Switching Firefox update channels

After Mozilla's announcement of switching to an accelerated development process, Firefox on mozilla-central will be forked to aurora channel. Going ahead Firefox builds will be available on nightly, aurora, beta and release channels. There is no straight forward way to switch the update channel in the current nightly builds, but you can achieve this by editing about:config on the latest nightly builds.

Steps to enable channel switching option in Firefox:

•  In address bar type in about:config and hit enter.
• Right-click the parameter listing and select New > String from the options
• Enter app.update.desiredChannel and give the new parameter the value release, beta or aurora.
• open the Help > About Minefield menu. you will see the option to change the channel

Mozilla's revamped development process

Inspired by the success of Google Chrome's success Mozilla drafted a new development process (schedule-driven) for its Firefox browser. As per the draft Firefox we will see frequent releases with lesser features.

More details here http://people.mozilla.com/~sayrer/2011/temp/process.html

Firefox 2011 roadmap

Mozilla planning to ship 4 releases this year (2011 Firefox Roadmap here). Looks like Mozilla is feeling the pressure from Google Chrome's smaller release cycles. One of the Firefox's greatest strengths is its firefox add-on (extension) community. Every major release of Firefox calls for an upgrade of the firefox release version in the add-on's manifest file(which is a new version of the add-on), shorter release cycles calls for regular add-on update which is an overhead to add-on developers and AMO reviewers. I am very eager to see how Mozilla will be handling this.

Firefox is the top browser in Europe

Web analytic firm statcounter announced that FireFox overtook Microsoft's Internet explorer in Europe.

 checkout the announcement.
http://gs.statcounter.com/press/firefox-overtakes-internet-explorer-in-europe-in-browser-wars

Google's body browser

Google's new innovative service "body browser". This experiment will allow you to navigate through human body in 3D. You require a browser with a webGL support, currently webGL is supported only in the beta versions of the leading browsers. body browser homepage suggests users to download chrome beta. Even though a link to khronos.org is provided in the same page which lists all the browsers with webGL support. Is it a ploy to lure more users to adopt google chrome?

Happy birthday FireFox

Today FireFox turns 6.

FireFox 4 beta faster than Chrome

  For the first time javascript engine in Firefox 4 beta 8 builds clocked faster then google chrome's V8 engine. Mozilla’s “Are We fast Yet?” charts are showing the combined Firefox TraceMonkey and JaegerMonkey build to be faster than Chrome in Webkit’s Sunspider test.

  "JaegerMonkey" is the code-name for a new javascript engine, It is a JIT compiler for Javascript. TraceMonkey is the original javascript engine that is introduced in FireFox 3.5 . JagerMonkey is a general-purpose compiler which converts entire methods to machine code. When it detects a loop that can be traced, it automatically engages the trace compiler, which makes it even faster. Mozilla is optimizing the combination of  Jaeger and Trace working together in Firefox4 to get the best of Tracing and JIT.

Firefox Tabcandy is now Firefox Panorama

Finally tabcandy is in firefox 4 beta as Panorma. Tab Candy could revolutionize the way we browse and manage the browser tabs. Rather than browsing in the traditional browser window, we could be using the browser entirely through a graphical tab interface.

For FireFox users only

Choosing useful Firefox plug-in is a big challenge. Dhiraj in his neobinaries blog talks about the five useful Firefox plug-ins, I find ScrapBook very useful.