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Finding Pages Fast with Firefox 3

The Firefox 3 'awesome bar' generally does a good job of finding the web page you want when you start typing into it, writes Mike Gunderloy on WebWorkerDaily. He notes that it can be dramatically improved on, though. In his post 3 Ways to Find Pages Fast with Firefox 3 he covers Inquisitor, CyberSearch, and Ubiquity--Firefox extensions that can seriously enhance your ability to search. Check out the details.


Drag and DropZones: A Time-Saving Firefox Extension

Webware has an interesting post with a video up about a very useful Firefox extension called Drag and DropZones. It lets you perform quick, gesture-based searches across a huge array of search engines, and execute commands you would normally use your keyboard for with quick gestures. I've been trying it out, and it looks like a definite time-saver. Here's a screenshot-based tour of how this extensionﾠ works.


Competing With Microsoft Office, With a Dash of Help from Redmond

Here on OStatic, we've made the point many times that open source software often outdoes proprietary competitors. That said, if I see a good piece of freeware, or a fee-based commercial product, I'll still get it if it's best-of-breed. In this post, I'll flesh out a complete suite of software applications that can compete with and work seamlessly with the Microsoft Office suite, where a combination of open source titles, and one single $39.95 application will keep you totally competitive with--and compatible with--the Office suite.


Minefield: An Alpha Browser with Major Mojo

Kudos to Matt Asay for this post, which turned me on to a very fast and interesting browser for Windows, Mac and Linux users: Minefield. As it turns out, this browser--optimized for speed above all--comes from Mozilla, and is basically an offshoot of Firefox 3.1, which is in beta testing. It is indeed fast, but here are a few things you need to know before you download it.


Weekend Learning: Excellent, Free Online Resources From This Week

Some really remarkable resources for open source and web development skill improvement have shown up online this week, including Smashing Magazine's roundup of 50 Excellent AJAX Tutorials (and more)--currently a top performing story on Digg. There are also some great resources for Firefox users. In this post, I'll round up some of these good educational posts, and throw in some learning-oriented highlights from OStatic too.


Mozilla Delivers Firefox 3.1 Beta

Firefox logoMozilla has delivered the much-awaited first beta version of Firefox 3.1, which you can download here. There are also release notes covering what's new in this version, and a list of known issues. Mozilla notes that this beta version is for testing and community feedback, and not yet for use as a primary browser. I'm going to load it and start evaluating it within a virtualized environment. Here's what's new with version 3.1.


OStatic Buffer Overflow.....

A year after acquiring it, Yahoo! is finally using Zimbra.....

Must-have Firefox add-ons, plus plenty more.....

Evaluating the new Linux distros, and the new Python......

Top 10 open source productivity apps.....

OpenOffice.org 3.0 is an incremental improvement.....



Mozilla Labs Introduces Geode

Mozilla Labs recently offered a sneak peak and download of Geode. Geode is one of the first applications to use the new W3C geolocation specification API. It is currently available as a plug-in for Firefox 3 (and seems to only support Windows and Mac systems at this time). Mozilla Labs indicates it will likely be a new feature integrated in an upcoming browser release.

Geode uses web-based tracking, which tends to be faster than the traditional GPS geolocation methods. This would enable Firefox to sense the user's location and give information, for example, on local businesses, or quick access to local news.



Census Reveals the Top 20 Open Source Packages

The other day we reported findings from the Open Source Census--a global effort to track the number of installations of open source packages on computers. Among the top-level findings were that open source is seeing broad adoption in Europe and in finance. The census has also made available a list of the top 20 open source packages found in its scans of thousands of computers. Here are the packages that made the top 20 list.


FireTune Takes the Hassle Out of Optimizing Firefox


Have you ever typed about:config into Firefox's address bar? If you do, you'll get back a huge array of files that you can modify to configure and customize your Firefox installation. Some people like to play with these. I don't like to, and that's why I'm a big fan of FireTune. FireTune is a free, downloadable utility that automates the process of improving your Firefox setup. The application simply asks you to specify a few questions about your computer and connection speed, then automatically configures Firefox for optimal performance?in seconds. FireTune is newly updated for Firefox version 3. Here is a screenshot-driven guide to it.