Opera users who have already been working with beta versions of the release will not find many (if any) changes to previous builds in this final versions. That’s however different for Opera users who have been waiting for the final version release before making the switch.

Opera 10.10 has Opera Unite build in. Opera Unite is probably the biggest change to previous Opera versions as it makes it possible to use the Opera web browser as a web server to use it for things like file sharing, photo hosting, media streaming, file synchronization or chatting. More than 30 applications for Opera Unite are already available and Opera is getting the community involved by running a competition for the best Opera Unite application where developers can win prices.

Opera 10.10 does make use of Opera Turbo as well, a compression based data transfer option to retrieve websites faster which works quite well for users with slow Internet connection. Opera 10.10 final can be downloaded from the main Opera website where it is available for download for all supported operating systems.

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Sort Tabs offers another option. The Firefox add-on adds the option to sort all open tabs in the Firefox web browser. The tab sorting option is added to the right-click menu when right-clicking the tabbar. The option provided is to sort the tabs by url. There is unfortunately no option to change the sorting criteria to another value like page title or age.

This will sort all open tabs in Firefox. It did even move locked tabs (locked with App Tabs) to their appropriate place based on their url. It could therefor also affect other add-ons that lock tabs in the Firefox tabbar.

The only other options that are provided by the Sort Tabs add-on are to close blank tabs and duplicate tabs when the tabs are sorted by the add-on. It is also possible to reverse the sort order in the options.

Sort Tabs is available for download at the Mozilla Firefox website. It is compatible with all Firefox 3.x versions.

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Martin has posted his concerns about Chrome OS in his insightful “Google Chrome OS: My concerns“. I am in full accord with Martins’ take on cloud computing. But instead of discussing my feelings on the cloud or why we need another OS, I thought it would be beneficial to take a look at a running instance of the Google Chrome OS. I will preface this by saying the OS is in the very early stages of development. But even with the early stages it is quite obvious where this fledgling operating system is heading.

Getting and “installing”

In case you are interested in trying Chrome OS out you can with the help of either VirtualBox or VMware. Since we’ve covered VirtualBox here on Ghacks (read my article “Install VirtualBox with USB Support” to learn how to install VirtualBox) I will show you how to get Chrome running with that application.

After you have VirtualBox up and running you will need to download an image file to use. I have tried both the Chrome OS VirtualBox image and the VMware image on VirtualBox. The results of the VirtualBox image was a black screen that wouldn’t boot. The VMware image, however, was able to successfully boot. So it is my recommendation that you hop over to the Google Chrome page on Gdgt and download the VMware image. You will have to register on the site in order to get to the downloads page.

The download is just over 300 MB and will come in zip form. After you unzip the file you will have a vmdk file ready to use. What you will need to do is move that file to your VirtualBox hard disk directory with the command:

mv *vmdk ~/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/

When that file is properly located you can then create a new virtual machine using that image as your hard disk.

What you get

Figure 1

When Chrome OS boots (and it does so fairly quickly) you will be at a login prompt. It shouldn’t surprise you to find out the login/password is your GMail username/password credentials. As you can see, in Figure 1, your Google Chrome OS experience will very closely resemble the experience you have in Google Chrome – the browser.

But what else can you do? So far not much. I have read about application panels, but it seems as if you have to have a google.com login to experience them. I am, sadly enough, only the holder of a gmail.com login so I can not witness, first hand, some of the other features of the OS. Without having that login there is so little to the OS, in its current state, that it seems nothing more than a web browser running without an apparent operating system (which I believe is the point).

One of the few features of the OS I have managed to find is the ability to pin a page to a tab. What this effectively does is allow you to create a tab dedicated to a page (or Google application). For example: If you use Calendar, Mail, and Documents frequently you could pin each of these tools to their own tabs so that, in order to use a tool, you only have to click that that tools’ tab.

