Day in, day out…

So Firefox 3.6 was released recently, it has some nice features.

In the list, there’s one feature addition that bothers me – default support for Personas. This is not exactly a new feature, it has been around as a Mozilla Labs project.

I usually stick with the default theme of any application I use. It is the one that developers have put most effort in. But just for kicks, I have tried out Personas in the past. Each time, it did not last more than a few hours before I uninstalled it.

In my opinion, Personas – no matter how popular, or highly rated they are – mess up the readability of Firefox window. I am sure it is a great distraction for people who spend most of their time playing with themes. But isn’t that why there are extensions/add-ons? If someone is so inclined, install the Personas add-on and you are all set to hurt your eyes!

Here, you be the judge:

Firefox with one of the popular Persona themes, hurts my eyes! (click to enlarge)

That is Firefox with one of the more popular Personas. And here is Firefox with it’s default theme:

Firefox with its default theme is much more readable… (click to enlarge)

Not sure about you, but I’d stick with the default theme.

But hey! no one is grabbing me by the collar and forcing me to use Personas. So it’s all good.

Only thing I am curious about is the thinking behind picking the Personas Labs project to be integrated into Firefox. Why not Prizm? Or Weave, that would be awesome! Or Ubiquity perhaps. All these add value to Firefox too. May be they all have the merit, but are not mature enough?

I hope Personas was not picked because Google Chrome has a developing themes ecosystem… (and bunch of folks claiming ‘Oh! look how cool my Chrome looks’).

Granted that Personas is still a work in progress (it does not theme buttons and icons, like actual themes do), and that it is a better way to implement themes. But in the end, I still maintain that Personas was great as an add-on, and it should have stayed that way.

With rants and opinions out of the way, what is your favorite Firefox 3.6 feature?

As you probably know from tons of different sources, Firefox 3.5 was released yesterday. For all the new features and security updates, I would highly recommend you to update to the latest release, if you already use an older version of Firefox. If you don’t use Firefox, this is as good as any other time to try it. So go grab a copy…

Upgrade the Web – Firefox 3.5 is released!

Like many of the past Firefox releases, I used this release (code named Shiretoko) from its pre-alpha stages. It has developed into a solid release.

Now that this release is out, there will be many users to use it and report bugs. For me, it is time to grab the latest nightly builds and start using them. Hopefully file some bugs to help with testing.

Plans for the next version of Firefox – called the Firefox.next – are already in the making.

Congratulations to the Firefox developers on yet another great release. Now back to work on the next one…

The requirement is simple:

It is desirable that when we use our browser on different computers, we want to feel at home on all of the computers. If we bookmark a website on one computer, other computers should also get it seamlessly. If we end up using a loaner computer, the bookmarks should be readily available online.

When I say feel at home, I have something very Mozilla Firefox specific in mind. I use Firefox’s smart URL bar, or what is called the AwesomeBar, extensively. When I start typing in the URL bar, I like to get suggestions based on my bookmarks and history. When I get the suggestions, I want them to be derived from the latest and the greatest of my bookmarks – bookmarks added on my current computer, or some other computer. Getting history from the other computer would be great too, but just bookmarks should be just fine.

So what are the options? From what I read, there are quite a few…

Weave

Weave from Mozilla Labs, to me, is the most promising candidate to solve the problem at hand. But it is far from ready for general consumption. Every new version (that comes out pretty frequently) seems to break something or the other – It is fixed very promptly too – but there is disruption. It is indeed in lab-mode.

Weave synchronizes variety of profile items

What I like about Weave is that it synchronizes almost your entire Firefox profile between multiple Firefox installations – Bookmarks, History, Tabs, Saved Passwords, may be even more in the future. The data is stored (by default) on Mozilla’s servers in an encrypted format, that only your can read. Privacy freaks concerned can setup their own servers, so their data stays with them. But then they must keep the server accessible from the internet.

All this is achieved using the UI elements that already exist in Firefox – namely, the star in the URL bar. It is very intuitive, and in most cases very seamless.

It is really neat.

The down side to weave, is that there is no web interface to the data on the server. So if I am on a loaner computer, or in an internet cafe, my bookmarks are not accessible to me. I cannot use my existing bookmarks. I cannot add a bookmark if I come across something useful.

Delicious

Delicious is one of the most widely used social bookmarking service. Delicious add-on for Firefox provides an additional bookmarking system where the bookmarks are stored on the Delicious website. The add-on provides handy buttons to manage the online bookmarks.

Delicious adds button that do things similar to Firefox’s star

Although the Delicious website says that the add-on enhances Firefox’s bookmarking system, in my opinion, it is more like an additional bookmarking system. The add-on adds UI elements to Firefox toolbar to interact with Delicious bookmarks. A tag button that functions exactly like the star in Firefox’s URL bar. A new window to add tags to the new bookmark, where you input almost the same information that you do in Firefox’s native interface. A bookmarks menu item, that is very similar to the native Firefox bookmarks menu. There’s just too much redundancy.

Since Delicious is mainly an online service, it has a very mature and efficient web interface. And because all your bookmarks are online, you can access them from any computer with an internet connection – whether it is your own or a loaner or one in an internet cafe.

Google Bookmarks

Google Bookmarks is a part of Google Web History. Like Delicious, the bookmarks are saved online and they can be accessed from any online computer.

Google Toolbar adds its own star

Google Bookmarks integrate well with the Google Toolbar for Firefox. Also like Delicious, the interface provided by the Google toolbar for bookmarking is exactly like Firefox’s own. The toolbar adds its own star, which is used to bookmark a website, or edit (add tags to) an existing bookmark.

