Firefox 7 is released and its back to re-capture those early days when it used to be among the leaders. Lets see how they bechmark against each other for various tests:

Test system: Tests were conducted on Core i7 Macbook 6gb DDR3 RAM, Windows 7 & OSX Lion.

Matrix: A Relative matrix has been used to make graphs easy to read.

Benchmark Tests:

• SunSpider Tests
• Generic Javascript operations
• DOM / CSS operations
• Startup time

Performance Results:

Overall performance: Chrome 14 vs Opera 11.5 vs Firefox 7 IE9

Firefox seems to have recovered from the times where it used to be a low performer. Chrome is still holds the top position overall, on Windows & Mac. However, Chrome 14 was slower than Opera on Windows.

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The new Chrome extension does he right things: Mute Tabs.

Mute Tabs

Mute Tabs looks on to all your open tabs for the audio violator, and puts a musical icon on it, makes an easy visual aid. It might not work with every html plugin, but believe me, it can tag the tab almost all the time.

All sounds in modern browsers such as Chrome are made by plug-ins such as Flash, Silverlight, QuickTime, etc. (expressed in HTML as <object> or <embed>), Java applets (<applet>), or HTML5 audio/video (<audio>, <video>). The extension scans open webpages for these tags. If configured, webpages that include any of these tags that are making sound will have their tab icon changed to the MuteTab icon () to make it easier to see which tabs play sound. Also, the extension collects a centralized list of the found sound source tags.

More on how Mute Tabs works

Firefox users can be satisfied with BarTab. BarTab can load or unload any or all tabs, while keeping their spots in the browser. Its still better than force quit or crash, Firefox can start with all tabs unloaded except for the one you’re on, restarts are silent.

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Tilt lets you visualize a web page’s structure in 3D, may it be any site. The 3D rendering is done using WebGL which ensures that the graphics are smooth and rich. The work comes from Mozilla’s own developers which kickstarted the idea at Google Summer of Code project.

Tilt takes the DOM structure and creates a tree like representation layering each node based on the nesting in the tree, stacks of elements, each having a sense of corresponding depth and is textured based on the webpage rendering itself. The experience hence produced is the most realistic.

3D is not just the only thing Tilt does, it also gives out various infos regarding each node’s type, id, class, or other attributes, hence providing editing and viewing the inner HTML and other properties of the HTML, page DOM elements.

Controlling and navigating is easy, and can be easily be followed using the onscreen help.

Get 3D Browsing, download Tilt extension.

Download the xpi and drag-drop to Firefox, install it and look for Tilt inside the Tools menu.

Mozilla is working on Tilt and bringing some newer, cooler features soon — modifying and updating the 3D webpage mesh on the fly, rendering elements with absolute position or floats differently, a developer-friendly environment and better integration with the Ace editor and the Firefox Developer Tools.

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We had tested Firefox 4 betas and Release candidates and saw a gradual improve in performance and standards. Firefox 4 vs Chrome 10 vs IE9 is all about Firefox vs Chrome love.

Without getting much into the comparisons, lets look down at top 10 Features of Firefox 4

1. Faster

With its new JägerMonkey JavaScript engine, Firefox 4 delivers huge performance improvements. In fact, in performance tests on the Kraken, SunSpider and V8 benchmarks, for example, Firefox 4 outperformed the firefox 3 by three to six times.

Firefox 4 also outdid Chrome 10, Opera 11.1 and Internet Explorer 9 in the Kraken benchmark. More browser Benchmarks details here.

2. Less Clutter – Tabs on Top

We’ve seen Theme Mockups for Firefox 4 with Tabs on top. The browser overall is now simpler and cleaner, just like Chrome. A Switch to Tab feature, for instance, helps reduce tab clutter by automatically calling up an already-tabbed URL rather than duplicating it all over again.

If you have 200 tabs open and you can’t find the right one, that’s the slow part. There are App Tabs, which allow the user to take sites they always have open–such as Gmail or Twitter–off the tab bar and give them a permanent home in the browser. Thats exactly like pinning Tabs in Chrome. App Tab’s icon glows to indicate when there’s been activity on that site, such as new mail coming in.

When Firefox gets reloaded, it boosts loading speed by focusing first on the active page and App Tabs, and then loading other tabs in gradual succession after that.

Further reducing clutter is Firefox 4′s Firefox Button displays all menu items in a single button for easy access.

