User Agents

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 is available

Today Firefox in version 3.5 has been released. It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. You can choose to get a localised version in more than 70 languages.

Firefox 3.5 has a huge number of additions and improvements for both users and web developers alike, including: robust new user privacy features; support for high quality open video and audio; a new, high performance JavaScript engine (and a host of other performance and speed improvements); downloadable fonts that will fundamentally change how we view typography and the web; powerful new developer features such as location aware browsing, canvas features, worker threads, native JSON, and media queries; and so much more. Firefox 3.5 is essentially an upgrade to the Web itself.

Source: Firefox 3.5 now available

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Google Chrome available for Linux and Mac OS X

Early builds of Chrome for Mac and Linux are available on Googles Chromium blog.

The blog post says the releases are only aimed at developers because they are incomplete, unpredictable and the software might crash.

Most of the features known for the Windows build are available which the exception of flash video, privacy settings and printing facilities. Google has promised that a beta release will be available in the foreseeable future.

There is also a version of the iron browser available which has no unique id and is not sending requests to Google search for faster search results.

Taskfox extends Firefox’ Awesome bar

If you ever wondered how mondern web browers could be improved watch this video and you’ll see!

Taskfox Prototype from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

I found this video at the end of an interesting article on The Future of Firefox: No Tabs, Built-In Ubiquity on the ReadWriteWeb.

Video of Chrome Experiments

Have you ever wonderer what your browser is capable of doing using just JavaScript? The website Chrome Experiments bundles a lot of interactive JavaScript experiments you can test right in your browser. See some of them for yourself in the following video.

Go to Chrome Experiments to test some of the JavaScript stuff yourself. And you don’t need the Chrome browser to run them.

Amazing Opera Face Gestures

Fresh from Opera labs come the Opera Face Gestures. Make gestures with your face and your head and your Opera browser will react. As easy as that. Too bad I have not seen this on April 1st…

Personas - Customize your Firefox

If the standard look and feel of your Firefox browser is too boring for you maybe you want to try the new Personas for Firefox. Personas is a free add-on just released from the Mozilla labs. It is a Mozilla Labs experiment. Just surf to getPersonas.com, download the free add-on, restart your browser and choose from a selection of totally different looking skins.

After the restart you’ll find a small fox icon in the lower left corner of your browser. Klick on it to open a menu from which you can choose skins by popularity, age, category and from the ones you recently tested. You can also easily go back to the standard look and feel which you are used to.

Personas are lightweight, easy-to-install and easy-to-change “skins” for your Firefox web browser.

Among the most popular skins are a California sunset, Yosemite, Niagara Falls, Hanami, Fireflies, Minefields and the Firefox Robot of the upcoming Firefox 3.5 which I chose. You can preview a new skin just by rolling over the menu entry. The skin changes almost instantly without selection, restarting or any other hassle. Great way to do themeing!

GNU IceCat formerly known as GNU IceWeasel is not IceWeasel

You want a complicated story? Here is one. The Firefox user agent has a logo that is in terms of the Debian project not free. So they put out a differently packaged version of Firefox with a new logo and name it IceWeasel. But that did not happen until the Mozilla foundation complained to the Debian project that they cannot use the name Firefox with a different logo. To make it really complicated there was a browser called GNU IceWeasel by the GNU Project. It was renamed to GNU IceCat in 2007 to avoid name conflicts with Debian’s IceWeasel. Pretty complicated, eh?

Find out more about GNU IceCat and the GNUzilla.

Newsflash: Songbird 1.1, Firefox 3.5, IE Windows 7, Firefox Fennec

Songbird 1.1

The final version of Songbird 1.1 is available for download. Songbird is an open-source customizable music player based on Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

Firefox 3.5

Rumors of a version jump for Firefox from 3.1 to 3.5 have been confirmed.

Beef about IE bundling

Google and Opera’s CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner demand that there is a choice of browsers even though Microsoft confirms there is an option to switch IE 8 off completely.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 3

Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 with native JSON support has been released last week.

Fennec

A first beta - the twelfth milestone - of Fennec a mobile browser from Mozilla has been released. As this is a very interesting user agent I will write a follow-up with detailed information.

If Browsers Were Women

Internet marketer Zee has posted a fun article with a woman a browser what he thinks a women would look like if it were a browser. Have a look!

Video Opera Fingertouch

Opera labs showcased a technology where its browser zooms in on mobile devices. User are likely to make less false decision with this improved input method.

Version jump from Firefox 3.1 to Firefox 3.5

German news source Golem.de reports (German) that the next release of Firefox might be numbered Firefox 3.5. They cite the Firefox3.1 StatusMeetings on 2009-03-04.

Need to do some testing to find any weirdness with 3.1 -> 3.5 version change.

The reason for the jump is the amount of changes. The next pre-release (beta) of Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 is scheduled for 12th of March 2009.