Considering the new Firefox update, and its market share for browser users, compared to Bing’s market share in regards to search users, it’s hard not to wonder if there are more people using Firefox than there are Bing searchers. Whatever the case, Firefox users no longer have to navigate to a search engine to query Twitter’s never-ending amount of content.

With a quick drop-down menu selection, those who update to Firefox 8, according to the Firefox blog, will have the capability to:

Twitter search in Firefox makes it easier to discover new topics, #hashtags and @usernames. Twitter search is currently available in English, Portuguese, Slovenian and Japanese versions of Firefox, with more languages to come in future releases.

The latest Firefox update is not just for Windows users either. The browser update has been made available to Mac users, Linux users and to Android owners. Unfortunately, however, it doesn’t appear as if the Twitter search feature is available for Android owners, as, “Twitter is now included as a search option in Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux.”

Mozilla pioneered WebGL and introduced it in Firefox earlier this year. WebGL is a new Web standard that allows websites and Web apps to display hardware-accelerated 3D graphics without third-party software. Firefox adds support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), which lets developers load WebGL textures from other domains in a secure way.

As well as better third-party app control. No longer will these apps be able to install themselves without the user’s permission. While more security is always a good thing, the main feature of Firefox 8 is the inclusion of a functional Twitter search.

When a query is entered, in this case, “Joe Paterno,” users are taken to the Twitter search results page of the query that was entered. While this may not be exactly groundbreaking in terms of execution, the fact that this search feature is part of the new Firefox can only be considered a good thing.

You can get the newest version of Firefox here.

Another neat feature of this Beta release is that if you share a computer with family or friends you can now each have a personalized Chrome experience, by letting each user sign into Chrome sync.

If you wish to obtain the new Beta release, the official Google Chrome blog states:

“To try it out, go to Options (Preferences on Mac), click Personal Stuff, and click “Add new user.” A fresh instance of Chrome will open, ready to be customized with its own set of apps, bookmarks, extensions, and other settings. A badge in the upper corner lets you know at a glance that this new Chrome browser belongs to you, and you can customize the name and badge as you like. Clicking this badge drops down a menu of all the users on that computer, so you can easily switch between them. In addition, each user can sign in to Chrome to access their own personalized Chrome across all their computers.

One thing to keep in mind is that this feature isn’t intended to secure your data against other people using your computer, since all it takes is a couple of clicks to switch between users. We want to provide this functionality as a quick and simple user interface convenience for people who are already sharing Chrome on the same computer today. To truly protect your data from being seen by others, please use the built-in user accounts in your operating system of choice.”

Personally, this is a pretty great update for anyone who shares a computer with someone else. Well done Chrome team.

Are you downloading the Beta version? Let us know.

What makes Firefox 4 Beta so special, compared to its earlier editions? Not only did Mozilla redesign the user interface they’ve also incorporated a ton of new features. Check out the list below from Mozilla’s release notes.

It should be noted that this is just a Beta preview, and some bugs will happen… as Mozilla wants to catch all errors now before the final product is released.

If you’ve downloaded Firefox Beta 4 – Let us know what you think about it.

Original Article: Feeling creative? Fan of Google’s Chrome browser? If your answer to either of these questions is yes, you might be interested to know that Google is hosting a global project in which it is asking fans to submit creative videos in which they create a Google Chrome icon.

Jason Toff from the Google Chrome team says the idea for the project came when the team itself was experimenting with using different objects to create the icon – like this cake for example:

What Google considers to be the best entries to this project, it will feature on Google and YouTube. "We know from past experience that users are the ones who come up with the coolest stuff. So with that, we now turn the challenge to YOU to make a video showing the formation of the Google Chrome icon in a big, unusual or creative way," says Toff. He tells me he likes the magnets one so far (video below):

You may recall that earlier this year, Google created its first television advertisement, and this was for Chrome. I don’t know if any of these designs will make it into an actual commercial or not, but I suspect the initiative itself is designed to generate buzz and draw awareness to Chrome. Not a bad viral campaign.

Participants have until July 22 to submit their videos. You can do so here, and while you’re there, you can also check out what other people have done. I’ll leave you with a few samples below. By the way, they should be between 15 and 60 seconds long.

The fact that Mozilla gives the community the tools necessary to customize almost any aspect of their web browser makes Firefox a popular browser. The ability to compile and package these customizations into easily distributable add-ons will likely keep the Firefox community thriving for ages to come.

Even though Mozilla Jetpack is still in its early stage, it already has a wealth of features, including support for popular external application interfaces such as Twitter and easy inline debugging support. With Jetpack’s new technology you can seamlessly incorporate new add-ons into Firefox during runtime without the need to restart the browser. Mozilla has also taken care of compatibility issues with back and future versions of Firefox. These two elements combined result in a non-interrupted online development experience.

A key aspect when developing any application, interface, or add-on is the ability to eliminate errors and bugs. For this reason Mozilla Labs has incorporated into Jetpack their free inline web development debugger, Firebug. Developers can simultaneously monitor, detect, debug, and fix any error in their HTML, CSS, or Javascript code by using Firebug.