Panorama: Firefox 4′s new Panorama feature is another one designed to battle tab clutter. Using it, Web surfers can drag and drop their tabs into manageable groups that can be organized, named and arranged intuitively and visually. Panorama provides a visual canvas on which tabs can be logically organized into groups representing work, home, hobbies or research, for example.

3. Sync

Just like Chrome or Opera, you can now sync settings, bookmarks, etc across platforms among multiple copies of Firefox. All user data is encrypted.

4. Do Not Track

With a single check box, Firefox 4 users can ensure that any time the browser requests a Web page, it will send along a header specifying that the user does not want their browsing behavior to be tracked.

Advertisers and Web sites will use the new capability as an opportunity to show respect for consumers’ wishes and to demonstrate leadership when it comes to privacy.

5. More Standards, Richer web standards support

Firefox 4 includes a support for the WebM format for HD-quality video; 3D graphics via WebGL; elegant animations through the use of CSS3; and multitouch support.

Apart from that there is super-fast graphics acceleration with Direct2D and Direct3D on Windows, XRender on Linux, and OpenGL on Mac enabled by default on supported hardware.

6. Improved Security – Always Encrypted

With HTTP Strict Transport Security, or HSTS, sites can now make sure information is always encrypted, thereby preventing attackers from intercepting sensitive data. So that puts an end to Hijacking of Facebook, Twitter accounts with Firesheep.

7. HTML5

Firefox 4′s new HTML5 parser and full support for Web video, audio, drag & drop, and file handling mean that it’s capable of supporting the latest Web environments.

8. New Addons Manager, Sandboxing for Plugins

New Addon manager is cleaner, easier plus each plugin now runs in its own Sandbox. What that means is that if a plug in like QuickTime or Flash crashes in a tab, Firefox will make sure it doesn’t cause the entire browser to crash with it. All you have to do is reload the page. Oh yes, thats exactly what you see in Chrome.

9. Multitouch Support

Firefox now integrates multi-touch support for Windows 7, enabling users to interact with their browser in a new way.

10. Better Memory Management

Expect lesser crashes, lesser RAM usage by Firefox as Firefox 4 uses “Compartments”. Firefox can now better manage JavaScript objects with Compartments, offering improved cache utilisation and garbage collection mechanisms for better security, memory management and overall performance.

Download Firefox 4

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IE9 vs Chrome 10 vs Firefox 4 Benchmark

Platform: Windows 7 32bit on a Intel i7 Macbook Pro, 4GB RAM.

We are not testing 64bit since IE9 has poor performance on 64bit as it still uses older javascript engine, while IE 9 32-bit is using the newer, more efficient Chakra JIT.

Benchmark Results:

V8 Benchmark results

Sunspider Benchmark Results:

Kraken Benchmark Results

Peacekeeper Benchmark:

Chrome 10 wins in 2 tests and Firefox 4 does in one, and IE & Chrome tie in sunspider test.

Browser Verdict

I really don’t think that JavaScript performance is an issue any more, its fairly fast enough to be handled by users. What matters more is better support for modern technologies like HTML5. When it comes to the support for modern technologies, Firefox & Chrome beat IE9 out of the scene. There is a huge set of features tha IE9 needs to learn from Chrome 10 & Firefox 4:

Application Cache (offline), Web Workers (threads in JavaScript), HTML5 Forms (validation mechanism, CSS3 selectors), JavaScript Strict Mode , ForeignObject (embed external content in SVG), SMIL Animations (SVG animations), File API, WebGL (3D), CSS3 Transitions (for animations), CSS3 Text Shadow, CSS3 Gradients, CSS3 Border Image, CSS3 Flex box model, ClassList APIs, FormData, HTML5 History API, Drag’n Drop from Desktop.

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Synchronize Chrome Tabs, Session across Multiple Computers

We all happen to use multiple computers and hop all the time. Even if you don’t, its not hard to lose track of last session when there are 30+ tabs, and you are about to open more. Google Chrome provides ability to sync bookmarks, form autofills, extensions, themes, preferences, out of the box but there’s no support for saving Tabs from current session.

Its time for your to save your Chrome Tabs, Session and sync to the cloud so that the next time you login to any other machine (or the same machine), you can select and restore the session.

TabCloud is a great extensions that lets you backup & sync all your tabs to the cloud, so that they are available across any number of computers, on demand.

To get started, install the TabCloud extension and simply click the TabCloud icon on the menu, login the first time to see your current open windows and previously saved windows, you can save open windows, or restore saved ones. You can also delete previously saved sessions.

