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Firefox Friday Five (3.6!!!)
Phew! What a week for the Firefox!With this flurry of activity things, you'd expect things to calm down for a little... but no! Mozilla will try to capitalize on their new fleet-footed approach to updates and minor revisions. With Chrome now barking at its heels and Microsoft's IE9 likely to arrive this year, it's never been more important for Firefox to keep its lead.
Let's start with the best one:
1. Government warnings about Internet Explorer cause massive influx of Firefox downloads
Lee, like the great impartial reporter that he is, pointed out that there were lots of Firefox and Opera downloads -- but as always when talking about Opera, it's on the same scale as a tiny, uninhabited Pacific island, so let's just go with the Firefox statistic.
Basically, the governments of Germany, France and Australia told its citizens to dump Internet Explorer... and that's what they did! From Firefox's usual 50,000 downloads a day, they spiked up to 200,000!
(It's worth noting that IE has now been patched and is safe again... but for how long?!)
2. Firefox 3.6 released. The crowd goes wild.
I really doubt, being a loyal Download Squad reader, that you could've missed this small tidbit of news. Firefox 3.6 is now available, along with built-in Personas (themes/skins) support.
It's a lot faster, a lot more stable, and the basis for some other neat things that are due out in the next few months -- such as 'content processes'! Download it already.
If you like those 'aero peek' icons when you Alt-Tab in Windows 7, you'll love this neat little feature that made it into Firefox 3.6.
You can now enable 'visual tab previews' when you use Ctrl-Tab. Assuming you have more than two tabs open, you'll get one of those pretty jump menus showing you the contents of each tab. Definitely beats tabbing into an old tab and waiting 30 seconds for it to be recovered from the page file...
To enable, visit 'about:config' in your address bar, and then search for ctrlTab -- double click browser.ctrlTab.previews until it's set to true.
I'm told it works just fine on Macs too!
This was actually meant to go out last night, but due to a technical issue it got re-published earlier today. I don't want to give this feature any more attention than it deserves -- especially not during daytime hours when kids might be reading! -- but give it a read if you're an adult, and you, er... surf the Internet.
To celebrate the release of Firefox 3.6 and the built-in support for its great, new skinning system Personas, Jay compiled a list of his favourites.
With over 35,000 themes, Personas has definitely taken off in a big way! Personally, I don't see why anyone would want some kind of image behind their web browser's menus, but I guess some people do.
Most of those 35,000 skins are pretty ugly too -- so I'd suggest you start with Jay's list, rather than dive into the Personas website itself.
* * *
Did I miss anything exciting? Feel free to chime in!
Comments
18
Subscribe to commentsSleepingPandaJan 22nd 2010 5:33PM
Thanks for the Ctrl Tab tweek!
JóiJan 22nd 2010 5:42PM
That Ctrl Tab tweak is just down right sexy!!!
Thanks... : )
Sebastian AnthonyJan 22nd 2010 5:46PM
You're welcome! And the guy above you too!
MaxJan 22nd 2010 7:28PM
CTRL-tab does NOT work on mac. The previews appear, but repeated tabs do not switch the tabs.
benJan 22nd 2010 9:25PM
Really? Works for me. What version of OS X are you using? I'm on Snow Leopard.
archerJan 22nd 2010 7:45PM
too many broken essential extensions like prism and sage
i've gone back to 3.5.7
SilverWaveJan 23rd 2010 10:16PM
All this lot work fine:
Enabled Extensions: [30]
* Adblock Plus 1.1.3
* Back to Top 5.3.2
* Boox 2.6beta1
* Download Statusbar 0.9.6.5
* DownThemAll! 1.1.8
* Fission 1.0.9
* Gmail Notifier 0.6.4.1
* Greasemonkey 0.8.20091209.4
* Hide Caption 0.7.6.1
* Informational Tab 0.3.2009100802
* Locationbar² 1.0.4
* Make Link 9.11
* Menu Editor 1.2.6
* MR Tech Toolkit 6.0.4
* NewTabURL 2.1.0
* Nightly Tester Tools 2.0.3
* NoSquint 2.0.3
* OptimizeGoogle 0.77
* Places’ Full Titles 3
* Platypus 0.81
* Pronounce 1.4
* Reliby 1.5.0
* repagination 2006.4.5.1
* RequestPolicy 0.5.12
* Shelve 1.21
* Stay-Open Menu 1.5.2
* Tab Counter 1.8.4
* Text Link 3.1.2009110201
* Toolbar Buttons 0.6.0.8
* Tree Style Tab 0.8.2009122501
Saying which I did use Extensions>Tools>Make All Compatible, to sort out about 6 or 7 of them.