It should be pretty obvious what the intention of the Google Chrome OS is – a foolproof, web-based, single minded operating system who’s experience will only be as good as the applications available to it. This type of operating system seems as if it wants to take the metaphor of the mobile OS and put it square in the middle of your desktop. But with the way the web experience is growing vs. the computing habits of the average user – it makes perfect sense. You have a stripped down OS that can do everything you need to do without having anything on the periphery to confuse or confound the user.

“Features”

Figure 2

After playing around with the OS I have found a few features in place that are usable. You can add a compact navigation bar (see Figure 2). By default this bar (text area to the left in Figure 2) is not there. You have to click on the Options menu and select “Compact Nav Bar” for this to appear. But where is the Options menu? Take a look in Figure 2. The downward-pointing arrow in the far right corner is clicked in order to reveal the Options. You will be surprised to see that this menu is very similar to the Google Chrome Options menu.

As I mentioned earlier, you can pin a page to a tab. Say you use Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Documents frequently. Instead of creating bookmarks for these pages, all you need to do is open that page up, right click the tab, and select Pin Tab. This will create a tab for that page (or App if you will). Now, as Google Chrome OS is very much in the early stages, these pinned tabs will disappear upon reboot.

Final thoughts

It’s only a start, but the Google Chrome OS has all of the underpinnings of something that could have remarkable impact on a very specific application. I wouldn’t necessarily suggest using this early release, but when it hits beta, it will certainly be worth a try.

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No Color is basically an on and off switch for colors and image backgrounds on websites. The developer mentioned that the Firefox user had to drag and drop the icon into one of the toolbars of the web browser after installation; This was not necessary on a Firefox 3.6 test system. The icon to switch the design and layout of a website was already linked in the status bar of the browser.

A click on the button will remove the colors and the image background of the page. The Ghacks homepage looks the following after clicking on the icon in the status bar:

The settings of the add-on contain an option to remove the icon from the status bar and place it in the View menu instead. No Color works extremely well on pages that use irritating colors or background images that make it harder to impossible to access the actual contents of the website. The add-on is available at the Mozilla Firefox website where it can be downloaded. It is compatible with all Firefox 3 versions.

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Microsoft has now confirmed that they started working on Internet Explorer 9 and it seems that they have big plans for this browser. Three demo videos have been released by Channel 9 that show some of the Internet Explorer 9 developers showcasing some of the improvements that they already build into the web browser. The Sunspider Javascript benchmark comparison looks very interesting as the new Internet Explorer 9 JavaScript engine closes the gap to Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 to about 100 ms.

Standards and Interoperability

JavaScript performance:

Surfing On The GPU

The most interesting changes that have been announced so far:

• New Javascript engine
• GPU enhanced page rendering
• Better interoperability and web standards support

It is interesting that Microsoft is giving the public a chance to view the progress that they are making. They already changed their strategy during the Windows 7 development phase where they created blogs, videos and other means of showcasing the development progress and features to the public.

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Even worse was the fact that Firefox users were not able to manage these components at all as they would not be displayed in the add-on’s and plugin’s section of the web browser. This meant that Firefox users were not able to disable them if they encountered incompatibilities. But the Mozilla developers themselves were also unable to react on incompatible components or those that would pose a security risk to Firefox users. You might remember that they did block a Microsoft plugin globally after a security vulnerability was disclosed but that was a plugin, not something that was added to the components directory.

From Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 on the components directory is locked for third parties. This means that third party programs that were using this way to add their functionality to Firefox are not working anymore since they are blocked by the web browser. Only Mozilla components will from this web browser version on be allowed to use the components directory.

Neowin and others have reported about this but got their facts wrong as they linked this stability and security measure to the Microsoft silent install incident a while ago. Microsoft back then installed two plugins without the user’s consent, something that other software companies like Apple do as well. Microsoft’s bad luck was that a security vulnerability was disclosed shortly thereafter which made the Mozilla developers block the plugin globally for all Firefox users.

The components directory is a subdirectory of the Firefox installation directory.