TabCloud also has a Firefox Extension, that works in a similar manner.

Sync Chrome, Firefox Tabs with Android

This is also one of the killer feature of this extension that allows all chrome, firefox tabs to be synced with Android, using the android app.

Additional features:
- Middle (or ctrl) clicking any tab icon opens just that tab.
- Clicking on an open tab icon jumps to that tab in a browser.
- Dragging a tab icon allows you to move tabs between windows, including to and from saved windows that are not currently open.
- Secure login using your Google account, with the option to logout on the TabCloud menu.
- Click on any windows name to rename at any time.

Going further, extension has some awesome features planned which would include:
- Realtime synchronisation and auto saving
- Some kind of passphrase/PIN based security/encryption
- Optionally use bookmarks to save tabs instead of external service
- Overwrite previously saved windows to update them
- Hold shift to copy tabs or open them in the background

The extension is open source, if you are a developer, go ahead and check it out at http://github.com/Connorhd/TabCloud

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Mozilla has let loose the JaegerMonkey engine, enabled hardware graphics acceleration on Windows and Mac. Whats more is the exciting new integrated Sync with the Panorama/”Tab Candy” that looks great.

Mozilla says their JaegerMonkey compiler, combined with their other improvements, brings new bar of performance to Firefox 4 being powered by a great  page rendering engine. Their chart of three benchmark tests, shows what looks like some serious improvements over Firefox 3.x:

In addition to the raw code and horsepower additions, Mozilla also notes the inclusion of hardware-based graphics acceleration in this beta, along with more obvious integration of previous experiments like Sync, Pannorama, and App Tabs.

Watch the performance improvments in the video:

Firefox 4 is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, go ahead and download it.

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The latest release of Firefox 4 Beta for mobile is now available for download in 10 languages on your Android, Maemo device.

Since the last alpha version, lots of bugs have been fixed, with lots memory optimizations, improved text rendering and a 60% install size reduction on Android (from around 43 MB to 17 MB).

The new version also includes a new theme that gives Firefox a fresh new look, also giving you the ability to easily share links with your friends.

There are lots of optimizations that make this version of Firefox fast in Actions like panning and zooming are faster and smoother. On Android 2.2, Firefox 4 is now 25% faster on the SunSpider Javascript benchmark than the stock browser.

What’s coming next is hardware acceleration to make scrolling and zooming even faster and HTML5 video. Working is also in progress to improve browser responsiveness while its active with Firefox Sync.

Try out the beta version, Go Mobile.

Behold, there’s a solution that will make it possible to automatically sync iPhone Bookmarks with Firefox and Chrome [and vice-versa] i.e. Sync Firefox, Chrome Bookmarks with iPhone, in a blink of the eye.

Step 1. For Firefox, Download and Install Xmarks Addon from here and for Chrome from here.

Step 2. Configure the plugin by signing-up for an account (if you are new to xmarks) or login with your existing account. Fill in the required fields and wizard will guide you through it. Sync will execute and backup of all your contacts will be placed on Xmark’s server. If you are an existing user, you might want to “merge bookmarks” than overwriting them.

Step 3. Install the Xmark in IE from here or Safari from here. Follow the same procedure as Step 2 to sync your account. After a successful sync, all your browsers have the same Bookmarks, synced on every change or periodically.

Step 4. Sync your iPhone using iTunes while selecting the browser you chose in Step 3, under the “info” iPhone tab.

That’s it, you will automatically sync Firefox, Chrome Bookmarks to iPhone on every Sync. Ain’t this addon cool? Look here for more Firefox addons and Chrome Extensions.

Liked our guide? Subscribe to us below or contact me @taranfx for any assistance

Since its a pre-alpha release, expect bugs and might cause some troubles.

You’ll see the app exit and relaunch on first start, as well as on add-on installs and it cannot be set as the default browser, just yet.

Min Requirements: Works with Android 2.0 or above, and OpenGL ES 2.0 capable device. Works best with devices with 128mb+ RAM

Key Features

The Firefox mobile will provide near Desktop experience by browsing great screen adaptability, addons, profile and bookmark Sync.

Weave Sync

Experimental version of Weave that is compatible with this build: to enable Weave, navigate to Mozilla Labs weave page and click on “Experimental Version”.  Install the add-on, then restart Fennec.

However, when installed, Weave  add-on will lets you sync all your Firefox settings across multiple platforms: Mac, windows, Linux and now even Android Phones. It also synchronizes all your mobile activity (history) back to Firefox on your desktop.

