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Download Firefox to Treat Red Pandas

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

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?

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

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.

Latest version of Firefox, 3.6, is faster, has new theme feature, Personas

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.

Mozilla Labs’ Raindrop project aims to cut through e-mail clutter

Mozilla-RaindropDo you get too much e-mail, whose volume has grown significantly in recent times due to social networking notifications from the likes of Facebook & Twitter?

How do you sort it out and quickly? Filters? Folders? Those methods may be doing the trick right now, but Mozilla Labs is working on a different approach – creating views of your messages (not necessarily e-mail only) and letting you interact with those conversations without having to switch applications.

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