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# (NEW) Changes to how we allow third party software to integrate with Firefox in order to prevent crashes.
# (NEW) The ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page load times.

Firefox users who are interested in upgrading to this latest beta version should read the known compatibility issues which are listed in the release notes to ensure that Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 will run properly on their system. Updates are available for all supported operating systems and languages. The easiest way to upgrade is to check for a new version from within Firefox by going to the Help > Check for Updates menu. Another option is to visit the official beta page to download the version of the web browser from there.

As usual this new beta version breaks a few add-ons which need to be forced to be compatible with the Nightly Tester Tools.

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The second option is a script to automatically reload a website periodically. And one of these scripts is the Greasemonkey script Auto F5 which can automatically reload websites.

Auto Reload can be activated with the keyboard shortcut [Shift t]. This will bring up the configuration menu where the web user can configure the automatic reload on the active website. Configurable settings include the reload interval with the default being 5 minutes, a random value that is added to the timeout and the following options that require more explanation:

• The option “Ignore everything after these symbols in URL” is a little bit difficult to explain: if there are session id´s in the URL the timeout would only work for this session, but if one wants this page to be refreshed in every session one can enter separators that determine sessions and other things. Another example would be that one wants to store a refresh value for a whole site with its subfolders etc.. Therefor one could enter the “/” as a separator.
• “Include the separators in the URL saved” as an additional option for the separators: imagine one wants to have a timeout for all subfolders of /topics/21456/ (discussion of this script) and puts it in the list of separators. Then the URL saved by this script would be http://userscripts.org/ which may not be what one wants, because the main page is to have its own timeout value. Then this option should be activated so the URL is http://userscripts.org/topics/21456/ which is different to http://userscripts.org/, so it can be refreshed independently.
• The “Hide menu”-option is to hide the menu when one clicks somewhere that is not the menu.
• The “Prolong timeouts”-option is to prevent an unintentional page reload, while working on that page.
• Option to relaod all pages with standard timeout when no timeout is set for that page. What else to say? Ok this option is like a wildcard. If checked it reloads every single page (!) with default timeout, unless an individual timeout is setup for that page.

Most users can keep the default settings except for the page reload timeout which might be to high in certain situations. The script will automatically deactivate the hotkey in web forms. Users who want to use the automatic refresh on pages with web forms need to click outside of the web form before the keyboard shortcut becomes active.

Auto F5 Reload is available at the script’s Userscript page. The web browser needs to be restarted after downloading and installing the script.

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The changelog of this new version lists several bug fixes in the interface, core, Opera Mail, Opera Unite and some more that are operating system specific. The full changelog is available at the blog post announcing this lucky Friday the 13th edition.

The release candidate comes with Opera Link, Opera Unite and Opera Turbo. All of these features can be activated in the left corner of the status bar of the Opera browser. Opera Link can be used to synchronized bookmarks, notes, speed dial settings and other information. Opera Unite to use the web browser as a web server and Opera Turbo to speed up page loading and connection by using compression.

All available versions can be downloaded from the Opera website. Watch out for Jason, though..

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Google two days ago made an announcement over at the Chromium Blog where they showcased part of their vision to make the process faster, their answer: SPDY, “an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web”.

SPDY is “designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression”. Initial tests in a “lab-environment” have shown speed increases of up to 55% over standard connections while downloading pages from the top 25 websites.

The SPDY project defines and implements an application-layer protocol for the web which greatly reduces latency. The high-level goals for SPDY are:

• To target a 50% reduction in page load time. Our preliminary results have come close to this target (see below).
• To minimize deployment complexity. SPDY uses TCP as the underlying transport layer, so requires no changes to existing networking infrastructure.
• To avoid the need for any changes to content by website authors. The only changes required to support SPDY are in the client user agent and web server applications.
• To bring together like-minded parties interested in exploring protocols as a way of solving the latency problem. We hope to develop this new protocol in partnership with the open-source community and industry specialists.

