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.

Firefox 3.6 comes out after 2 release candidates.The new Firefox is built on the Gecko 1.9.2 platform which is enhanced and providing some new features for the users:

Hurry up!Please click there to get the latest Firefox in order to enjoy a fresh experience on browsing the websites.I bet you will never regret.

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.

I just know that Internet Browser is still quite young.I had 12 years experience on computer and Internet Browsers only have 15-year history.

I think most of people use Internet Explorer at the beginning when they start to surf Internet because IE is integrated in a large number of PCs installing Microsoft Windows.And if you’re an Apple fan,you’d probably use Safari currently.However,the first Internet Browser is neither IE nor Safari.It was called Netscape which had been out of our eyes for long time.

More options here compare to 15 years ago.Now except IE and Safari,we also have Firefox,Opera,Google Chrome and so on.They all want to hit the No.1 seat belonging to IE for years and I do believe it could happen within a near future.I use Firefox always because it has better securities,less bugs,faster speed of loading websites and bulks of useful extensions.So I can’t give out any single reason to back to IE yet.

How do you think?Which browser(s) you prefer to use?