My Life

So today I decided to install the new Beta of Firefox 3.5, Beta 99.

The new Firefox 3.5 Beta 99 has dramatic speed improvements of around 250% according to Betanews. For me in the first couple of minutes I noticed the speed increase in loading Facebook. Facebook is a very JavaScript intensive website and with the new Firefox 3.5, Mozilla has upgraded Firefox’s TraceMonkey engine which is Firefox’s JavaScript engine.

More and more websites are utilising JavaScript to create a better user experience especially Web 2.0 websites like Facebook, MySpace and pretty much all Google products

This is why it has become critically important for browsers to create/tweak their JavaScript rendering engines to load these scripts as fast as possible.

In the current browser war, Google Chrome 3.* and Safari 4 are the leaders of speed as can be seen in the diagram below.

Courtesy Betanews.com

For me personally there’s no going past Firefox. There’s just no competition. Yes it’s a bit slower than Chrome and Safari but the add-ons that Firefox provides makes life that much easier. I mean really any feature you can find on any browser will be made into an add-on for Firefox in a couple of days to a week max. You just can’t beat that.

The add-ons help make everyday tasks that much easier to manager and make Firefox that much better.

I’ll be running the new Beta at work to see how the new Firefox is coming along. If you’re a fan of Firefox and don’t mind running a Beta I suggest you try out the new Beta here.

Thanks,

Marat

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Recently Mozilla the makers of Firefox have released a new add-on which allows you to synchronise Firefox on multiple computers.

Weave as it’s called runs in the background of Firefox and will upload your data (encrypted) to Mozilla’s secure servers where it can be accessed, retrieved and synchronised again with your other computers. So far Weave is capable of synchronising Bookmarks, Browsing History, Cookies, Saved Passwords, Tabs and Saved Form Data. In future releases you’ll be able to synchronise Extensions, Themes, Search Plugins and Microformats too.

Currently there is a fantastic extension which I use called Foxmarks Bookmarks Synchronizer which will upload your bookmarks to their server for synchronisation with your multiple computers, but that’s about as far as it goes.

Weave is currently in beta testing so don’t expect a problem free service. Personally I’ve been waiting for an extension like this for years and Mozilla has finally delivered one. If you’ve ever wanted to synchronise multiple computers running Firefox then look no further than Weave.

Thanks,

Marat

Image via Wikipedia

Tomorrow the 17th of June is the day when you can help the millions of Firefox users set a new world record for the most software downloads in 24 hours.

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Well since I’ve been gone for such a long time I thought I’d make a new post and include a few new little scripts/extensions/tweaks I’ve found and started using for some time now.

First off I must note that in order to utilise any of the following scripts/extensions/tweaks you must use Mozilla Firefox. I haven’t said this enough but please by god don’t use Internet Explorer and just switch for Firefox already

Ok now that we’ve got that out of the way lets begin.

Greasemonkey (Wikipedia)

Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to most HTML-based web pages. As the Greasemonkey scripts are persistent, the changes made to the web pages are executed every time the page is opened, making them effectively permanent for the user running the script. ~ Wikipedia

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