Firefox 3 Beta 5 Announced

The Firefox 3/Gecko 1.9 development team has decided there needs to be a Beta 5 release of Firefox 3.

…based on the number of blockers remaining. This additional beta will ensure that changes which may affect website compatibility and changes which affect the user experience will get exposure to a wider audience for feedback and regression testing.

The string freeze is expect this Friday, March 7th with a code freeze on March 18th. They say Beta 5 will be the last milestone for string changes. No word as of yet on a release date for Beta 5, especially given Beta 4 hasn’t even been released yet.

Source: Mozilla Developer News

This content was originally posted on http://fffacts.blogspot.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

Week Update 2008-03-03

Here’s an overview of this week’s Update Meeting:

• Fx 2.0.0.13
  • Purposed Release Schedule:

    • Code freeze: March 7
    • Builds start: March 10
    • QA starts: March 11
    • Release to beta channel: March 18
    • Final Release: March 25

• Firefox 3 Beta 4

  • Awesomebar
    

    • Real multi-word searching
    • Adaptive learning

  • Download Manager
    

    • Much improved search, multi-word, match on all data available

  • Visual Refresh
    

    • New Mac rev
    • Separate Vista and XP themes for Windows users
    • More Linux (as always!)

  • Still coming soon (landed and backed out)
    

    • Save Link As.. filename fixes
    • JSON backup (Ts hit)

  • 114 hard blockers left, working on load balancing and driving number down this week, Places is the current “winner” but they have lots of help.

• Gecko 1.9 Beta 4 - No Report
• Lightning/Sunbird (Calendar Project) - No Report

• TBird 1.5.0.14 - No Report

• TBird 2.0.0.12 - Released: February 26th

• TBird 3 - No Report

Complete meeting notes.

Here’s an overview of this week’s Update Meeting:

• Fx 2.0.0.13
  • Purposed Release Schedule:

    • Code freeze: March 7
    • Builds start: March 10
    • QA starts: March 11
    • Release to beta channel: March 18
    • Final Release: March 25

• Firefox 3 Beta 4

  • Awesomebar
    

    • Real multi-word searching
    • Adaptive learning

  • Download Manager
    

    • Much improved search, multi-word, match on all data available

  • Visual Refresh
    

    • New Mac rev
    • Separate Vista and XP themes for Windows users
    • More Linux (as always!)

  • Still coming soon (landed and backed out)
    

    • Save Link As.. filename fixes
    • JSON backup (Ts hit)

  • 114 hard blockers left, working on load balancing and driving number down this week, Places is the current “winner” but they have lots of help.

• Gecko 1.9 Beta 4 - No Report
• Lightning/Sunbird (Calendar Project) - No Report

• TBird 1.5.0.14 - No Report

• TBird 2.0.0.12 - Released: February 26th

• TBird 3 - No Report

Complete meeting notes.

This content was originally posted on http://fffacts.blogspot.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

Canadian Firefoxen

Neko, bottom left and Su lin, top.
Photograph by: Rick MacWilliam/Edmonton Journal

More Photos

News Source: David Ascher

Tip: Transitioning From Netscape 9 to Fx 2

With the recent announcement from AOL that they will end support for Netscape in February, many loyal Netscape users will be looking for a new browser. Since Netscape 9 is based off of Firefox 2 with a few extensions built-in, it would seem moving to Firefox 2 would be the logical choice. However once users Get Firefox, they are going to discover that the social networking features that came with Netscape 9 are not included. While it is not too difficult to get these features installed in Firefox 2, locating them on addons.mozilla.org (AMO) isn’t as easy. The Guru has made this part a lot easier. Back in March, shortly after the time Netscape 9 was announced, the Netscape Add-ons Team registered on AMO and posted the Netscape theme and the 4 standard extensions for Firefox 2. These can be obtained here and include:

• Netstripe- Netscape Navigator 9’s default theme, packaged for Firefox.
• Propeller Friends’ Activity Sidebar - The Friends’ Activity Sidebar (FAS) extension helps you keep tabs on what stories your Propeller friends are submitting, commenting, and voting on.
• Propeller News - Displays the latest news stories from Propeller in a top-level News menu and sidebar.
• Propeller Sitemail Notifier - The Propeller Sitemail Notifier extension adds a button (shown above in the preview image) to your toolbar that indicates when you have new sitemail messages at Propeller.
• Propeller Tracker - Follow the latest news, votes, and comments on the news at Propeller with this auto-updating sidebar.

So, what about your Netscape bookmarks? Firefox will not automatically pull your bookmarks over from Netscape. However, it only takes a couple minutes to manually bring them over:

1. In Netscape 9 go to the Bookmarks Menu and select ‘Organize Bookmarks…’
2. A new Bookmarks Manager window will pop-up, go to the File Menu and select ‘Export Bookmarks…’
3. Select HTML (standard) from the list
4. Choose an easy to find location such as the Desktop to save the bookmarks.html file and click ‘Save’
5. Close any open Netscape 9 Windows
6. In Firefox 2 go to the Bookmarks Menu and select ‘Organize Bookmarks…’
7. A new Bookmarks Manager window will pop-up, go to the File Menu and select ‘Import…’
8. Select From File and click ‘Next >’
9. Locate the Bookmarks.html file you saved from Step 4 and click ‘Open’
10. All your bookmarks from Netscape have been imported into Firefox 2. Close the Bookmarks Manager window

Hopefully this guide will make your transition from Netscape 9 to Firefox 2 a little smoother.

Review: Organize Search Engines

One of the nice features with Firefox is allowing you to add multiple search engines to your search bar. Since the introduction of this feature, more and more sites have added this functionality. As a result some users are bound to have a lot of search engines in their list. This is good and bad. Good in that you have plenty of search engines to choose from when you want to search; bad if you have so many search engines your drop down practically goes off the screen and you have to hunt down the search engine you wanted to use. Organize Search Engines solves this problem by allowing you to create folders (like you do for your bookmarks). Once you install the extension, simply go to your search bar and select from the drop-down ‘Manage Search Engines…‘ A new widow titled Manage Search Engine List will open an interface very similar to that of the Organize Bookmarks.

Keep in mind the Organize Search Engines extension is more designed for those ‘power users’ who have a lot of search engines. For the casual Firefox users with only a few search engines this extension is not very practical. I can confirm it plays well with SearchLoad Options extension and the developer has a list of other search related extensions that this does work with. However there may be some search related extensions that are not compatible with this extension. Should you run into an issue, you are urged to e-mail the developer with this information.

Organize Search Engines works with Firefox 2.0.0.X up through 3.0b3pre and is about 74K.

News Source: Learn Firefox