A whitepaper goes into further detail. Users who are interested in the project should start there and follow the discussion over at the Chromium blog.

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There are other options to save a website into only one file. One of these options is to convert the website into a pdf document, another the Mozilla Archive Format add-on for Firefox. The Mozilla Archive Format can be used to save websites either as MHTML (MHT) files supported by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or MAFF multi-page archives.

The functionality is automatically integrated into the Firefox web browser after installation of the add-on. The fastest way to save a website is to press the [Ctrl S] keyboard shortcut which will open the Save As dialog window. Among the available choices are both the MAFF and MHTML format.

The differences between the two formats are the following: MAFF uses zip compression to save one or multiple websites into an archive. This ensures better compatibility and accessibility even on computer systems that do not have access to the add-on as it is still possible to browse and extract the date with any compression software supporting zip files. The MHTML format on the other hand is not compressed, can only save one website per file and is only working with a limited number of web browsers. It is however better integrated into Internet Explorer and could be the choice of the user if Internet Explorer is the target web browser.

The add-on will save the following additional information with each save:

• The original location the page was saved from. This normally matches what is displayed in the address bar of the browser.
• The date and time of the save operation.
• The title of the page, if present.
• The character set in effect at the time the page was saved. If the character set was changed manually using the View » Character Encoding menu item of Firefox, the custom choice is remembered. This allows the document to be displayed correctly when it is reopened from the archive, even if it contains internationalized characters.

The add-on can also be used to convert previously saved websites (e.g. with Firefox’s default Save As function) so that they are better accessible from then on. Mozilla Archive Format is available for download at the Mozilla Firefox website for all Firefox 3.0 to 3.5.x browsers. It can be forced to be compatible with Firefox 3.6.

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It improves on three major points and one of them is better stability for third-party plug-ins. Good to see Apple doing that.

Tags: 4.0.4, apple, safari, software update

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Interested users can check out the list of changes in the release over at Bugzilla sorted by severity of the fix.

Firefox 3.6 beta 2 is available for download at the official Mozilla Firefox beta download page. It is available there for all supported operating systems and languages. Users who are already running an earlier version of Firefox 3.6 can also perform an update check in the Help menu to initiate the download and installation of the latest beta version directly from within the web browser.

The release notes are posted below:

What’s New in Firefox 3.6 Beta (revision 2)

Firefox 3.6 Beta is built on Mozilla’s Gecko 1.9.2 web rendering platform, which has been under development for several months and contains many improvements for web developers, Add-on developers and users. This version is also faster and more responsive than previous versions, and has been optimized to run on small device operating systems such as Windows CE and Maemo.

* More than 190 bug fixes from the last beta to improve performance, stability, security and features.
* This beta is available in more than 45 languages – get your local version.
* Users can now change their browser’s appearance with a single click, with built in support for Personas.
* Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
* Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
* Support for the WOFF font format.
* Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
* Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.

Have you been trying out Firefox 3.6 already? If so, what is your impression so far?

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I make use of core add-ons that are installed all the time and temporary add-ons that I only install when I need them. Two examples for temporary add-ons are the excellent web development add-on Firebug and the multi-site video downloader Video Download Helper.

I also have to say that I’m running the latest version of Firefox 3.6 and not the latest stable version of Firefox 3.5x. Many of the add-ons had to be forced to be compatible with the Nightly Tester Tools add-on. They do work perfectly though afterwards.