Foxmarks A.K.A. Xmarks

Foxmarks which is now known as Xmarks is also a strong contender in this space. It has the goods of both online bookmarking services and native Firefox bookmark synchronizing. Xmarks provides an add-on for Firefox (in addition to Internet Explorer and Safari, which is an added bonus), that just synchronizes your bookmarks with an online storage on xmarks.com. They have a neat web interface to manage the online bookmarks. Any changes made online, or on any computer are automatically synchronized.

The missing link

Although Delicious and Google Bookmarks provide a usable interface with Firefox, there is one deficiency in both of them that is very significant to me (an AwesomeBar user). Bookmarks on Delicious or Google Bookmarks don’t become a part of Firefox Bookmarks, and hence are not accounted in the search algorithm used by the AwesomeBar. If I add a bookmark to either of the two services, it will not be suggested when I type something in the URL bar.

Conclusion

I love the fact that online bookmarks (Delicious/Google Bookmarks) are available from anywhere on the internet. However, no matter how much I try to get used to one of the two services, I miss that fact that online bookmark are not included in the AwesomeBar suggestions.

A web interface to manage Weave’s bookmarks online will be a welcome feature. Or If add-ons provided by online bookmark services somehow integrate their bookmarks with Firefox’s bookmarks, that would be cool too.

Until then, it will have to be an inconvenient combination of the two.

I have not used Xmarks long enough to form a solid opinion about it. I’ll just have to play around with it for a while.

Edit: Added Foxmarks/Xmarks as a viable alternative, after this post was first written.

Edit (05/12/2009): Well, looks like the Delicious add-on for Firefox just came a step closer to the way I like it. With its version 2.1.041 released yesterday (?) delicious bookmarks are now integrated with the AwesomeBar. In addition, if you start typing in the address bar with ??, AwesomeBar will show only Delicious bookmarks. If you start typing with >>, AwesomeBar will show Delicious tags. This is great! Now if it could just reuse Firefox’s native UI elements…

Since its Alphas, I’ve been comparing font rendering in official Firefox 3.0 Linux builds and the ones I used to compile myself. Fonts in the official builds were, and still are, very crudely rendered. Upon reading a little, I learned that this difference is due to the use of different version of Cairo, a graphics library that Firefox uses under the hood.

Using --enable-system-cairo option when building Firefox greatly improves the look of fonts. I used to compile my own nightly builds using this option, hoping that the official builds will move to using that option too, before the final 3.0 release.

I just tried the final release and found that it still does not use --enable-system-cairo option, and the fonts are still not neat.

Thankfully, I also noticed that Ubuntu’s Firefox 3.0 – that got updated today as well, does use --enable-system-cairo option. Now I don’t have to compile my own builds. I wish I had noticed this the first time I installed Hardy – the Firefox 3.0 beta that came with it probably used system Cairo too. But I am glad I noticed this, better late than never.

Here are a couple of screenshots that illustrate the difference:

Click on the image to view full size – The one on top is the Ubuntu build, using --enable-system-cairo option. The one a the bottom is the official Firefox build, not using that option. Notice how the fonts in the Ubuntu build are so much better than the fonts in the official Firefox build

Now, go download Firefox 3.0 while it’s hot. You don’t get to set a world record everyday!

Its official, Firefox 3.0 will be released on June 17^th, 2008.

Join more than a million others by pledging to download Firefox 3.0 on the day of release. Celebrate the Download Day by setting a world record. Click on the image below:

To see what to expect from the new version of Firefox, watch this screencast.

Cheers!

UPDATE (06/12/2008):

There’s an excellent post on dria.org that lists the new features in Firefox 3.0, it is called Field Guide to Firefox 3.

Support for Indic script in Mozilla Browsers on the Mac has so far been missing. But I got a pleasant surprise with the latest trunk builds of both Firefox and Camino. They both handle Indic Scripts pretty well. I am sure this is thanks to Gecko 1.9.

Here’s what I am talking about. The snapshot below shows rendering of Hindi version of Google News on Camino 1.5. It is mostly… well, question marks!

Following is the same page viewed with the trunk version of Camino. That’s more like it!

Like I mentioned, I saw this with trunk versions of both Firefox and Camino – with many websites using Indic script.

शुभ वाचन !! (Happy Reading… if there’s such a greeting )

I have been using Google Bookmarks for a while now. Needless to say, I like the Bookmarks button on the Google Toolbar. Although I don’t really care about most of the other functionality in the toolbar. So I got rid of it (via Customize)! With Firefox’s Bookmarks Toolbar not needed anymore, the browser window looks pretty clean!

I like this for now, may be until Places changes the bookmarks scene. I hope Google finds a way to seamlessly link Google Bookmarks with Places… that would be very useful.

Which reminds me of Browser Sync. I tried it, but quickly gave it up after I came across too many issues using it on different machines running different platforms. Another problem was that, at least at that point, there was no web access to manage Browser Sync data. You could only delete it! Google Bookmarks gives me greater control over the bookmarks database.

And what more, if need be, I can use Google Bookmarks with IE too! Well, for that matter, with any browser with access to http://www.google.com/bookmarks/

Like I said in my previous post, I’ve been playing around with Flock.

So far, the only really useful feature I’ve found is this blog posting tool – which could use a spell checker, by the way. The Flickr bar, the shared bookmarks are all good features but I did not end up using them a whole lot. Shared bookmarks don’t preserve collections – when I sync bookmarks, I still have to move new entries into appropriate collections. This may be a limitation posed by del.icio.us bookmark format. Whatever it may be, its no better than importing exported bookmarks between Firefox installations.

So, to me Flock seemed more like a dressed up Firefox – and the get up is not compelling enough. Flock seems to be heading in the right direction, so I will probably check back with Flock in near future to see how its developing, but for now, Firefox is still my default browser on both windows and Mac.