Talking

Firefox 4.0 beta 2 just released yesterday.It built up a lot of improvements on the outline and enhanced the overall performance in order to face the competitions from the coming IE9 and Google Chrome.

The following long lists are the things done by the engineers in this latest version.

• Firefox 4 Beta 2 is available in 24 languages.
• Tabs are now on top by default on Windows and OSX - Linux will be changing when the theme has been modified to support the change.
• You can turn any tab into an "App Tab" by right-clicking on it and selecting "Make into App Tab" from the context menu.
• Web developers can animate content using CSS Transitions.
• Responsiveness and scrolling improvements from the new retained layers layout system.
• JavaScript speed improvements due to engine optimizations.
• Changes to how XPCOM components are registered in order to help startup time and process separation.
• See the complete changelist from the previous beta.

As well as these features from previous Firefox 4 Betas:

• You can search for and switch to already open tabs in the Smart Location Bar
• New Addons Manager and extension management API (UI will be changed before final release)
• Significant API improvements are available for JS-ctypes, a foreign function interface for extensions.
• The stop and reload buttons have been merged into a single button on Windows, Mac and Linux.
• The Bookmarks Toolbar has been replaced with a Bookmarks Button by default (you can switch it back if you’d like).
• Crash protection for Windows, Linux, and Mac when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins.
• CSS Transitions are partially supported.
• Full WebGL support is included but disabled by default at this time.
• Core Animation rendering model for plugins on Mac OS X. Plugins which also support this rendering model can now draw faster and more efficiently.
• Native support for the HD HTML5 WebM video format.
• An experimental Direct2D rendering backend is available on Windows, turned off by default.
• Web developers can use Websockets for a low complexity, low latency, bidirectional communications API.
• Web developers can update the URL field without reloading the page using HTML History APIs.
• More responsive page rendering using lazy frame construction.
• Link history lookup is done asynchronously to provide better responsiveness during pageload.
• CSS :visited selectors have been changed to block websites from being able to check a user’s browsing history.
• New HTML5 parser.
• Support for more HTML5 form controls.

Developers can find out about all the changes and new features at the Mozilla Developer Center.

However,what I like here is the new feature-App Tab.You can see how it works in my pics:

I always open Google Reader and Facebook when I’m surfing Internet.The normal tab occupies unnecessary spaces.Well,now I can just simply make a right click on the tab and select to ‘make into App Tab’ and it then is reduced to a lovely size.It’s nice,isn’t it?

The bad thing is most of my existing add-ons are not yet supported.I think the developers will catch their work up.I just hope it won’t be too long.

If you wanna try this new Firefox,please get it here and install it.You will have a fresh experience.

When I was in Malacca,I brought my laptop with me.So I could check emails and update Facebook on time.However,the hotel I stayed is without free usage of WIFI.I had to use my Google Nexus One as a modem connecting to my laptop to surf internet through DiGi’s network.

DiGi has a wide coverage of EDGE,the 2.75G network which is able to provide the downlink speed up to 144Kbps in my experience.However,it could not be suitable to load most websites fast because nowadays those fancy pages always embed with flash and pictures where the size is easily over 1MBytes,meaning that I have to wait at least 10 seconds for each page.I can’t imagine how I could watch a YouTube video or play some Facebook games by using such a wireless service.

I hope when I visit Malacca next time,I could enjoy 3G connection there.Do you hear me,DiGi?

Google throws out a new stuff to the public-Google Public DNS.Somebody may not know what DNS exactly is.Here’s the simple explanation:

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participants. Most importantly, it translates domain names meaningful to humans into the numerical (binary) identifiers associated with networking equipment for the purpose of locating and addressing these devices worldwide. An often used analogy to explain the Domain Name System is that it serves as the "phone book" for the Internet by translating human-friendly computer hostnames into IP addresses. For example, www.example.com translates to 208.77.188.166.(Wikipedia)

In the real world,every website/server will have an IP address.However,in order to easily access the site,we normally type in the domain name to visit it and the domain name server will translate it into that specific IP address.After all,we could get what we want to get.

Many ISPs will always provide some DNS service to their customers,even automatically configured.However,Google Public DNS could give more compared to other DNS service:

• Speed up your browsing experience.
• Improve your security.
• Get the results you expect with absolutely no redirection.

Google has a broader network all over the world.Thus,it will direct you the closest DNS server once you set Google Public DNS as your priority DNS.

To try it out:

• Configure your network settings to use the IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as your DNS servers or
• Read our configuration instructions.

I previously tried OpenDNS for some while.It is also an independent service provider with quite a lot of credits from the clients.But the DNS servers are mostly located in Europe and America,the users in Asia would have delay because of the geographic conditions.Google eliminates the issue since it has several DNS servers in Asia.

I have used Google Public DNS for 3 days.It works as well as what it says.I’m so happy to see that we are having more alternatives.Thumb up!

Firefox Beta 3.6 had come out for several weeks.In fact I had tried it when it firstly launched,but I don’t feel so comfortable on it because quite a lot of add-ons were not compatible and I even met some crashes in one-hour usage.

However,with the help of thousands of beta users,it has been going to run properly and most of functions could work well.Firefox also introduced Add-on Compatibility Reporter which could mention the author of add-ons for any compatibility issues.You could check up the details of the Beta of Firefox 3.6 / Gecko 1.9.2 introducing several new features for users to evaluate:

• (New in this update) A change to how third-party software integrates with Firefox to increase stability.
• (New in this update) The ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page load times.
• A mechanism to prevent incompatible software from crashing Firefox.
• Users can now change their browser’s appearance with a single click, with built in support for Personas.
• Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
• Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
• Support for the WOFF font format.
• Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
• Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.

I’m going to try that again soon.If you want to try it,please go here to download and install it.I hope you will like it too.

It’s 5 years for me to use Firefox too.I remembered that I just wanted to try it at that time and amazingly I’m never going to drop it since then.Compared to IE,Firefox is of better performance,rich facilities and more securities.Of course,now we have some other good browsers to choose such as Safari,Google Chrome and so on.Anyway,Firefox did all greatly and I do wish it could last long with all pros.

Happy Birthday,Firefox.