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Firefox 3 Beta 4 Brings Lots Of Updates

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:12:28 +0000

The latest testing version of Firefox 3 brought along several hundred fixes and tweaks from the previous version released to the Web.

Mozilla’s ongoing quest to continually improve the web browsing experience hit another milestone. The Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 3 Beta 4 to the public.

As with previous beta versions, Mozilla urged people to understand this latest edition is for testing purposes and not general use. The sheer volume of updates between Beta 3 and Beta 4 should reinforce that idea:

Firefox 3 Beta 4 includes more than 900 enhancements from the previous beta, including drastic improvements to performance and memory usage, as well as fixes for stability, platform enhancements and user interface improvements. Many of these improvements were based on community feedback from the previous beta.

Among the updates comes a nod to Microsoft Vista, as a bit of good news in a sea of recent negative news about the operating system. Better Vista integration with Firefox takes advantage of native user interface widgets in the browser and in web forms, and uses Vista-specific icons, Mozilla said.

Speed and memory usage, regular concerns about Firefox, continue to receive attention from the developers. “Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3 Beta 4,” they said.

On the memory usage side, Mozilla cited the use of several new technologies to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox. “Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned,” said Mozilla.

Such improvements will be welcomed by Firefox’s millions of users. These updates will be necessary for Firefox to continue competing with Microsoft, which released Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 last week.

Mozilla’s Marketing Misfire

Janet Meiners — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 14:02:16 +0000

Mozilla, makers of the Firefox browser (my preferred browser due to the amazing plugins) wants to lure Internet Explorer users.

They have a new marketing campaign that hasn’t gone over so well. The theme of the campaign is Fight Against Boredom, suggesting that IE is a boring option.

Here’s a line to give you the idea of the 70s goofy feel of the campaign’s song (Rise Up! Rise Up!).

The world is such a great big place with so much to do. You can ski, eat green eggs, ride bikes, or start a coupe.

The jokes on the site they set up (which is unaccessible now) didn’t go over very well, especially the ones that talk about heart disease and cancer. They say, Firefox users are much hipper than Internet Explorer users, quoting fake stats.

Firefox users are:

21% less likely to be a sales representative or agent at their current place of business.

45% more likely to have gone on vacation in San Francisco within the last 2 years.

33% less likely to live with others suffering from high cholesterol.

24% less likely to live with others suffering from heart disease.

66% more likely to have viewed or listened to audio or video about politics or public affairs news within the last 30 day.

89% more likely to have purchased database software for work in the last year.

38% less likely to live with others suffering from breast cancer.

25% less likely to have breast cancer.

TechCrunch reported on the campaign, and Paul Kim, VP of Marketing at Mozilla, did some explaining. He said the site wasn’t reviewed or ready for public view:

This is Paul Kim, VP of marketing for Mozilla. I want to apologize to anyone who was upset or offended by some of the stats on the not yet final website for this campaign. The list Techcrunch referenced was posted without a final review by Mozilla and wasn’t intended to be published as is. We’re working right now to correct this on the site, which goes live in a final form later today.

Recently, Mozilla’s CEO Mitchell Baker stepped down as CEO and their chief operating officer John Lilly, Mozilla’s will be her replacement. Estimates put market share for Mozilla at about 15% and it’s been 10 years since launch. I pop in to read Baker’s blog from time to time and she details the changes there.

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SpaceTime Takes Web Browsing 3 Dimensional

Janet Meiners — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 17:16:41 +0000

The 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is in Las Vegas this week. Startups and big brands alike are launching their products. They’ve got a blogger’s lounge this year too.

According to CES, the average U.S household has 25 consumer electronic products in it and U.S. consumer electronics sales should exceed $160 billion in 2007.

SpaceTime is one of the startups at CES. They’re launching a new version of their 3-D web browsing tool – version 1.0. The free download is a lot like Mac users are used to using. You can interact with windows and your browser, along with perform visual web searching. The interface lets you more interact more intimately with content – like separating out images or videos from your browser.

The tool automatically launches top pages in your search result, but you must click on the image to launch the page. If you search for images it will display them as a stack of individual images matching the keywords, not the actual web site.

I’m a tab addict, and this seems much easier to navigate than scrolling through my tabs as a linear list. I don’t know what the speed tradeoffs are like but I keep imaging that it’s idea for web designers.

Here are some features of SpaceTime:

Navigator – Zoom, pan, and visually tab through your results.

Savable Spaces –Save 3-D arrangement of the Web pages and return to the same spot another day.

SpaceTime Zoom – When using Google or Yahoo! Search, the first few pages appear in a stack with your search terms already highlighted on each page. Use the zoom feature to jump to a close-up view of each instance.

Cinematic View –View YouTube’s most popular clips of the day right from SpaceTime’s interface which stacks the videos on a reel. It can maximize to full-screen and automatically pause when you change the channel.

If you’re at the show, SpaceTime will be demonstrating Version 1.0 at booth #36 at ShowStoppers in the Wynn Hotel today, Monday, January 7 at 6:00 p.m.

The optimal system for running SpaceTime is on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, with at least 512 MB of RAM and 128 MB of video RAM. I haven’t used it to test the speed but I’m sure that you’ll need broadband.

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