Gaining Transparency for FF3 on Vista
July 22, 2008

I know, its been awhile. I've been so busy lately that it isn't even funny. I've been learning Adobe Air, concentrating on graduating and just got done writing a little app to set my background from rss feeds (as well as an app to generate a wallpaper rss feed of my own). Nifty stuff.

That's not the point of this post though, thanks to Scott Hansellman's recent post on adding OpenSearch to your web-site, I discovered an awesome new addon for Mozilla FireFox. It's called Glasser and it does one spectacular thing; adds Vista transparency to the whole toolbar. Finally, FF3 is nicely integrated into Vista just like IE7 (and unlike Office 2007). It's listed as experimental, so watch out I guess - though I haven't had any issues with it.

Enjoy having FF3 blend in with Vista. :)

FireFox 3 Beta Pretty Neat
March 26, 2008

Daring Fireball's recent article on the FireFox 3 beta got me interested enough to give it a try. Wow, I'm glad I did - as its totally replaced FireFox 2 on my Macbook. For me, its main point above all else is the awesomeness of the default theme. I have dislike the way that the default FF2 (really, it is the FF1 default theme with a little icon work) theme held up to the newest wave of operating systems. FF3's theme is definitely a huge improvement.

Stability's definitely good, as I haven't had a single crash in the day or so that I've been using it. I'm also noticing helpful little features here and there, but like other's have said - there are no massive improvements. I'm happy enough - so... thanks for the awesome software!

Update - 2008-03-25

Ok, now that I've spent a bit more time with it I absolutely love it. Oh, that's right. I went there. The URI autocomplete box is revamped now to include titles and favicons which is an awesome feature, the file upload control is now revamped so that you no longer have to find the little "browse" button to pop the browse dialog and the <form> controls now finally use OS native widgets. Hearts!

WGA, Rebooting, and FireFox 2.0
July 17, 2006

So Windows Update rebooted my work computer last night. Apparently the WGA update that was released was so amazingly important that all of my long running processing tasks and file transfers should be killed so that my machine may reboot.

On the plus side, I discovered a new feature of the latest FireFox beta. If FireFox unexpectedly quits, it maintains a memory of the last layout, tab position, and loaded sites that you had and offers to restore. Quite nice, and will break me of the habit of bookmarking every interesting site that I only want to read once, but am afraid that my browser will crash on.

FireFox Beta 2.0, A Little Better
July 10, 2006

I downloaded the latest beta launch candidate for Mozilla FireFox 2.0 today. The new features are pretty nice but still minor. I certainly wouldn't say it counts as an entire major release number.

New Features

• Each tab has its own close button - you can now close any tab from anywhere.
• Better incorporation of RSS feeds - you can select a feed reader to feed a newly found RSS feed to. This is still not as nice as Flock's built-in feed reader that happily displays updates to you while you're browsing.
• Spell checking in app - A nice addition for us bloggers who spend a lot of time typing in little textareas.

All in all, these are some nice improvements. The close buttons on the tabs are much appreciated. I've frequently closed the wrong window while trying to rid myself of a different one, so this will be a definite plus.

I definitely wouldn't say that these improvements should warrant a version increase. Maybe there's more in the background that's been updated, so I probably should read the release notes before complaining. I'll keep you guys updated as I use it more.