Unified Address Bar

Fennec also offers a combined search and address bar, much like Google’s Chrome web browser does. And it comes with integrated search engines like Google (the default), plus site-specific engines like Amazon, Twitter and YouTube and others can be added on demand.

Troubleshooting Tips

In case the fennec hangs or causes hangs, try a utility  called “White Killer”, available from the Android Market, it will help you force quit app much more easily.  However, if it doesn’t stop crashing, reinstall it, that would clear your preferences and profile.

Download: http://bit.ly/fennec-android [APK]

We write about Latest on Gadgets, Browsers, Open source, Firefox, Chrome, Google, Tech news, you can get them all via @taranfx on Twitter.

As usual, Safari was the first to fall, followed by IE 8, then was Firefox on Windows 7 x64 and iPhone’s mobile Safari. Google Chrome, however, is the last man standing.

Charlie Miller, the first hacker to take safari down, says that Chrome is still the hardest one to exploit.

“There are bugs in Chrome but they’re very hard to exploit. I have a Chrome vulnerability right now but I don’t know how to exploit it. It’s really hard. They’ve got that sandbox model that’s hard to get out of. With Chrome, it’s a combination of things – you can’t execute on the heap, the OS protections in Windows and the Sandbox.”

The mobile Safari attack was particularly impressive, since running code on the iPhone requires a valid digital signature. By rearranging bits of pre-signed code, Halvar Flake of Zynamics was able to deliver a malicious payload via Safari and force the iPhone to cough up its complete SMS database. Contacts and messages were laid bare — including deleted ones.

“Nils”, for the 2nd year in a row, exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in Mozilla Firefox to take complete control of a 64-bit Windows 7 machine. He used several tricks to bypass Address Space Layout Randomization (ALSR) and Data Execution Prevention (DEP) to get his drive-by download to load an executable on the target machine.

Normally, ASLR+DEP are held up as significant roadblocks to thwart malware attacks on the newest versions of Windows but, as this contest shows, skilled hackers with enough motivation and resources can bypass those mitigations easily.

Conclusions?

Most of these exploits aren’t being used on the internet, it’s still an indication of just how scary the landscape of the Internet is right now. How do you stay safe? Google Chrome looks like a good choice, obviously, but there’s another option you might consider: Opera. Opera has relatively small market share and even hackers don’t bother about preparing exploits fro this browser.

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But it’s time to change it all. Microsoft has built the new browser ground up and lead innovation to let the industry to follow. IE9 is the First browser to support full GPU acceleration (Direct 2D) Rendering which means your graphics card is now put to good use. Earlier to this Firefox 3.7 nightly showed some GPU rendering which is pretty limited.

Our early impressions of IE9 were good, but it has gone better.

Rendering the web page in most browsers including IE8 is performed on the CPU. Direct2D (a new Windows API in Windows 7) uses hardware Direct3D acceleration to accelerate 2D graphics. This would be available as a patch for Windows Vista. Through the use of Direct2D, IE9 performs all graphics rendering on the GPU, providing quicker page rendering, faster, smoother animation, and high quality image scaling, resulting in richer experience.

Download IE9

Performance Benchmark

The New engine used sounds exactly like V8 engine used in Chrome. On the Inside, the new IE9 JavaScript engine will compile JavaScript into native code, just like in V8, and the technique it will use to speed up the object-oriented nature of JavaScript also sounded similar to the approach V8 takes.

We don’t go by the words of the manufacturer, we like to test it on our own. Today Microsoft announced a Preview of IE9, we got our handson and reviewed it. We used SunSpider benchmark to get Real world-alike Javascript performance results and Some intense graphics Based applications like Bing maps, google Maps and some of the demos hosted by Microsoft itself.

SunSpider Benchmark

Results:  My eyes popped out, IE9 seems to have some great improvements:

Clearly, IE9 has come very close to Safari  and beats all versions of Firefox. It would be some time till it touches chrome’s mark (may be in the final version) but the results are brilliant so far.

Graphics Framerate (FPS)

Era of Rich graphics on web just started over last few years with beginning of Maps applications and some fantastic animations in various webapps. We took some of the most common ones: google Maps, Bing Maps and few demos hosted by Microsoft for IE9 and then average framerate over all of these and results were eye-opener:

IE9 sweeps of all browsers in this area. The GPU acceleration is way to mature than in Firefox 3.7. And Opera 10.5 does some decent job thanks to it’s Vega graphics and Carkan engines.

