Have a look at the changelog before you upgrade, and then hit up the download.

While I was there I also noticed Firefox has a Tips and Tricks section with some pretty useful information if this is a first move for you, or even for more advanced users:

Now you can use Web-based protocol handlers to provide quick access to your favorite Web applications. For example, you can set Firefox up so clicking on a mailto: link on any site will open a new message in your preferred webmail provider rather than your computer’s default mail program

Fennec is Mozilla’s take on the mobile browser market and the pre-alpha is available now. Not for everyone though, only if you have a VGA Windows Mobile phone and even then it’s not 100% gauranteed – and that’s fine by me. Pre-Alpha means that if you try and use it, don’t bitch if it doesn’t work 100%. Nothing irritates me more than a person that slams a product that is not final for being unstable or incomplete. That’s why it’s not stable, it’s being worked on.

Anyway, this is great news. Opera has been the only ready alternative if you are serious about browsing on your mobile and are not using an iPhone and I’m glad to see that progress is being made to get Firefox out there to hopefully dominate in the same way it has changed the desktop browser market.

The focus of development so far has been on building a new user interface that reflects Firefox’s design principles, and adds touch screen support and other features that are appropriate for mobile phones and other handheld devices. We plan to do further alpha releases which focus on performance, including projects like TraceMonkey, speculative parsing, and many Fennec and Gecko optimizations. But in the meantime, we feel it is important to make this early release available to continue to grow the community and gather feedback as early as possible in the development process. [Fennec]

Mozilla also have another interesting project in their labs called Joey

Project Joey is an experiment in allowing you to send the Web content you need most to your mobile phone. With Joey, you can quickly mark content that is important to you on your desktop, and have that content available while using your phone. It allows Firefox to send text clippings, pictures, videos, RSS content, and Live Bookmarks to your phone through the Joey Server. The Joey Server transcodes and keeps all of the content up-to-date

Sounds interesting

Related articles by Zemanta

• Mobile Browser Fennec Moves to HTC Touch Pro, Hints at Greatness (mashable.com)
• Firefox Mobile Available for HTC Touch Pro, Windows Mobile Phones (lifehacker.com)
• Firefox Mobile pre-Alpha released (jkontherun.com)

A lot is being said about IE8 and how it will change the history of IE and how it is seen in the eyes of developers. Anyone who has ever tried to design a website using standards defined by W3C is sure to have found that while the site looks great in FireFox for example, it looks terrible in IE.

Fixes have been around for ages now with it just being accepted that you design the site in FireFox and fix it for IE. A quick search on Google will show you just how many of these fixes exist. Most of them have become quite well known and are pretty much put in during the initial design of the layout. There is even a javascript tool that will automatically fix as many of the problems as it can allowing you to design a standards compliant site.

In comes IE8 with the promise of being standards compliant and the hope that the days of fixing perfect code for an imperfect rending engine are gone.

In the wake of a record European Commission fine for failure to comply with interoperability standards, Microsoft on Monday reversed course and announced that it will make Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) compliant with Web standards interoperability. [source]

IE8 has been said to pass the Acid2 test, a tool used to test the rendering engine of a browser.

Acid2 is a test page published and promoted by the Web Standards Project to identify web page rendering flaws in web browsers and other applications that render HTML. It was developed in the spirit of Acid1, a relatively narrow test of compliance with the Cascading Style Sheets 1.0 (CSS1) standard, and was released on April 13, 2005. Like Acid1, a web browser passes the test if the way it renders the test page matches a reference rendering. [source]

At work we do a lot of work on the GUI of the product and making sure that it works just as well in IE as it does in FireFox etc. has always been a headache. So, I went ahead and got myself the recommended update from Vista to install IE8 to see what the browser was going to change.

We were working on a new menu system that was based on an unordered list and would be styled with CSS and crafted with Javascript to bring the menu to life (pop ups etc.). The menu worked 100% in FireFox as expected and the design followed already tried and tested methods of achieving the end result in terms of CSS.

