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A Windows only experimental Firefox extension called FoxTab introduces a new tab switching interface to Firefox. FoxTab comes complete with five different thumb nailed views and man is it awesome.

FoxTab provides a new fascinating and elegant method for finding and selecting a tab in the browser.
FoxTab is designed to be suitable for many types of users, those with only few tabs opened and
those out there (like me) who usually have tons of opened tabs to select from.
The idea behind FoxTab is to provide new visual methods for quick tab switching.

We already know that FireFox 3.1 will have a new tab switching interface. But why wait, this thing is awesome. Take a look at these screenshots:

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FireFox has always been a good browser, but as of the latest release has become THE browser that I use daily. FireFox extensions make it wickedly powerful. As a web developer I find many of the extensions invaluable. Here’s the best of the best…

Web developer`s toolbar

Web Developer`s tool bar probably will become one of the best plugins You`ve ever seen. It comes with his own tool bar that gives many useful tools for analyzing, validating and optimizing web-pages. The great thing about this plugin is that it’s on a few different browsers, so if you switch between them you will be able to use the same plugin on all.

Web Developer Toolbar

Firebug

Firebug is pretty similar as web developer, but it comes across with few different powerful options. You have an ability to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript right in any web page.

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Google’s Chrome browser has sure raised some eyebrows. I have to admit the speed at with it run JavaScript intensive pages IS pretty impressive. But it’s still very beta, and lacks all the addons/extensions and goodies that FireFox provides. But if you fancy the look of the Chrome browser (ie, tabs on top) you can now snag a FireFix extension to make FireFox looks just like Chrome.

The Chrome package is really two extensions (an extension and a hack of the Chromifox theme) to enable Google Chrome lookalike mode in FireFox and according to the developer “this is just the beginning”.

Grab the Chrome Package here.

With so much being said about Google Chrome’s performance (I’ve played with it… it IS fast), everybody started wondering about FireFox’s reaction. After all, it has been the golden boy as of late. The question on everyone who’s a follower of FireFox beta’s is how does the new beta Google Chrome browser stack up against the beta 3.1 FireFox release in JavaScript performance. Note… BOTH of these are beta releases.

Here are the results from head-to-head SunSpider on Windows XP on a Mac Mini and Windows Vista on a MacBook Pro, testing against last night’s Firefox automated build and yesterday’s Chrome beta:

The entire results of the test are worth looking into as they provide where V8 (Chrome) excels versus TraceMonkey (FireFox) in JavaScript performance.

Get the full scoop here.

The Acid test,  tests how well a browser complies with a given set of Web standards. Acid2 tests a variety of web standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium and the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Harrison Hoffman, co-founder of LiveSide.net and contributor to the CNET Blog Network is reporting that Google’s Chrome browser is outperforming the latest “stable” builds of both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7 in the popular Acid3 test. All the browsers tested pass the Acid2 test. However, the only currently released browser to beat Google’s Chrome browser was Opera, which scored an 83. FireFox scored 71 and IE scored 14, whereas Google’s Chrome (which is still beta) hits a 78 out of 100.

Developer builds however, including Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 (85), Opera (91), and Safari 4 (100) do beat out Chrome.

Read the full details over at CNET.

Google announced it will release a brand new open source web browser called Google Chrome. Yesterday a site went up, and has subsequently been taken down at http://gears.google.com/chrome/?hl=en (as of this morning clicking this link take you back to regular old Google).

According to Crunchbase the features include:

• Tabbed browsing where each tab gets its own process, leading to faster and more stable browsing. If one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t go down with it
• A distinct user interface that places tabs on top of the browser window instead of right below the address bar
• An “incognito” mode that lets you browse the web in complete privacy because it doesn’t record any of your activity
• A new JavaScript engine built from the ground up for speed
• Malware and phishing lists that automatically update themselves and warn you of bad websites
• A default homepage that displays your most commonly used sites and other personalized information

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If you visit a website with either an expired or a self-signed SSL certificate, Firefox 3 will not show that page at all. Instead, the browser shows the “customs officer” graphic and an error saying the website may be dangerous. Apparently this is seen as an issue by some people (I dig it.. and you can always override it).

Of course, excuse or no, according to Netcraft, as many as 18% of the Fortune 1000 websites have expired SSL certificates. That means the odds are pretty good that Firefox 3 is going to block you from accessing some legitimate sites.

I’m gunna say thumbs-up to FireFox for doing us all a favor. People like my mom have no idea what an SSL Cert even is… if it stops here from hitting some bogus self-signed site in error then kudos to the FireFox team.

Read more at WebMonkey

Stephen Colbert gave Firefox 3 his “Colbert Bump” on the day of Firefox 3’s launch.  You can watch the video here.

Download Day was a wild success, and the Firefox guys were happy to share some thanks and credit with Stephen.  However, a few questions naturally arose, e.g., what was the direct impact of the Colbert Bump? and could the effect be precisely measured?

Here’s what they did:  they looked at downloads of Firefox 3 by users within the U.S. – and then drilled down to a minute-by-minute view to see what, if anything, could be detected.  At minute 23 of the broadcast, Colbert said, “Firefox 3 just got the Colbert Bump.”  What happened next?

A big spike in downloads exactly one and two minutes later:

There is other scientific evidence proving the Bump’s effect.  If you’re interested in that previous study by James Fowler of the University of California at San Diego, you can read the complete version here.

Net Applications, published some interesting data about Mozilla’s Firefox in this month’s newsletter. Specifically, they’re projecting that users of the world’s favorite alternative browser will account for 20% of all web traffic sometime in July.

“Net Applications Global Internet Usage Market Share for May 2008 shows Firefox gaining more momentum,” said Vince Vizzaccaro, executive vice president, marketing. “Firefox market share for May was 18.41% up from 17.76% in April. If recent trends continue, Firefox should achieve 20% market share some time in July.”

Source: Net Applications

It’s all in the timing

However, with Firefox 3 RC 1 already in circulation and the full release expected soon, Mozilla may be able to steal a march and shoot past 20% before the end of June.

Firefox 3 RC 1 has been my browser of choice, I love the thing. Already, prerelease versions of Firefox 3 account for close to 1% of web traffic as measured by Net Applications

Lastly, SpreadFirefox.com is planning a major marketing push for the release of Firefox 3 with the Download Day 2008 promotion, whereby backers hope to break the single-day record for the number of downloads for a single piece of software.

Whereas Firefox growth to date has been slow and steady, it seems to me that the time may be right for a major surge in adoption.

Original post from MozillaLinks.

A year and a half after the last major Firefox release, Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is here with  a very long list of new features and improvements.

For those who have been following Firefox 3 development you may want to jump to What’s new in Release Candidate 1.

For the whole scoop, make yourself comfortable and read on.

Performance

Firefox 3 gets several performance improvement gains. Among them, profile guided optimizations (PGO) provides an optimized Firefox build based on the way it internally works. So far it is only available for Windows.

A very noticeable gain can be seen in JavaScript: it is about three times faster than Firefox 2 implementation. JavaScript is twice as important for Firefox since it is not only used in a large number of web pages but it’s also what makes Firefox UI work.

Memory wise, a much needed memory cycle collector is now in place to take care of freeing memory no longer used by modules that requested it but failed to release it properly. This and other memory oriented tweaks, seem to have paid off so far: a set of tests I recently ran suggests a noticeable increase in memory management efficiency with more memory freed as tabs and windows are closed and no mysterious memory eaten up when Firefox is kept open and idle for several hours as it has been reported several times in the past for Firefox 2.

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