• App Tabs – I reviewed the add-on yesterday and really like it. Tabs can be pinned and minimized on the left side of the Firefox tabbar. This is great for websites and services that are open all the time.
• Bug489729 – This prevents Firefox from opening a new window if a tab gets dragged accidentally in the web browser. Some users do not have a problem with this at all while others have to cope with this behavior regularly.
• Greasemonkey – Userscripts can be very useful in many occasions. There are some great ones out there that really improve the web surfing experience.
• Last Pass – I switched to Last Pass after using the build in Firefox password manager for a long time. Last Pass offers a lot of additional features including a secure password generator, form profile manager to automatically fill web forms, automatically log into websites, web access to all passwords.
• Multi Links – If you regularly work on websites where lots of links are posted that you all need or want to open then Multi Links is for you. You can draw a rectangle around an area on the website. Every link in that rectangle will be opened once the user lets go of the right mouse button. Excellent for forums, link lists or blog posts.
• Nightly Tester Tools – Most add-ons have not been updated by their developers yet to be compatible with the Firefox 3.6x branch. This tool makes them compatible with this version. It will be uninstalled once all developers have updated their add-ons.
• No Redirect – If you hate being redirected by your ISP to a search page whenever you mistype an url then this is for your.
• NoScript – One of the two Firefox add-ons that I consider most important (the other is Last Pass). No Script will block all scripts from being executed on a website on the first visit. This increases the security of the web browser and computer system as most exploits and attacks make use of scripts to do so.
• SeoQuake – Useful for webmasters. SeoQuake can display various SEO related information about websites including their Pagerank, links, Alexa rank and more.
• Tiny Menu – I like the Firefox header to be as small as possible so that the actual website makes use of most of the screen estate in the web browser. Tiny Men compresses the menu into one menu entry which can then be merged with the address bar so that only one bar is shown at the top of the web browser.
• Operetta Theme – I ran the default Firefox theme for most of the time. But then I discovered the Operetta theme which brings the design of Opera 10 to Firefox. It looks fabulous but only works with Firefox 3.6x versions.

And that’s it. Not a lot of add-ons if you consider that some Ghacks readers use 70+ add-ons.

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The basic idea of App Tabs is to offer Firefox users a way to pin selected web services and websites to the tabbar of the web browser making them available always in the same spot. The idea works perfectly for websites that do not require back and forward navigation like Gmail or Google Docs but also for any other website or service that the user accesses all the time.

App Tabs pins selected tabs to the left side of the tabbar in Firefox. The tabs are minimized so that only the favicon of the website or service is displayed. This saves space in the tabbar and is usually appreciated by most users.

The new version of the App Tabs add-on adds comes with the following features:

• App tabs can be saved across sessions! (default)
• App tabs can be merged when closing a window. (default)
• App tabs can be protected from being closed individually.
• If you have Tabberwocky installed, App Tabs will automatically also lock app tabs that you create. This feature can of course be disabled by going to about:config and setting extensions.apptabs.lock to false.

Tabs can be converted into app tabs by ctrl-clicking them in the Firefox tabbar. App Tabs is currently compatible with all versions of Firefox 3.5x to 3.7x. The download is available at the Firefox add-on’s website.

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The reason for doing this is simple: cash. ISPs earn money if you come to those search pages and use them to find what you are looking for. More often than not those search pages are not helpful at all. Here is why. Most of the time users know where they want to go if they mistype a url, say ghackss.net instead of ghacks.net. All that they would need to do to fix the error is by editing the url.

The page that the provider displays on the other hand uses a different url structure leaving the user with the only valid option to enter the url again in the address bar of the web browser. It would be possible to edit the url of the new page as well as it usually contains the entered domain name as a search term somewhere at the end.

Users with Internet Service Providers that redirect DNS errors have a few choices. Some ISPs have a page where the behavior can be changed manually. A second alternative would be to switch DNS servers. Again, some ISPs offer DNS servers that do not take part in those redirects but it is also viable to switch to open DNS server providers that do not redirect DNS errors.

The third option comes in the form of the No Redirect add-on for the Firefox web browser. The add-on is only suited for advanced users as it requires basic knowledge of regular expression to configure new Internet Service Providers. It comes with a few pre-configured including Verizon, Rogers and Earthlink but if the ISP is not among them it would be necessary to add the search page to the list of available ones. This is not as difficulty as it sounds though as it is possible to simply copy and edit the regular expression of the already included service providers and websites.