As typical with most, if not all, Mozilla applications, Jetpack is open source and free for the public to download, manipulate, and compile. Jetpack still lacks decent security measures, so developers should be cautious. However, being that it’s open source, someone is apt to contribute to this aspect of Jetpack in the near future.
If you wish to add to the Mozilla community and begin using Mozilla Lab’s Jetpack to make your own add-ons for Firefox check out these links:

For demos and installation go to Jetpack’s main website at Mozilla Labs here.

To acquire the source code for Jetpack, visit this link.

If you encounter a bug while using Jetpack, you can report it here.

And finally, stop by Jetpack’s Google Group found here.

As reported in PC Advisor, Google Chrome’s blog announces the latest beta of Chrome. Google had dropped the beta tag back in December but it is back as well as the beta channel that is designed for feedback. No indication why that happened but they are Google after all and they can do what they want. The greatest change according to Google is its increase in speed.

“The best thing about this new beta is speed – it’s 25 percent faster on our V8 benchmark and 35 percent faster on the Sunspider benchmark than the current stable channel version (of Chrome) and almost twice as fast compared to our original beta version,” said Brian Rakowski, Google product manager.

Google’s philosophy is to give users the changes as they go rather than save them up for a big release. Other features to look for are autofill, autoscroll and the ability to drag tabs for side by side views.

While Google’s blog gave its point of view, the new IE 8 from Microsoft, which will be available at noon today, was reviewed in the WSJ today by Walter S. Mossberg. From a 30,000 foot fly over point of view, the review was that the new features are fantastic but the trouble is speed. On that note he did not let the new IE 8 unseat Mozilla as his favorite browser for Windows but it appears as if the latest version of the most widely used browser has made strides to be better.

Some of these features can’t be matched out of the box by its main rival browsers. For instance, related tabs are color-coded, the search field can show images along with text, you can get instant fly-out maps of place names in Web pages, and you can easily hide your tracks online from the prying eyes of advertisers.

The review is very detailed and looks at improvements in search functions, privacy features and compatibility, which appears to be pretty strong for the most part which will help ease the nerves of designers and developers who wonder what the impact may be on existing sites.

In a kind of informal survey tell us what browser you currently use and if it isn’t one of these two would you be willing to switch for any reason? Also, which is a bigger event today; the release of IE8 or the start of the NCAA tournament?

Comments

Essentially, it looks and acts a lot like Firefox. Here are a few screenshots from the new browser:

Pogo Start

Springboard – Home pages (multiple) start with your list of important pages to choose from.

Springboard

History – Pogo offers your search history visualized with screen shots from the websites you’ve visited.

History

Bookmarks – Visualized bookmarks with screen shots fro all of your bookmarks.

Bookmarks

New Cells – Instead of tabs, additional open windows are called cells.

New Cells

Pogo is a 3D web browser created in collaboration between AT&T’s business development group and Vizible. We weren’t particularly impressed when we reviewed it a few months ago, but a new version has since been released.

If you get your hands on it, feel free to let me know how you feel about it!

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Firefox fans kept the servers busy at Mozilla during the organization’s Download Day. The day aimed to deliver a world record number of downloads to Firefox’s global fans.

Mozilla CEO John Lilly noted a few of the highlights of the day on his blog. Though they recorded over 8.3 million downloads, Lilly expects that number to decrease a little as they review counts over the next few weeks.

Their network witnessed impressive traffic numbers, once some early issues caused by heavy demand were resolved. “At the peak, we were serving 17,000 downloads a minute (283 per second!), and saw sustained download rates in excess of 4,000/minute,” Lilly said.

Once the dust cleared, Firefox ended up with a 4 percent global share of the browser market. World leader Internet Explorer, via a cake delivered to Mozilla, congratulated the group on shipping the latest version of Firefox.

It’s after 5 pm EDT, and Firefox Download Day is well under way. The site listed over 1.3 million downloads so far, only a few short hours after opening the servers to the masses.

Like many tech projects, Firefox Download Day gave Mozilla’s engineers some last-minute worries. Eager downloaders slowed Mozilla Foundation servers to the point of inaccessibility for a brief period of time as the expected start of the record-download tracking approached.

“The outpouring of interest and enthusiasm around Firefox 3 has been overwhelming (literally!),” Melissa Shapiro said earlier at the Mozilla Blog.

Our download and installation of Firefox 3, replacing the most recent full version of Firefox 2, proceeded briskly. Some add-ons for the browser may need an update from their developers for compatibility with Firefox 3, as we discovered; we expect maintainers of the most actively developed add-ons to respond quickly.

One of those, the browser add-on StumbleUpon, should have a new version available in the next few days to function with Firefox 3.

“The Firefox 3 Smart Location Bar will allow StumbleUpon users to quickly access their past favorites by typing text into the location bar where the auto-complete function will begin to display matching Stumbles,” StumbleUpon said in a statement.