Firefox Friday Five - "We miss Sebastian" edition

As Sebastian is still in Montenegro, I will be presenting you with today's Firefox Friday Five. I know you guys miss him, but fret not – he's due back around Tuesday, so next week's installment shall indubitably be British in style and flavour. For now, though, you're stuck with me -- so buckle up and enjoy the ride!

This week we've seen two pretty exciting releases from Mozilla, plus one aimed at developers, as well as a great add-on and a Greasemonkey script to round it all off. Read on for the details!

1. Firefox 4 Beta 2 hits the interwebs:

If you ask me, FF4 is beautiful, and Beta 2 brings another usability tweak to the table with the new App Tabs. Firefox is a bit behind the curve on this one, as Chrome had this feature for ages now, but still – it's nice to see that it's finally here. And as you shall see in the next item, Mozilla are way ahead of the curve with at least one FF4 feature:

2. Tab Candy Alpha is alive and kicking:

Now, this is some serious innovation right here. Usability guru Aza Raskin shines once more with a concept that takes the idea of "browser tabs" and extends it beyond all recognition. And it's not just theory, either: along with his original announcement, Raskin served an early Alpha build of Firefox with Tab Candy baked right in. The functionality isn't all there yet, but Raskin also offered a video showing what's in store for this feature:

3. KeeFox 0.8 released:

As you may know, I love KeePass, and I love Firefox. So obviously, I would be excited about an add-on that promises to marry the two. KeeFox has been around for a while now, and its developer, Chris Tomlinson, has just released the new 0.8 beta. While it does have several unresolved issues (clearly stated on the project page), it now lets you generate passwords right from within Firefox, limit its auto-fill options to one KeePass group (very happy about this feature), and a slew of other improvements. Chris tells me KeeFox development will continue, alebit with a short hiatus due to personal reasons.

4. Bespin Gallery announced:

I love text-editors, and Web-based text editors are always interesting, especially when they come from Mozilla. The Bespin project went through some pretty rocky times earlier this year, with its original developers departing Mozilla for Palm (but still contributing), and the whole thing morphed and got a completely different VIM-like UI, with no menu bar and an arcane-looking (if beautiful) command line.

And now, Mozilla introduced a new plugin gallery just for Bespin. It's aimed at developers who wish to roll their own versions of the editor, and offers ways to easily extend the editors functionality for your own specific installation, running on your own server. So while this isn't strictly Firefox, it does give us a glimpse as to Mozilla's ultimate vision of the Web as an application platform.

5. Featured user script: O'Reilly Safari Minimalist:

This is a lovely Greasemonkey script which should really get a bit of recognition. I use Safari Books Online quite often for reading tech books, and this little script strips all the crud from the interface, leaving you with just the text. So much easier to focus this way!

Well, that's it for this week's Firefox news – we'll be back next week!

Tags: bespin, beta, firefox, greasemonkey, keefox, oreilly