Can't remember if that's from "MR Tech Toolkit" or Nightly Tester Tools.
Sebastian AnthonyJan 23rd 2010 10:18PM
Cheers for the info :)
archerJan 23rd 2010 10:48PM
yeah the majority of mine worked too, it's just that some i deem essential (well, dearly loved and constantly used, anyway) don't
BazJan 22nd 2010 8:25PM
Interesting Ctrl-Tab tweak (though I don't know I'll use it), while the upgrade seemed to only disable one of my preferred Add-Ons, CookieSafe. But its developer has posted a workaround for that.
That said, I'm more disappointed by what Firefox doesn't offer. It desperately needs to be a lot 'lighter' - start up and fully closing down still take an eternity to achieve and resources are drained away like nobody's biz'ness in operation.
Sure you can use Firefox Preloader to hide the length of time it takes to get running, but that doesn't hide fact it (and maybe its companion Add-Ons) needs to lose a lot of weight.
benJan 22nd 2010 9:26PM
That's waiting for Firefox 4. They're already in the process of rewriting the extension framework.
Sebastian AnthonyJan 22nd 2010 10:36PM
Jetpack!!
susaJan 22nd 2010 11:26PM
Ctrl-Tab tweek in Mac only pulls up the tab-previews. You have to press and release to be able to switch tabs. Pressing ctrl-tab a second time doesn't even go to the next tab, it goes back to the previous tab.
pressing ctrl-shift-tab only brings up the previews. pressing and releasing it doesn't do anything.
in other words - it appears to be broken on the mac.
and yes, i'm using OSX 10.6.2
fabbazJan 23rd 2010 9:05AM
don't know what the problem is but it works fine here. ctrl-tab switches to the next, ctrl-shift-tab opens a stupid preview (stupid because you can't switch back to the last tab instead...)
fabbazJan 23rd 2010 9:01AM
i have a problem with the functionality of that ctrl-tab tweak (which works fine on mac, by the way) - it changes not only the visuals but also the sorting behavior, which i find annoying. normally you can blindly ctrl-tab through your tabs because it follows the order the tabs have in the navigation bar.
but with this tweak active they are sorted pseudo-chronologically, by which one was used last. i don't like that because i don't have a clue what tab i clicked minutes ago, and don't want to care, which means i always have to look and select what to pick. and for looking-and-selecting-what-to-pick i already have the tab bar.
i have the same problem with normal alt-tab/command-tab switching.
so even though this _looks_ nice, i'll revert to pre-tweaked ;)
Sebastian AnthonyJan 23rd 2010 10:26AM
Ah! I thought I noticed the tab order changing. Wasn't sure if it was chronological, or something else. Cheers for the tip :)
Saint SeminoleJan 23rd 2010 1:41PM
Already went back to 3.5.7 so my extensions would work. Too many were disabled for 3.6.
This is my single biggest complaint about FF, and the only reason I rarely upgrade. Most times, I wait a few weeks to see that my extensions have been updated, and then I download the new FF.
archerJan 23rd 2010 10:55PM
i've done the same but i have seldom had this issue with past updates. perhaps you are unaware that many of your extensions, though disabled by the upgrade, can be made to work
install mr tech's toolkit, then right click on disabled extensions and select "make compatible". many will then be fine, but alas, some still may not.