3, Canvas and Web Sockets
  • Better page-rendering performance, including a new HTML5 parser
  • Crash protection that prevents bad plug-ins from blowing up the whole browser
  • New add-ons manager
  • Recently updated Jetpack SDK for new-style lightweight add-ons

Syncing, hardware acceleration and new themes for Mac OS X and Linux are coming soon, probably in the next beta release. So stay tuned.

See Also:

Tags: , , , , ,
« OLDER POSTS