If the ISP is added properly the default “problem loading page” or “not found” page will be displayed instead of the redirected search page of the ISP. The main benefit of this is that it is now easy to edit the url that has been entered to visit the desired website.

No Redirect not only takes care of Internet Service Provider redirects but also to stop so called smart error pages. Smart error pages are used by some websites instead of the usual 404 error pages when a page cannot be found. You might have seen those at Microsoft.com for example where Microsoft displays all kind of “did you mean” information instead of an error message.

The final option – one which I was not able to get working – is the ability to always preview shortened urls. If anyone gets this working let us know in the comments.

NoRedirect is an interesting add-on for users who are using the Firefox web browser and are experiencing DNS error redirects or smart error pages that they do not want to see.

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And that’s what the developer did. The userscript changes several key elements on the website. Its main features are options to customize the script display on the website and the option to add scripts and authors to a blacklist so that they will no longer be displayed when browsing the website.

The default changes include an increase in the amount of scripts that are displayed per page (triple the default amount), and options to install or blacklist any script right from that page without visiting the script’s profile page first. A trashcan icon is also placed next to each userscript in the script table listings to add it to the blacklist.

The left side contains a link to the settings of the userscript which provide access to additional options. This includes removing rows of the table layout (Hide ‘Rating’ Column, Hide ‘Posts’ Column, Hide ‘Fans’ Column, Hide ‘Installs’ Column, Hide ‘Last Updated’ Column, Hide ‘Votes’ Column), add scripts based on title or description to the blacklist or to change various author and script related blacklisting settings.

Because it’s your userscripts.org can be downloaded from the userscripts website.

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The release notes are – as usual – not up yet and the fixed bugs list at Bugzilla shows only four fixes in this latest version. One of the bugs that has been fixed was rated critical on the other hand with the other three rated as normal.

The description of the release on the Mozilla website states that it is a “short-cycle security and sustained engineering release to fix several top crashing bugs”. In other words a stability update for the web browser. The Firefox release schedule which we posted a few days ago indicates that the next version of the web browser (Firefox 3.5.6) will be released about a month from now on December 15.

We have uploaded the US-English version of Firefox 3.5.5:

Mac
Windows
Linux

Cautious users might want to wait until the official release announcement is public to update their browser from the official source.

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The experimental add-on is a bare-bone add-on that currently comes without any means to modify settings. It adds a new icon to the Firefox status bar after installation which, when clicked on, will ask the user to pick a directory where the images from the active website should be saved to.

It will then start to download all images that are displayed on the website. It will also process all images that are linked from the active website. This means that it can download images from pages where the images are displayed as thumbnails with the original sizes linked from those thumbnails. It fails however if the links are html pages that contain the original image (like Flickr handles it for example).

The add-on works extremely well if the original images are linked on the active page. It does fail on the other hand if that is not the case. It will for instance download only thumbnail images at Flickr but the original images at Google Images search. It will also always download all images which includes thumbnail images and other images used on the website.

The add-on needs settings where the user can change this behavior. It would for instance make sense to add a size and file type filter to the program so that small images and those of a certain type are not downloaded automatically. Firefox users who want to try out the batch image downloader can visit the add-on’s profile page at the Mozilla Firefox website to download and install it.

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Chromium users who want to install a userscript simply visit the website where the userscript is offered, e.g. userscripts.org, and click on the install link offered there.

The process after clicking on the link is similar to the process of installing extensions in the Google browser. It begins with a warning at the bottom of the screen that explains that extensions can be dangerous. It gives the user the choice to continue or discard. The installation dialog will appear if the user selects the continue option. Here it is again possible to install the extension or to cancel the process.

Installed userscripts will appear in the extensions manager of the web browser from where they can be disabled, uninstalled or reloaded.

Support for this new userscript behavior is only provided in the latest Chromium builds with the promise that it will soon be added to the Google Chrome web browser as well. The only thing left do to for the Google Chrome developers is to release a public version of the web browser with this new feature set (extensions and userscripts) enabled.

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