firefox

Download Firefox to Treat Red Pandas

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Red Panda Mozilla has introduced a new campaign aimed to promote Firefox 4. The campaign streams cuteness from the Knoxville Zoo in the form of two female baby red pandas which are also called firefox (as pictured in this article) and by downloading Firefox 4 Beta you help earn “treats” for the red pandas including jungle gyms, grass flats and kung fu lessons.

With the web browser benchmarks showing Firefox 3 as not performing as well as Chrome, Safari and Opera, perhaps this is campaign that will bring some users back to Firefox… at least until staring at cute red pandas practicing kung-fu gets boring.

Update: apparently the Knoxville Zoo will NOT be teaching red pandas kung-fu.

Web Browsers Benchmarked

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October 2010 Browser Benchmark

Ars Technica performed a battery of tests with modern browsers. All tests were run on the latest stable and the recent nightly build of each browser.

The tests included SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark to measure JavaScript performance, V8 Benchmark Suite which is developed by Google, Nontroppo General Browser Load-Time Test and the Peacekeeper: The Browser Benchmark.

What’s the verdict? Chrome one again performs best with Opera in second. Safari barely beat Firefox for the number three spot and Internet Explorer continues to bring up the rear. In Ars Technica conclusion:

Chrome: it’s fast!

Chrome is the obvious winner in these tests. It has a such a significant lead that we doubt it’s going to be bumped out of the top spot anytime soon, especially if we take into consideration that the team wants to release a major version every six weeks. Still, competition in the browser market is only getting fiercer, so Chrome’s king-of-the-hill status may not last forever.

Mozilla Plugin Check – are your plugins up-to-date?

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Mozilla Firefox plug-ins extend the Firefox browser to power videos, animation, read PDFs and play games. While these plug-ins empower Firefox to do more, plug-ins are typically targeted and exploited by hackers to gain access to your system (usually to install bots). Users must keep plug-ins up-to-date, but unfortunately most people do not perform upgrades.

In the future, Mozilla will enable Firefox to update plug-ins for you. Until then, you should regularly check the link below (Mozilla’s Plug-in Checker) to stay safe.

We can check your plugins and stuff

Review: Mozilla Weave keeps your Firefox installations in sync

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mozilla weaveMozilla Labs has just released Weave 1.0 and (so far) it rocks for sync’ing up my Firefox installs on different computers. Weave is actually a lot more than just a synchronization tool, but that’s the first service to come out of the project.

So what’s the point of it? Let me paint you a picture: I’ve got desktop and laptop computers that I run Firefox on, and it’s a pain to have to re-implement, transfer and/or update settings, tabs, history, bookmarks, etc. whenever any of those changes on 1 or the other. Weave now takes care of that for me automatically.
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Latest version of Firefox, 3.6, is faster, has new theme feature, Personas

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mozilla firefox 3.6Mozilla has released the latest version of Firefox, 3.6, and it claims a 20% speed improvement over v3.5. I just installed and startup certainly seems a lot faster. I’ve also noticed an improvement in memory usage.

New features include improved security features like anti-phishing and anti-malware detection and warning, improved JavaScript performance, support for new CSS features like gradients.

But the feature that I particularly like is a new type of theme called Personas which you can preview and install without a restart of the browser. Just visit GetPersonas.com, browse the over 30,000 themes, then simply roll your mouse over a swatch to see your browser immediately take on that theme.

If you don’t already have Firefox, you can download it for PC, Mac or Linux from www.firefox.com.

Google’s Chrome 2 Web Browser – faster?

Networking & Internet, Software / By /

Google recently released version 2 of Chrome, their Web browser. Although not a major release, it incorporates new versions of WebKit, the browser engine, and V8, the JavaScript engine.

Two new features include Fullscreen mode (F11) and Auto-Fill for web forms.

As much as we like Chrome from a pure Web browser perspective, we’re not about to stop using Firefox. The sheer number of extensions that we now can’t live without is too much to let go.

The Read it Later Firefox extension

Networking & Internet, Software / By /

Sometimes I just want to turn Gizmos for Geeks into a cool productivity tools blog. Fear not readers, we won’t be doing that, but there really are so many cool software & Web tools being introduced or improved all the time.

Take for example, the Read it Later Firefox extension which helps out you news and info junkies. Ok, I’m definitely one of you! Right. So the RiT extension lets you quickly mark articles/URLs for later reading, even letting you simultaneously mark a bunch of open tabs. It also lets you mark articles in your favorite news reader and even sites like Digg. Perhaps the best feature may be the ability to sync your reading list across multiple browsers/computer.

The video sums up the features nicely in 2 mins:
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Google enters Web browser market with Chrome

Gizmo of the Day, Networking & Internet, Software / By /

Google sure knows how to light up the news sites and blogosphere – release a brand new Web browser! Called Chrome, it’s Google’s foray into a once-crowded market that is now dominated by just 2 players (at least on Windows) – Microsoft and Mozilla.

Everyone else has reported on and given their opinion, so why not another?! I did download and test out Chrome. I would have been disappointed if I was not impressed by at least one feature of a brand new Google product and the big G did not let me down.
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