Tag: EXPERIMENTAL

Engineering Director of Mozilla, Rob Sayre, has detailed the upcoming changes to the Firefox release schedule. The most notable change is a shift away from feature-driven releases to a fixed six-week schedule-driven release pattern. Instead of major releases every 12 to 18 months, Firefox will shift to a four-channel system, just like Google's Chrome browser. The nightly channel ...

So much for Firefox 4 already being feature-frozen! It now looks as though several additional changes may land before the final release of Firefox 4 lands in early 2011. Among them: tabs in the title bar. As with Google Chrome, your tabs will only move to the topmost area of the window when maximized. The feature has yet to be delivered to the Firefox 4 nightly builds, but you can download ...

Those of you who use Google Chrome on a Mac will soon have a handy option added to your browser of choice. It's called 'confirm to quit', and it does exactly what you'd expect. Upon activating the confirmation, Chrome will display a prompt if you press Command+Q -- which you'll then need to hold for another second and a half to actually quit. It's handy for those times when you meant to tap ...

Just days ago, I wrote about an upcoming change Google had planned for the about:labs page. The goal: to make the page less inviting and clarify the fact that experimental features listed on the page could very well cause users problems. Today, the change has landed in Chromium and will no doubt be pushed to Canary shortly. Now called about:flags, the page sports the trefoil (internationally ...

Bleeding-edge Chrome users -- especially those using Macs -- have at least one very good reason to like Chrome's recently-added about:labs page. First and foremost, it provides an easier way to enable and disable features that were previously buried behind command line switches. In a posting on the Chromium-dev board, Google's Ben Goodger has some encouraging news for about:labs fans. Goodger ...

With our Web browsers becoming more and more like an OS -- or actually becoming an OS as with Chrome -- it's not surprising to see developers turning their eye toward features which provide a desktop-like experience. Over at Mozilla, they've been working away at TabCandy -- which offers a whole new way to manage your Firefox tabs. TabCandy is a bit like a full-featured virtual desktop manager ...

Dropbox is an awesome sync application, and one which gets a lot of love from techy types. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems and the 2GB of free cloud storage is enough room to handle all kinds of useful and important files you need to be able to access from anywhere. Until now, one knock against Dropbox was the limited choice you had with your Dropbox folder. You could choose where ...

Skype may warn you that their experimental versions are potentially unstable and even ugly, but they do have some exciting features that haven't come to the mainstream releases of the app yet. Skype's known for its voice and video chat capabilities, but the experimental version of Skype for Mac adds indexed search to Skype's underrated text chat feature. You should back up your Skype user ...

One of the things that makes Firefox special is the fact that you can install thousands of plugins that add features to the web browser or change its behavior. But some of the available add-ons haven't been thoroughly tested. Although many will work just fine, there's a chance that installing these experimental add-ons could cause problems. In the past, Mozilla has made it difficult to ...

I don't know about you, but I've gotten so used to the Beta label in Gmail that I don't really take it seriously anymore. Sure, Gmail is still a work in progress, but it's been pretty reliable with just a few hours of downtime over the last few years. But there's beta, and then there's Gmail Labs, which is a collection of admittedly experimental add-ons and tweaks for Google's email service. The ...