wow factor

Updated Web Developer, User Agent Switcher and site.

Chris Pederick has updated his excellent extensions for compatibility with Firefox 3 and given his site a nice update as well.

"Bizarrely (and rather embarrassingly) this is an almost identical post to my last post over 10 months ago. New versions of the Web Developer and User Agent Switcher extensions have been released. These releases are mainly to add support for the upcoming Firefox 3, but also contain a few other bug fixes."

Mozilla call's it Personas. After going through the built in offering, I'll stick with browser bling

Personalising your browser might be a great point of difference in the battle for market share however I look forward to some more usable themes that don't have me searching for basic icons amongst the snow flakes, waterfalls and foxes.

via: Read Write Web, also sporting a new design.

View some examples.. click here

Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 1 Release Notes

Firefox have launched this beta version to the wider community with the express purpose of having it tested. If your a browser tragic then get involved, but be warned, your extensions wont work. Out of the 30 odd extensions I have installed only Dom Inspector and Add New Tab worked.

This version integrates the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine and the rewrite of code is extensive. My first impressions is that its UI changes are subtle and the speed improvements are very noticeable

Installation:
I simply installed it in it’s own folder and am having no problems running this and Firefox 2.0.0.9 on my Mac.
It picked up my profile and bookmarks just fine. There is also a new Mac specific skin, which may excite some but I find too dark.

Bookmarking sees huge improvements. One example is Tags, where you can associate keywords with your bookmarks to sort them by topic

Firefox 3 Beta 1 is a developer preview release of Mozilla’s next generation Firefox browser and is being made available for testing purposes only

Important:

Over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation.

The convoluted CSS file for this site is a gzipped PHP file.

During a recent edit of the CSS, I accidentally deleted the PHP code from the top of the main CSS file.

The result was interesting....
Firefox 2.0.0.3 (Mac/Win) would not load the css.php file at all.
In all other modern browsers the css.php rendered as normal with the page fully styled.

Opera 9, IE7 and IE6 and Safari all ignored my stupidity while Mozilla based browsers refused to play or forgive.

For those that like to get in early, you can download Firefox 2.0 for your particular system here....Firefox 2.0If you wish to wait until the official announcement, then at some time today you can download it from..

Mozilla.com

Firefox 2 has officially launched and the supporting upgrade of the Mozilla site is a credit to them. Cleaner layouts persist throughout the site. Well done to all concerned.

Tip:
If you don't want the URL GO (green arrow) button, the way to remove it is type about:config in the URL bar and find browser.urlbar.hideGoButton.
The default setting is false. Simply toggle this to true to remove the GO button.
It cannot be dragged from the browser as in previous versions.

Enjoy