Update: IE9 vs. Chrome 10 vs. Firefox 4 Benchmarks - on Core i7 machine

We write latest and greatest in Browsers: Chrome, Opera, Firefox, IE, and latest in Tech @taranfx and below:

Mozilla had started working on “JagerMonkey”, a new “baseline” method JIT compiler for SpiderMonkey, Firefox.The JagerMonkey method JIT will provide a much better performance baseline, and tracing will continue to speed up.

Right now, the work is pretty much in progress, JagerMonkey  is 18% faster interpreter and it’s a long way to go, the scope is huge.

Another amazing development is the DirectWrite & Direct2D landing in the nightly builds.

DirectWrite and Direct2D are Windows Vista and Windows 7 based DirectX 11 APIs for text and 2-D graphics that can be hardware accelerated. To test this feature, download the latest nightly build and do:

• Enter ‘about:config’
• Enter gfx.font in the ‘Filter’ box, Edit  ’gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled’ to set it to true
• Below this, right click and select New > Integer to add a pref setting and Enter ‘mozilla.widget.render-mode’ for the preference name, 6 for the value
• Restart

Known Issues: Some extensions like stylish and adblock+ may break the new features.The major benefit can be seen in  Rendering Heavy pages, and also the fonts look really great with DirectWrite enabled. Also, difference can be seen in 2d apps like Google Maps, very similar to what is coming in IE9.

So, if your GPU is sitting idle, it’s time to put it to good use.

JagerMonkey: Under the Hood

As David Madelin  claims on Mozilla blog, TraceMonkey’s tracing JIT is very fast, it is 9x faster at certain operations such as SunSpider’s “math-cordic” benchmark.

But it can’t really trace a benchmark like date-format-tofte, which calls eval in its main loop, so tracing only yields a 5% speedup on that program. David Anderson calls it “TraceMonkey has rocket boosters, so it runs really fast when the boosters are on, but the boosters can’t always be turned on”. There are many factors that can prevent the rockets from turning on, so there’s really no short description of the programs that don’t trace, but most of them fall into a few categories:

Programs with very branchy control flow.

Programs with many type combinations. Because TraceMonkey generates type-specialized code, it must generate a separate trace for every type combination (mapping of variables to types) the program generates. If there are 1000 type combinations, we have the same problems we get with 1000 paths.

In nutshell, type-specializing trace JIT generates really fast code, but can’t generate native code for certain situations. On the other hand, an optionally specializing method JIT generates moderately fast code, but can generate native code for any JavaScript program. When both of these are used collectively and intelligently, they can complement each-others drawbacks and produce extremely fast execution.

If all goes well, Firefox can compete with chrome’s current performance, but who knows how fast Opera and chrome would be by that time.

We write latest and greatest in Firefox, Chrome, Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Android, Open Source, Latest in Tech @taranfx on Twitter.

When Xmarks came, it solved part of the problem by syncing Firefox and Chrome bookmarks. But I was still looking for a solution that could sync my settings, addons. Mozilla Weave partly solved bunch of it by providing settings sync. But wait a minute, addons?

Then I came across another addon, which became the solution to sync every kind of stuff across Firefox browsers, no matter what:

Siphon (Download)

Siphon is a firefox addon that promises to kick all the crap and sync it all. Siphon will manage and sync all your Add-ons with your different computers. That means tt will also save your Add-on list if you ever need to reinstall Firefox.

Siphon is still in the beta but works fine almost all of the time.

Now, you can combine Mozilla Weave with it to sync all your Firefox settings, bookmarks. you can also use xmarks for bookmark sync across browsers: Firefox, IE, Chrome.

Using this methodology, everytime you install  a new firefox, just install Siphon and it will do everything.

Limitation: Support for profiles, Themes sync will be added soon.

2nd Option is to use FEBE addon.

FEBE (download)

FEBE also does similar stuff but does a backup instead of Sync.

FEBE backs up your extensions, themes, bookmarks, preferences, passwords, cookies and just about everything else Firefox offers (it can even backup/restore your entire profile). You can selectively restore only the items you need. For instance, you may just want your bookmarks restored and leave everything else as it was.

Key Features:

• Schedule automatic backups in time-stamped folders
• User-defined backups: Make backups of virtually any file or folder – Firefox related or not. Just specify what to backup and FEBE does the rest.
• Auto-Upload backups to your Box.net account.
• FEBE 6.2 has a new, simpler profile restore interface. No need to use the Firefox Profile Manager to manually create a profile to restore into.