In comes IE8 and smashes it to the ground in a pile of sad little CSS dust.

We spent quite a while changing things such as display:none to visibility:hidden and have had to add an entire block of Javascript code to literally fix the style issues we had for IE8.

The funny part of this? The menu worked 100% in FireFox initially and continued to work 100% while we were making all the CSS changes. It just worked as it should have in IE8.

I understand that all browsers will have differences no matter how standard compliant they all claim to be, that’s just life for a developer but generally the differences between FireFox and Opera for example are minimal and the design is still acceptable.

Something else that crept up was to do with the Javascript engine. I will admit first that it was a bug in the code that caused the problem, but FireFox didn’t lock up, eat all the memory and literally hang my computer when I pressed the “Alt” key on my keyboard. When you press Alt in IE8 (if you use it as is out the box), it brings down the “File Edit” menu which changes the size of the window the site is shown in. The problem came in because we had an event listening for this change in window size to re-position the menu and IE8 just crapped itself on this event. As I said it was a bug in the code, but still, it could be quite easy for someone to maliciously exploit the handling of this problem and it has already been done in the past.

To sum it up, I’m disappointed with IE8. I thought it was going to change my views on developing for IE, but so far it hasn’t and I hope the final release will change all this.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Microsoft’s IE loses more share, slides to new low (infoworld.com)
• Microsoft Releases Internet Explorer 8 RC1: Promises Faster and Safer Browsing (readwriteweb.com)
• IE’s Loss is Firefox, Safari, Chrome’s Gain (appscout.com)
• Microsoft’s IE loses more share, slides to new low (infoworld.com)

Debugging in Firefox is easy with a vast number of extensions aiding you in tracking down the bugs in your code. Doing the same in IE can be very frustrating with one usually only having access to the mostly unhelpful js error icon in the bottom corner of the browser.

Luckily Six Revisions has put together a list of IE tools that can aid you in the development of your app.

For Web developers wanting to use Micosoft’s Internet Explorer as their primary browser, there’s some terrific IE extensions/add-ons that can aid you analyze, troubleshoot, debug, and speed up development of web pages.

Here, you’ll find the top 6 free IE extensions for web developers.

Where appropriate (and available), you’ll also find related resources, their download page, and documentation.

• Maximize Firefox without extensions
• Gmail hacks for better spam protection
• 7 of the best designed sites on the web
• 60 AJAX/Javascript resources for professional coding
• 3 ways to test web input with CAPTCHA

Maximize Firefox without extensions

We have made a couple of posts relating to improving FireFox and getting the best out of your FireFox experience and plugins. There are plugins that could do what this article details, but with the release of Beta builds quite frequently over the past 2 months or so, not all plugins work the whole time.

If you type about:config in your address bar, Firefox opens the master directory of user-defined preferences and built-in settings. The ultimate arena for performance tampering, the about:config settings are the foundation for programming Firefox extensions.

We’ll show some simple about:config modifications below. Even if the word “Boolean” means nothing to you, we’ll try to make it easy to understand about:config settings

I happen to have a ‘.’ in my gmail address just by chance, and also use the + tip for signing up on certain sites to keep things more organized. But you could just as easily use them to help combat spam.

You can create alias emails for things like shopping sites, places you know will spam you, or anything you want to track to see who they are sharing your email with. To do this, simply put a “+” after your account name and add words.

Apparently, Gmail doesn’t really acknowledge dots in your account name. So I can use “mr.marky.mark@gmail.com” or “mr.markymark@gmail.com” or without any dots at all, “mrmarkymark@gmail.com”.

7 of the best designed sites on the web

Titles of this nature always grab my attention. I’m constantly trying to see how designers are innovating using the latest techniques. While I may not completely agree with this list, I do agree that the sites are visually appealing, even google.com, and that they have crisp layouts.

