June 20th, 2008 §
Firefox 3 has gigantic improvements for Mac users, but they left out a few things that would have made it fit in better. Here are a few extensions I installed to make Firefox 3 on Mac OS X a little more Mac like.
- Fission – Combines the address bar and progress bar like Safari. I like this since it is easier to notice when a page finishes loading.
- firefox-mac-pdf – Ever wanted to view PDF’s in the browser like Safari? This extension is the first PDF viewer to integrate into Firefox on Macs (Adobe Reader works if your lucky and if you like bloat). It uses PDFKit (the part of OS X that handles PDF’s) and works just as slick/fast as Safari when it comes to handling PDF’s. For an early version, this works very well.
- Favicons on Firefox 3 for Mac – Mozilla for some reason does not like having favicons on the bookmarks toolbar for Mac versions of Firefox. This fixes it.
There are also themes for Firefox 3 that look more Safari like.
June 16th, 2008 §
Great tip on Lifehacker for how to add favicons to the bookmarks toolbar in Firefox 3 for Mac OS X.
One of few things I do not like in Mac versions of Firefox is the fact that there is no favicons on the bookmarks toolbar. I am a visual person, so having favicons on the bookmark toolbar really helps me pick out bookmarks quickly. This resolves that issue.
If your interested in voting for the bug in Bugzilla regarding this, the bug # is 348719.
May 18th, 2008 §
Apparently Bank of America just did some upgrades to their online banking web site. Thanks to Firefox 3, I feel even more secure now:
The site identification button now shows up green when I log into my online banking page. They also now use 256-bit encryption.
It will be much harder for Bank of America customers to by mistake log into a phishing site, especially if they use Firefox 3.
May 17th, 2008 §
The Firefox 3 updates keep on coming. After 5 beta’s, there is now Release Candidate 1 as well.
Firefox 3 is light years ahead of Firefox 2. I cannot begin to describe how numerous the improvements are, especially for Mac users. The awesome bar alone is worth the upgrade in my opinion, nevermind when you throw in the massive improvements in memory management and performance increases.
For a great review on Firefox 3, check out this article at Mozilla Links.
It completely and utterly leaves Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera in the dust. I seriously have fits when I am forced to use another web browser now.
March 31st, 2008 §
Back in 1998 I was a 10th grader who’s beloved web browser (Netscape) was open sourced to the Mozilla project. It was basically the first time I had heard of open source.
Ever since then I have maintained a huge interest in the Mozilla project. I remember the first day I switched from Internet Explorer to the Mozilla suite M14 builds, sometime in ~2000. I remember testing the first nightly builds of the Phoenix browser and immediately seeing its potential. That potential is now reality in Firefox, which is usually the first thing I install on any computer I use.
Well, Mozilla is having its 10th birthday today. What an amazing trip it has been.