The thing I don’t like about this addon is that it doesn’t sync witha  cloud service automatically, and that could be pointed as a big limitation. Everytime you want to sync with new PC, restore the backups manually from file location. On the contrary, it’s more featureful.

Choose your wishful methods, and let the syncing prevail!

We write latest and greatest in Firefox, Chrome, Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Android, Open Source, Latest in Tech @taranfx on Twitter.

At the right time comes the Mozilla’s next version to rediscover the Web with Firefox 3.6. With over 6,000+ addons, 35,000 themes, it’s world’s most extensible browser.

Update: Now Official

The word is not official, but the link below points to the correct version.

Download (Mozilla Firefox)

Note: This is not declared as official yet, I`ll update my readers as soon as it get official. Get the update @taranfx on Twitter

3.6 Brings down lot of new stuff, the best part being the performance improvements. Practically, as we benchmarked it, it’s 23% faster than Firefox 3.5: Browser Performance Benchmark – Firefox 3.6: 23 Percent Faster

So, what’s new in Firefox 3.6?

Key improvements:

• Improved performance, security and stability
• Users can now change their browser’s appearance with a single click, with built in support for Personas.
• Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
• Windows 7 Integration (Each Tab get preview)
• Support for Accelerometer for screen orientation.
• Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
• Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
• Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.

Mozilla has done good job at marketing this time, they have come-up with a highlighting “what’s new”:

We write about Latest on Gadgets, Browsers, Open source, Firefox, Chrome, Google, Tech news, you can get them all via @taranfx on Twitter.

1. AutoPager: Tired of browsing through pages while you are looking for something? Paginate no longer with this addon you can get  AJAX like page loads while you scroll. The plugin is compatible with most websites [atleast all search engines google, yahoo, bing, etc.] that use pagination.

Download [Also Available on Chrome]

2. Firefox 4 Transformation: With few addons here and there you can get a perfect looking Firefox 4. Sure it’s more of an Eye candy, but cleans-up the clutter like combining URL and search bars, removing Menu bar, etc. More at: Firefox 4 Theme Transformation.

3. Make Older Extensions Compatible: Every time and then new version of Firefox arrives or we deliberately tryout Alpha/Beta builds, older extensions just don’t work. Hail, here is the trick you can do by adding Night tester tools addons. More details: Make Old Extensions Compatible with Firefox (any version)

4. IETab: Even though we hate IE, still we often hunt down to this base browser when we are stuck by an outdated website which doesn’t support other browsers. With this addon you can open IE in a new tab.

Download

5. Yet Another Smooth Scrolling: If you are iPhone or Opera browser user, you seriously miss smooth scrolling. Firefox’s default scrolling isn’t quite as refined as I like it. It supports up to three presets, which is nice for laptops. Keep one set for your touchpad and one for your mouse. I found the default settings for this addon to be very inadequate, however, raising up acceleration and smoothness(forepart) made it look alot better. You can customize to fit your needs.

Download

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Bonus: I can’t hold myself back for this one: DownloadThemAll – This is a complete download accelerator/manager for firefox most people often overlook. In fact, it is the only efficient multithreaded downloader for firefox.

More Addons/ Extensions:

• 5 Interesting Firefox Addons
• Taranfx’s Web Addict Must-have Firefox Addon Collection
• How to Dislike on Facebook
• Best Google Chrome Extensions Top 15
• Useful Google Wave Extensions, Gadgets
• How To Write Google Chrome Extensions

It had been long predicted, that this day would come when Browsers will learn to leverage GPU for rendering webpages. After Microsoft’s announcement of GPU acceleration in it’s upcoming browser IE9, Firefox also started to get into it seriously.  Microsoft had published new API with Windows 7 called Direct2D. Direct2D is designed to be  replacement for GDI and takes the task of vector graphics rendering engine, using GPU acceleration to give large performance boosts to the webpage rendering.

Update: Chrome gets Hardware GPU Acceleration, Chrome 7 to get Hardware Acceleration, 60x Faster

Firefox gets GPU Hardware Acceleration, JagerMonkey Boost

Firefox gets GPU accelerated OpenGL Push with WebGL [3D Graphics]

The support for D2D is being seen on Firefox’s Latest alpha release Minefield 3.7 a1(nightly)
Direct2D has been implemented in Firefox as a Cairo backend. Firefox uses Direct3D textures as backing store for all surfaces. This allows Firefox to implement operations not supported by Direct2D using Direct3D

Since we are offloading the CPU task to GPU, there is a delay in between the data transfers from GPU to CPU  before the CPU can read it. Readbacks have significant performance penalties because of GPU-CPU synchronization being required.