A sites design is its identity. It can make the biggest difference in attracting and keeping traffic, keeping visitors happy, promoting products and services and establishing an identity on the web.

Website design has come a long way. Previously, down-to-the-point, straightforward sites with minimum graphics and fastest loading and easy navigation were considered the “best” sites in terms of design.

60 AJAX/Javascript resources for professional coding

AJAX is one of the most commonly used techniques for creating seamless webapps these days. However, if you have ever tried to develop something using AJAX, you may have found that it can be frustrating sometimes trying to accomplish the crazy idea that you have set down as your goal. Infact, I was wrestling an AJAX idea in the office today that was partially solved with the scriptaculous javascript library.

When it comes to design of modern web-applications, Ajax is considered as a standard approach. Interactive solutions for lightboxes, form validation, navigation, search, tooltips and tables are developed using Ajax libraries and nifty Ajax scripts. Ajax is useful and powerful. However, when using Ajax, one should keep in mind its drawbacks in terms of usability and accessibility. With an extensive use of Ajax, you can easily confuse your visitors offering too much control and too many features.

3 ways to test web input with CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA is something that we are all used to by now, it’s those barely readable images we have to re-type to prove that we are human. Turns out that computers are becoming more and more human with spam bots being able to break CAPTCHA codes, in record time, to webmail sites bypassing the human requirement of owning an account. However, it is still seen as an important part of a website where differentiating a legitimate user from a spam bot is required and even though it is being beaten more and more these days it is still one of the best ways to help combat spam.

Many Web forms these days feature a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) as an effort to stop people from setting up computers to automatically fill in Web forms. A typical CAPTCHA is an image with some numbers and letters in it with distortion and/or background noise, and a Web form input field where you are to enter the numbers and letters from the image. This article investigates three CAPTCHA applications that you can use on a PHP Web site.

• You Used JavaScript to Write WHAT? [via Zemanta]

LifeHackers Guide

Step 1: Nightly Tester Tools

Nightly Tester Tools is a plugin for Firefox (that will install) which allows you to do a few nifty things, one of which is force plugins to be compatible. Go download it now!

Step 2: Restart Firefox

This is a step on its own because it can be tricky. After installing Nightly Tester tools I had to use the Tools->Addons menu and tell it to update it and restart again to get it working. But, worry not, it is possible to use this on beta5. Do whatever it takes people.

Step 3: Use the Tool

Once you’ve got your nightly tester tools installed (you can tell as your titlebar will include a Build number), its time to enable Zemanta (or your other plugin). Go into Tools -> Add-ons and select the extensions menu. Right click on Zemanta and choose to “Make Compatible“. Now restart Firefox; when you come back you’ll notice your Zemanta is running once again!

Step 4: Other Apps (Optional)

Note that you can do this for any plugin – be careful though because there are changes between versions. I can tell you that Zemanta runs fine on beta5; but other plugins might not – although to be honest its very unlikely in my opinion when we’re almost RC.

Slovenia (44.5%), Finland (41.3%), Croatia (36.5%), and Germany (36.2%) lead the way, followed by a group of mostly Eastern European countries. Remarkably, The Netherlands is only at 13.3%, right before Andorra. Oceania maintains a slight lead over Europe, at 24.8%; the rest of the world trails at 11.9% to 15.1%.”

Slashdotting
Original Article

LH knows whats good – and this is great. A FireFox extension to customize (and improve) your GMail [experience]!

Gmail’s good, but it could be better. We’ve featured several Greasemonkey scripts that enhance Gmail in lots of different ways – like adding saved searches, attachment icons, label colors, keyboard macros, a filter assistant and right-click conversation previews. But not everyone wants to install Greasemonkey and hunt down all those scripts.

The best part, is that the famous Gina Trapani [of LifeHacker, my home away from home] actually created the extension! For more tips and tricks for GMail, don’t forget to see my previous post.

Lifehacker Code: Better Gmail (Firefox extension)
The Google Calendar Cheat Sheet