Firefox 3 codename Gran Paradiso will most likely leave alpha phase in September. The release of Gran Paradiso alpha 7 could be the last alpha version and I decided to take a look and see what we can expect in the new version. The first thing that I noticed when starting the new Firefox release was the incredible speed.

I decided to throw some speed tests towards Firefox 2.0.0.6, Internet Explorer 7, Opera 9.22 and Firefox Gran Paradiso Alpha 7 since this was more of a feeling than a proof that Firefox 3 - despite being an alpha version - is the fastest browser nowadays.

The webwait website was exactly what I needed. You can enter a url on that site and define how many times you would like to load that time. Webwait is then calculating the average speed that it took to access that website. The first time is always higher of course because the other tries use the cache to speed up the loading time.

continue reading "Gran Paradiso rocks the web"

There are not many features that the Internet Explorer posses that Firefox users have to be jealous about. The image toolbar which is the popup that appears when you hover the mouse over an image to be able to quickly access the most used image commands could be one of the features that you would like to see implemented in Firefox as well.

The Firefox extension Image Toolbar adds this functionality to Firefox giving users the following options when the mouse is hovered above an image: Save, Print, Copy, Info and Folder. While the first three are obvious the last two require some explanation. Info opens the dialog that displays information about the image while Folder opens the default download folder.

The extension can be customized. It is possible to remove any of the commands for instance. If you never print images you could remove that option. You can also define a minimum image size, the delay before the menu is shown and choose to automatically save the image instead of showing the download image dialog.

continue reading "Firefox Image Toolbar"

It seems like only a few days since Firefox was updated to version 2.0.0.5 but the ever busy development team had to release the new version earlier because of a recently discovered bug in the Windows version of Firefox. The new version is already available on the Mozilla homepage and the automatic update routine is also reporting version 2.0.0.6 as the latest version already.

The new version is fixing one critical and one moderate security vulnerability that I listed below for your convenience. Make sure you update to Firefox 2.0.0.6 as soon as possible.

MFSA 2007-27 Unescaped URIs passed to external programs
MFSA 2007-26 Privilege escalation through chrome-loaded about:blank windows

continue reading "Firefox 2.0.0.6 has been released"

Fichey finally offers a new approach for the crowded web 2.0 community by giving everyone access to the back catalogue of popular social news and bookmarking websites such as Digg, Delicious and Stumbleupon. This is just one approach of Fichey but the most important one.

A sweat little object is popping up in front when you visit Fichey and you can use that to take a look at all the sites that were popular at those websites in the past. Since Fichey is relatively new you can only access sites that were popular beginning with July the 6th of 2007.

Every site that was popular in the past is opened in the same browser tab which means that you browse one site at a time and can flip through them. It looks like Ajax was used to create the effect, looks pretty nice. Pretty good way to flip through many popular sites in a very short period of time.

continue reading "Fichey Digital Microfiche"

One of my readers Rico posted a link to the excellent Hyperwords extension for Firefox in the comments of my article about the Easy Gestures extension and I was heading out immediately to take a look and see if the extension was really that good as he claimed it to be. I know that many of my readers have some gems up their sleeves that they seldom share but when they do I’m often in for a surprise.

Hyperwords is giving you access to commands and searches that are able to interact with words on every page that can be accessed with Firefox. Just mark text on a website and the Hyperwords menu pops up automatically with a lot of choices such as translating the text, looking it up at various sites and maps, converting numbers or emailing it.

It is possible to change the default action that is required to make the Hyperwords menu appear which I would recommend. I sometimes mark text for others reasons which is why I changed it to appear only when I mark text and press F2 as well.

continue reading "Hyperwords a Firefox Extension"