Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation, has released a draft version of the Mozilla Manifesto, a declaration of principles and ways the Mozilla project as a whole follows and the goals it pursues. Part of the Mozilla Manifesto are 10 Principles that Mozilla “…believes are critical for the Internet to continue to benefit the public good as well as commercial aspects of life.” I am not going to list or discuss all 10 of the principles. However, #5 really stood out: “Individuals must have the ability to shape their own experiences on the Internet.” I strongly believe…

For some odd reason there was a Gecko 1.9/Grand Paradiso meeting on Tuesday (2007/02/13). In the meeting notes there is a brief mention that the Fx 3 developers are targeting (still have some bugs to work out) to have Places in place for the Alpha 3 release due out sometime next month. Permalink

[Part 1][Part 2][Part 3][Part 3.5][Part 4][Part 4.5] This is part 3 of my multi-part series on the Firefox Add-ons Overhaul. At the bottom of the Part 2 entry I had added this update: Update: The “preview” site is a work in progress and has actually been up (and down) for several weeks. The current extension list is NOT all inclusive, more may be added prior to the final release. Since this post, the preview site has been updated and nearly all the extensions I had mentioned prior as being removed/missing are now included in the preview site. They have also…

[digg=http://digg.com/software/CoLT_Copying_a_Link_as_Link] Back in October I touched briefly on my favorite and by far most used extension, CoLT (Copy Link Text). Since then I have found myself using it even more and have even taken advantage of the custom styles option. In the beginning I used CoLT mainly for copying entire (Text AND Links) HTML links. All I had to do was right-click (no need to highlight) the link I wanted to copy and selected from the context menu, ‘Copy Link Text & Locations As’ followed by ‘HTML Link’ from the sub menu. The extension automatically generated the HTML code for…

[Part 1][Part 2][Part 3][Part 3.5][Part 4][Part 4.5] As I mentioned Saturday, Mozilla is overhauling the Firefox Add-ons site. Earlier today Mozilla had made available a preview of the new and (not) improved Firefox Add-ons site. Besides removing a huge chunk of add-ons such as Clear Cache Button, CacheViewer, SeachLoad Options, Stylish, CoLT, Infolister, Linky, AJAX Yahoo! Mail, DisableBackspaceNavigation, Restarter, Smiley Xtra, Spellbound, Splash, Stop Autoplay, TinyURL Creator, Update Channel Changer and WeatherBug to name a few, I’ve noticed these changes thus far: URL format for the extensions has changed because of the multi-language support (English, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Korean, French…

[Part 1][Part 2][Part 3][Part 3.5][Part 4][Part 4.5] The Firefox Add-ons site, particularly the extensions side is undergoing a major overhaul this weekend. “Mozilla Corp. will relaunch its popular Firefox add-on site Monday by culling the several thousand extensions listed for its open-source browser to just a couple of hundred. Rather than list all the available Firefox and Thunderbird extensions — Shaver estimated that there are approximately 2,000 available now — the site will drop marginal add-ons, as well as those no longer maintained by their creator or not updated for the browsers and e-mail clients now in use. A couple…

With the release of Firefox 3.0a2/Gecko 1.9a2 earlier this week, there has been a common question, “So what new features come with this milestone? ” The short answer: not much. The long answer is best summed up by Percy from Mozilla Links: “The Mozilla project has released the second alpha of Gran Paradiso. Like Alpha 1 it is not much about Firefox but a testing vehicle for a large number of changes to the underlying Gecko rendering engine. Some important changes have occurred that affect the rendering of partially downloaded content (XML and web pages as well) and the calculation…

Over on Go Firefox!, an interesting question was posted: Which uses less system resources (memory)? My theory is using tabs would use less resources then having the same sites opened in separate windows. My reasoning is each window has to load the entire browser interface, not just the page content. So, I did a little experiment. First using Firefox 2.0.0.1 with a clean profile (no extensions, no plug-ins and default theme) and imported my bookmarks from another profile. For the first test, I opened Firefox with the clean profile and choose 5 sites and opened each one in its own…