On November 15, 2011, Mozilla announced, the Electrolysis project (e10s) will be placed on hold for the foreseeable future. What exactly is e10s? It is a lot of things that improve the performance, security and even stability of Firefox. The first part of e10s was back with Firefox 3.6.4 (May 2010) with Out Of Process Plugins (OOPP). OOPP introduced the plugin container, which allowed plugins such as Flash, QuickTime, etc to run in their own process away from that of Firefox. OOPP prevented a crashing plugin from taking the entire browser down with it. Also part of the current e10s…
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As mentioned last month, Mozilla is dropping XUL (eXtensible User interface Language, an XML grammar used by Mozilla to define user interfaces for Firefox and Thunderbird) in favor of using Android’s own Native user interface. This move was to increase performance and handling of Firefox on Android devices. Mozilla has now announced “Flash is now a supported plugin in forthcoming native Firefox for Android.” This despite the fact that Adobe announced on November 9th, 2011 it is discontinuing Flash development on mobile platforms. To clarify though, by “forthcoming native Firefox for Android” Mozilla means Firefox for Android 11 (release date:…
Just Released Firefox 9 Beta 2 – November 18th Coming Soon Firefox 8.0.1 – Week of November 21st December 20th Firefox 3.6.25 Firefox 9 Final Release Firefox 9 for Android Final Release Firefox 10 Beta (10.0b1)* Firefox 11 Aurora (10.0a2)* Future Releases January 31st Firefox 3.6.26 Firefox 10 Final Release Firefox 10 for Android Final Release Firefox 11 Beta (11.0b1)* Firefox 12 Aurora (12.0a2)* * As part of the new Rapid Release Schedule,dates listed for Aurora and Beta builds reflect when the code merge is set to begin. The actual release to that particular channel may vary by several days….
Firefox 9.0 Beta 2 has been pushed to the Beta Channel. Beta 1 users can update via Help > About Firefox…
Bad_Attitude commented about the Starting with a Fresh Profile post. They mentioned that they move their Greasemonkey and Stylish scripts as well. I am not really certain what percentage of Firefox users use Greasemonkey and/or Stylish scripts and didn’t even think about porting those over. I do use many Greasemonkey scripts and may be one or two Stylish scripts. So, I’ve added directions on how to move over your Greasemonkey and/or Stylish scripts. In the Starting Over section I’ve added a new step which involved installing and using the eCleaner add-on prior to installing new add-ons. Since users are porting…
Bug 701875 was created a few days ago to address a major issue with Windows and Gecko 2.0 (Firefox 4.0+/Thunderbird 5.0+). omni.jar is a core file for Gecko 2.0 versions of Firefox and Thunderbird. From MDN: Firefox 4 and Thunderbird 3.3 achieve performance improvements by moving many of their internal parts from being standalone files or sets of JAR files into just one JAR file called omni.jar; this reduces the amount of I/O needed to load the application. This issue is no fault of Mozilla’s rather Microsoft Windows. It seems the Window’s System Restore does not backup .jar files. Trying…
First off, by faster we do not mean frequency, but rather how fast the update installs on your machine. Ehsan Akhgari has posted an article on Future of Firefox, Updating Firefox in the Background. In this article, Ehsan explains how the current Firefox update process works and what is being done to improve this process. In order to update itself, Firefox first starts to download an update in the background. When the update is downloaded, Firefox stages it in a directory ready to be applied. The next time that Firefox is about to start up, it checks out the staging…
While Tab Utilities has a lot of stuff to offer, the only feature I really needed was to have the ability to Faviconize a tab. As B. Moore pointed out, there is add-on that does just that, FaviconizeTab. For those who want their links to open in a new tab to the far right instead of to the right of the pinned tabs or the current tab go into about:config, filter for browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent and double-click to change to False. This add-on works with Firefox 4.0 and newer (Firefox 3.6 did not support App Tabs) and is about 10 KB in…
We’ve made it easier to get to us on Facebook now. We can now be found at facebook.com/ffextensionguru. We are also trying to add more content such as the recent poll about App Tabs to go along with the posts earlier today about this often unknown or misused feature in Firefox 4 and newer.
Back when Firefox 4.0 rolled out in March one of the (many) new features was a little something called App Tabs. This was something borrowed from Chrome and even we didn’t really understand the correct use of this feature when we wrote about it in the Firefox 4 Quick Guide. Of course at this point, it really doesn’t matter what you are using an App Tab for as their behavior won’t change until Firefox 9 is released in December. As reported earlier, in Firefox 9 the new ‘Don’t Load Tabs’ option is going to exclude App Tabs starting in Firefox…