Like many of us, you’re probably getting used to the much-improved version 3.5 of Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Of course, one of the primary reasons that many people use Firefox is the large ecosystem of useful extensions available for it. The speed of version 3.5 will automatically give you an efficiency boost if you’ve been using previous versions, but there is one Firefox extension that I highly recommend to speed many kinds of tasks up even more: Mouse Gestures. This is one of the few extensions that causes an eye-popping response in many new users. It’s compatible with 3.5 and easy to get started with, too.
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The number of useful online tools that help to sift through the masses of information posted to the Internet every minute for content worth reading is growing. In this post, I’ll discuss a good way of following how news in any particular area is developing, and a good way to keep track of what others are saying about content you put online.
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Many of us have been using the Release Candidate of Mozilla’s Firefox 3.5 browser, which is a major upgrade to previous versions. Now, Mozilla has released a third Release Candidate, available for download for Windows, the Mac and Linux. Mozilla also has a post up about the release, although there aren’t a lot of clear details as to what, exactly, is new.
Mozilla’s post says only that the updates in Release Candidate 3 are in response to “user feedback.” The organization intends to move quickly toward a final release of Firefox Version 3.5. In all likelihood, the differences between this version and RC2 consist of bug and/or security fixes.
I’ve been steadily using both the betas and the Release Candidates of Firefox 3.5, and it’s both speedy and substantially more feature-rich. It’s stable, too. If you’re already running a Firefox 3.5 beta or Release Candidate version, you can obtain an update to RC3 by selecting “Check for Updates” from the “Help” menu. Here are the official Release Notes for more information.
Mozilla Labs today released a preview version of the next major version of its Ubiquity extension for Firefox: Ubiquity 0.5, downloadable here. I’ve been steadily using the beta releases of it, and Mozilla has ambitious plans to make Ubiquity a standard part of Firefox. It’s a command-line tool, and while that may cause some to roll their eyes at the idea of typing commands in the age of the graphical user interface, it’s actually very useful. The new preview version has many major additions, including localization features.
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Netbooks have become a hugely popular hardware category, and I’ve been using them for more than a year, including trying many of the new models. Making compromises is part of the design of netbooks, so it’s important to evaluate them in a hands-on way when you go to buy one. In this post, you’ll find five tips for better netbook shopping.
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Lately, many people have been experimenting with Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine offering, which we covered here. I agree with the many people who are noting improvements that need to arrive in Bing, such as blog searching and more varied search results for basic keywords. However, not everyone realizes that Bing is built on a powerful search engine technology from an open source-focused company that Microsoft acquired last year: Powerset. As I covered in this post, the Powerset technology underlying Bing introduces some powerful features that many people aren’t trying. You may find them useful.
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Mozilla released a new initiative this week for users of the Firefox browser, called Collections, with an introduction and an explanatory video available here. We covered it on the OStatic blog, and it looks like anyone who works with Firefox and appreciates how extensions add to the power of the browser can get a lot out of Collections. They are essentially sets of useful extensions, usually associated with each other according to similarities in what they do.
Among other things, Collections let you click one link to put a whole set of your favorite Firefox extensions on a new installation of the browser. You can subscribe to and install someone else’s Collection of extensions, or you can post your own Collection. You can also save your set of favorite extensions as a Collection, and then when you install a new instance of Firefox on any device, add all your favorites at once.
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