Firefox Friday Five

Welcome to a new weekly feature here on Download Squad. You've probably gathered from the name that it's a feature about Firefox, it occurs on Friday, and... wait for it... I will be covering five things. Madness, I know. These five things could be anything: add-ons, neat features, newsy developments -- anything really, as long as it's cool.

Generally we're pretty good at catching everything Firefoxy here at Download Squad (God knows the Firefox tag is bursting to overflowing), but if there are add-ons or features that deserve more attention than they're currently getting, let us know!

Without further ado, let's get started, because it's been a busy week for Mozilla and Firefox!

1. European Commission and Microsoft reach a resolution to the web browser anti-trust lawsuit
This doesn't immediately jump out as news until you look into the details. Basically, in Europe, Microsoft will be forced to provide a menu of optional web browsers. Internet Explorer will not be installed by default -- the user will have to select it from a list of almost every available browser. Even better, the list will be randomly jumbled, so Internet Explorer won't be at the top of the list.

This is big news for Firefox (and Chrome). Firefox is already a run-away success in Central Europe, and with this change you can expect Internet Explorer's market share to continue its downward trend. Now it becomes a matter of name recognition: how many people actually know of Internet Explorer as a browser, rather than just 'the Internet'?

Refinements and tweaks are the key elements of this week's Personas 2.0 release. Nothing fundamental has changed; it's now just easier -- and prettier! (The Personas site that is -- the themes themselves remain fairly ugly for the most part.)

Really, the only functional change is a bar down the right side of the site: you now have access to the 'most popular' and 'recently added' designs. Hopefully this will cause some great-but-undiscovered themes to bubble to the surface!

It's also worth noting that the Firefox 3.6 Beta has Personas installed by default -- it doesn't require a separate download. Sweet!


3. Chrome source code utilized to bring multi-process add-ons to Firefox

Here's yet another reason why Firefox and Chrome will continue to steal market-share from Internet Explorer: open source! Seriously, it's such a fantastic thing -- every developer working on Chrome is effectively producing code that can be used with Firefox... and vice-versa! I can't begin to imagine the total number of awesome programmers split between Mozilla, Google and the open source community.

This is really more of a 'coming in the near future' thing though -- to use it, you'll need a Firefox 3.7 nightly build, and then follow the instructions in a Download Squad article from earlier in the week. But hey, everyone should download and take a poke at Firefox 3.7 anyway, because it's starting to look pretty neat.


4. Browser window resizer add-on

I'm throwing this one in for the web developers out there. You probably won't ever appreciate the trials and tribulations of web design (not that you ever want to -- it's a horrible job, trust me) but tools like the Firefox Windows Resizer add-on definitely make things a hell of a lot easier.

You probably saw yesterday that Google has provided a 'browser size' webmaster tool -- well, this basically does the same thing, but as a Firefox add-on (and it isn't as frugly as Google's attempt). Having said that, this add-on is clunky too (it's stuck in the top left corner?) and it only has pre-set resolutions. Weird.

Incidentally, when is Firefox going to allow add-ons to be installed without restarting the browser? Is that on the roadmap? Has anyone tried installing extensions in Chrome? It's really quite swift...


5. Microsoft Bing's awesome nod to Firefox


It just be purely coincidental, but given the circumstances, I seriously doubt it. If you were offline last week, you might've missed Google's CEO Eric Schmidt pissing all over the concept of your privacy ('privacy? what privacy?') It sparked a lot of outrage, and some thoughtful responses from privacy advocates all over the Internet.

One of these dissenters was Asa Dotzler, a bigwig at Mozilla and veteran developer of Firefox. He actually recommended Google users to switch to Bing, citing a better privacy policy. It would seem someone at Microsoft was following the news, and threw in a delightful Bing background picture of a real-life fire fox -- or what is more commonly known as to non-geeky biologist types as a red panda.


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If some major Firefox news passed us by this week, feel free to throw it in the comments! I'll try to get around to it next week, if it's still news!

Tags: add-ons, addons, features, firefox, news, roundup