However, on Direct3D10+ hardware  (Windows Vista, Windows 7) this should not negatively impact performance, it does mean it is harder to implement effective D2D software fallback.

Benchmarks
Bas managed to get a Benchmark of the browsers on a  ATI Radeon HD4850 GPU:

If we alook at the pattern from the graph, complexly structured websites the performance advantages are significantly less, and the error margin in the measurements can be seen to be larger (i.e. different rendering runs of the same site deviated more strongly).

We can see that D2D provides a much better experience on our daily browsing. All the Graphic intensive work like Google Maps, Scrolling through webpages,  Image rendering, animation with javascript will have much smoother framerate on Direct2D.

Download MineField 3.7a1

These test were done on a Direct X 10 card, but older PCs with pre-D3D10 graphics cards and WDDM 1.0 drivers will not show significant improvements, moreover, It may or may not work on D3D9 graphic cards, depending on exact graphics card specifications.

Let’s hope the support goes better for Direct X 9 cards as well, may be Google has a better solution on this, we will have to wait and see.

1. Easy YouTube Downloader (HD)

How to Download Youtube Videos

Now that YouTube is going FullHD 1080p The only good addon that let’s you download YouTube videos is  HD, MP4, FLV,3GP, FLV formats.

How to Play FullHD 1080p on PC

2. Dislike for Facebook:

How to Dislike on Facebook

Petitions for Facebook to add a “dislike buttons are rising. They may not listen, bu there is an un-offical workaround.

3. App Tabs:

4. Google Wave Add-on for Firefox:

Google Wave Invites Giveaway [100+] [ending soon]

5. LongURL Mobile Expander

You may also want to checkout our  Taranfx’s Web Addict Must-have Firefox Addon Collection

Despite its intuitive accessibility and powerfully customizable interface, the performance of this browser has been problematic. Often, we indulge in opening  several tabs, Firefox becomes notorious and uses bulk amount of memory and processor.  I’ve seen Firefox eating up a 750MB of RAM with 30 Tabs opened, eating 2GHz+ of CPU. With 20+ tabs Firefox becomes slow and unusable on PCs having low-end config. And if you have lots of Addons, which everyone has, it gets worse.

Coming to the solution, Try Firetune. It is a quick solution for augmenting the Firefox speeds. Giving particular attention to the speed  of your Internet connection and that of  your computer’s processor, Firetune adjusts several internal settings of Firefox for increased performance.

Download FireTune

Firetune works with all Firefox versions: 1.x, 2.x, and 3.x

The Next concern: Browsing Speed.

Browser Performance Benchmark – Firefox 3.6 vs. Chrome, Opera Safari

Firefox is quiet fast. But not as fast as Safari 4, Chrome 4 or Opera 10. Still, we can raise the speeds by 100% by doing  following tweaks:

Go into Firefox configuration by enter about:config in the address bar.

1. Type network.http.pipelining in the filter bar and set it to true.
2. Type network.http.pipelining.maxrequests in the filter bar. The default value is 4. Change it to 16. You can also change this value to larger number, which means firefox will make more requests at once.
3. Type network.http.proxy.pipelining in the filter bar and set it to true.
4. Type network.dns.disableIPv6 in the filter bar and set it to true.

Tip: FireTune also tunes some of these values, however setting values manually to higher value can help further.

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Have a look at Firefox 4 – Screenshots

Of course, it isn’t released but confirmed that work is being done on it.  But we will assist you in getting the same Look and feel on your existing Firefox 3.x. Follow the Steps Below:

1. Form the menu View > Toolbars > Customize, Move your stop button next to the Address Bar and next to Reload button. We will combine them like in Firefox 4 over next steps.
2. Download Strata Reloaded, and StrataBuddy the base of our Transformation.
3. (optional) Download the theme and install (click Tools > Add-Ons > Themes). And then, Drag and Drop the file strata40_v0.3.jar to the theme section. (Note: you can use the theme inbuilt in Strata reloaded, but this one in more beautiful)
4. Now we will remove those traditional menu items “File Edit view..” and change it to something snappier. The Add-On called Personal Menu is needed for that change.
5. Next, we mock a loading progress bar. Download an Add-on called Fission here. After installation,  goto Add-ons, choose browse to get a new loading image. Browse to the folder where you have extracted the theme and select loading_bar.png.
6. Next step is to combine search and address-bars. Download OmniBar Add-on and and install it.
7. (optional) Now, we will remove our Standard Windows title bar. This can be done by using the Add-on called HideCaption.
8. If you’re one Windows Vista or Windows 7, we will make your title bar transparent. To do this, Tools> addons> Strata buddy > options > Select Firefox 4.0, Aero Glass. This gives a nice Glassy look.

