Filed under: Features, Mozilla, Browsers

As Sebastian is still in Montenegro, I will be presenting you with today's Firefox Friday Five. I know you guys miss him, but fret not - he's due back around Tuesday, so next week's installment shall indubitably be British in style and flavour. For now, though, you're stuck with me -- so buckle up and enjoy the ride!

This week we've seen two pretty exciting releases from Mozilla, plus one aimed at developers, as well as a great add-on and a Greasemonkey script to round it all off. Read on for the details!

1. Firefox 4 Beta 2 hits the interwebs:

Filed under: Browsers, Op-Ed

Firefox is doing a lot of usability-related work recently. And really, it now sports a fairly usable UI. It's kind of sluggish at times, but it is my browser of choice, mainly for political reasons.

But one thing never fails to piss me off ... why does the Find function have to be so bad?

Many people use large monitors these days (and often, more than one). This means that we often have a large mass of text all over the screen, but we want to find just a single word. This is a common function, and both Opera and Chrome have taken major strides in order to make it usable.

The Safari 5 feature that's caught the web's attention is the Reader button, which strips down articles and blog posts into an ad-free, highly readable format.

A Mozilla Firefox employee, Asa Dotzler, in his blog,  has estimated from the recent download stats of both Google Chrome and Firefox that, for every one new user of Google Chrome there will be 2.5 new users of Firefox. He has also created a graph in which you can see the download rates of both the browsers. Here is the graph:

It is difficult to say which is good. Firefox has been ruling the browser industry for a long time, while the new baby, Google Chrome has also made a tremendous growth in a short span of time.

However, I personally feel that, one factor for the exponential growth of the Chrome browser is advertising. Google has been advertising its browser everywhere. Starting from its homepage, Chrome ads are on, almost every page of Youtube. They also have promoted it offline by creating banners all over Europe.

Filed under: Browsers

Firefox's AwesomeBar is great, but there is no easy way to make the text (and the bar itself) larger from within Firefox. So this little trick might come in handy to those of you who use large monitors which are located somewhat far away.

1) Go to your chrome folder (not the browser Chrome, but Firefox's chrome configuration folder):

 C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[something random].default\chrome

2) Using Notepad or another text editor, edit userChrome.css.

3) Add the following lines:

  #urlbar { font-size:25px !important; height:42px !important; }

4) Now restart Firefox.

That's it! You should now get nice, large text in the AwesomeBar. What's cool about this method is that it seems compatible with many themes and add-ons.

Internet Explorer slowly nears 60% market share mark. This time it went down from 61.58 to 60.65, 0.93 point decrease.

In March, Firefox managed to increase its market share by 0.29 point, moving up from 24.23% to 24.52%.

Google Chrome continues to grow steadily; 0.52 point increase this time, up from 5.61% to 6.13%.

Safari has also increased its market share by 0.2 point, from 4.45% to 4.65%.

Opera’s market share also went up by 0.02 point, from 2.35% to 2.37%.

Maxthon team has released a technical preview of Maxthon 3.0 web browser, which now includes a GPU rendering support for smoother text on Web pages.

Here’s an example:

“The current implementation of GPU rendering is merely an initial step. The final version will be more powerful and will support more features”, Jeff Chen, CEO of Maxthon said.

As of today, Firefox 3.7 and Maxthon 3.0 are the only browsers to include GPU accelerator support, with Internet Explorer 9 soon to follow.

Download Maxthon 3.0.

Firefox/Chrome/Opera/Safari (with user script support): The original Helvetireader gave Google Reader a facelift, with a singular font and emphasis on keyboard shortcuts. Helvetireader 2, unofficially released, provides even fewer graphical controls, and the author admits it's not everyone's cup of tea.

Helvetireader's developer has toyed with the idea of releasing Helvetireader 2 as a separate entity, since not everybody might want even more functionality stripped out of Google Reader, with a resulting stronger emphasis on learning all the keyboard shortcuts (visible at any time by entering a "?" key). So before changing everything around, Helvetireader 2 is getting a soft release through Helvetireader's Twitter feed, where you can click to install the mostly finished release as a user script or extension, depending on your browser.

Apple's offered browser-based iTunes previews for a couple of months now, so is there any good reason my browser should show the preview and open iTunes every time I click an iTunes link? We think not; here's how to fix that.

Apple-focused site The Apple Blog details how to stop the iTunes web previews from automatically opening iTunes along with the web preview. (You can always choose to click through to iTunes after you've seen the web-based preview.) The post explains how the pages open iTunes (JavaScript), then the author sets out solutions for various browsers (and they should work whether you're on Windows or OS X), including Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. In Firefox, for example:

Dear Lifehacker,

I've been a huge fan of Firefox for years (prompted in great part by Lifehacker's recommendation), but it seems like Google Chrome has made huge strides lately. My question: Which is better, Chrome or Firefox? Which should I use?

Signed,

Uncertain About My Browser

Dear Uncertain,

Yours is a question we've been hearing more and more lately, and with good reason. The fact is, Google Chrome has fixed a lot of problems with Firefox that most Firefox users didn't even know they had, and Firefox is still working to catch up. (Restart-free extension installation, isolated processes that keep one bad tab from crashing the entire browser, etc.) As a result, Chrome's smart feature set has been winning over a lot of Firefox die-hards.

The answer to your question depends a lot on what operating system you're using, so we'll separate our answers for Windows and Mac users.

If you ever thought previously mentioned Xobni looked cool, but you prefer Gmail to Outlook, free Gmail plug-in Etacts adds many of the same features. You get social information, conversation history, and advanced sending preferences right in your Gmail sidebars.

The Etacts plug-in automatically adds detailed contact information to the sidebar of messages, as shown above, similar to previously mentioned Rapportive, but Etacts takes it one step further. Not only do you get links to any social networks that contact is a part of, and some of the information contained therein (such as their occupation and location), but you also get a detailed summary of your mailing history with them, complete with nice little graphs and charts. All this information is also available in compose mode as well, so you know exactly who you're sending it to.