It’s highly customizable, and you can fine tune it to your preferred settings. For moreFirefox Tips, and Tech guides you can catch us Live @Taranfx on Twitter.

Firefox 4 is way far, meantime you can look at Firefox’s Latest Beta release Firefox 3.6 (Performance benchmark, features)

Don’t worry we got a quick solution for you. All you need is Firefox and a plugin

Download Plugin

What’s ridiculous is just this morning there were at least two new pages requesting the addition of a “Dislike Button” (dislike button page and dislike button petition page) each of which have over 1 million fans. wow, the Demand is huge. Till Facebook implements it, you can live with Firefox addon. Here is what it will Look like:

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What makes Firefox 3.6 more interesting is the Windows 7 integration — It integrates with the new taskbar in Windows 7. [Discussed in detail in Windows 7 Review]

What’s the Deal? The Tabs within Firefox will show up as previews when you hover over Firefox‘s taskbar entry in Windows 7, in the same way IE8 already does it. This makes Firefox one of the few applications to offer integration with Windows 7′s new taskbar. [iTunes 9 is also one of them].

Firefox 3.6 also brings visual previews when you use the ctrl+tab method to switch tabs – Windows 7 style. This feature is disabled by default, so you need to dive into about:config, find the browser.ctrlTab.previews key and set it to true. Restart Firefox, and experience the new tabbing feature, it’s all beautiful.

More Windows 7 Tricks -> Windows 7 Tips n Tricks

The new tab switching feature also shows an option called “Show all n tabs“. This will bring up a permanent preview window with an instant search field to search through your open tabs. The navigation through tabs becomes much more easier.

Excited already? Get it from Mozilla’s FTP server.

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Mozilla , next week, is rolling out first Firefox 3.6 public Beta. The Release is supposed to be the first one, with big fixes for Firefox 3.5.

My experience with Firefox 3.5 had been the worst ever. The crashes were more frequent than any other previous versions, Tab restore was almost useless, worked rarely. With large no. of tabs opened (of the order of 20), it can eat 500MB of RAM and taking your CPU to adventures of peeks.

I won’t lie, But Firefox was jealous that I prefer Chrome 4 for reliability, and for the heavy web 2.0 apps. I use Firefox for causal general purpose surfing. All-in-all, it’s the only one that can fulfill taste-buds with so many addons.

Finally, I decided to take the latest nightly build of Firefox 3.5, 3.6, 3.7 to benchmarking adventures. Since, we are pretty close to planned code freeze, the results of Firefox 3.6 nightly will be 99% similar to public beta.

The Result was something that makes me glad: 3.6 is faster at JavaScript execution and much faster at page rendering.

Benchmark:

Hardware: The benchmarks were done on a core 2 duo 2.4Ghz with Nvidia 8 Series and 4GB of RAM on Windows 7. Windows 7 was chosen because it nears in performance to XP., and has continued to grow even before the release.

Reference: Of course, like other benchmarks, IE7 is held as the reference point for all tests.

Tests: Variety of benchmarking tools are employed to nail down the performance.

• NonTroppo: CSS Rendering, Page load test
• SunSpider: Javascript execution test

Results from all tests were combined to prepare Comprehensive Relative Performance Index, CRPI, Values.

Here are the CRPI scores:

Overall, The Winner is  Chrome 4, again. Though, on Windows XP Chrome 3 takes the lead. Firefox 3.6 comes with 23% or 1/4times faster than it’s predecessor Firefox 3.5.3

The pace of speed boost for Firefox is still lower than Chrome or Safari. Safari 3 to 4 was a giant leap in performance. On the other hand, Firefox speed boost ad been slow and steady. But, what is more important is that it has continued to improve, overall.

So today, Chrome 4 is almost 15x times faster than IE7, and Firefox 3.6 is 9x times.

Chrome 4 will get performance boosts as it comes out of Dev to the mainstream and with plugins on Chrome 4, it’s gaining popularity.

Firefox 3.6 can max jump from Firefox 3.5 by 25%. But what is more awaited is the bug fixes, better stability which makes it more attractive among it’s fans.

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