Leslie Franke

Today Flock released version 0.9 of their social web browser. Flock was first released with a enormous media hype in 2005 and since then has met with mixed reviews. Since it is based on the Mozilla Firefox codebase many have considered Flock just a Firefox clone that could be duplicated in Firefox by using the right extensions. With this latest version, Flock has finally begun to differentiate itself as a browser. Flock 0.9 includes significant updates to the user interface, better integration with numerous social services, a personalized start page, and an overhaul of the Flock bookmarking system. In addition to its own unique features, Flock also has added a few features that have already appeared in Firefox 2 such as anti-phishing features, inline spell checking, and session restore.
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PicLens is a newly released plug-in for the Mozilla Firefox browser (Windows only), by Cooliris, that lets the user launch a full-screen slideshow while browsing photos on sites such as Flickr. It was first released last year for the Safari browser and can best be described as something similar to the slideshow feature in Picasa. Support for PicLens is currently provided for Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, Picasa, and image search results from Google and Yahoo. In addition, web sites can add support for PicLens to their site by including support for Media RSS.

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TechCrunch is reporting that Google has brought a stake in Maxthon, a free web browser built on top of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer platform. Maxthon is an extremely popular browser in China that uses Baidu as its preferred search engine in China and Yahoo elsewhere.

Likely this means very little for Google’s relationship with Mozilla Firefox. This appears to be a marketing strategy designed to expand Google’s reach into a country where they have not made a large indent into the search marketplace. It is a smart move by Google that should allow Google to enhance their share in China while taking traffic away from Baidu, China’s most popular search engine.

With the new design of this site I have gotten a few reports from Mozilla Firefox users of an annoying black or gray 1px thin horizontal line(s) that displays on the screen after the page has been scrolled up or down (Two examples of this behavior appear at the bottom of this post). These lines appear to occur where the bottom line of a div or iframe is. The problem is that they are not showing up for me and thus I am having a hard time figuring out what the issue is. I believe that this is a bug with Firefox that has been mentioned several times including here.
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The Firefox 3 status meeting minutes have an interesting note. One of the items discuses what extensions should be included in the final release of Firefox 3 as part of the core browser. The list includes numerous extensions such as Firebug, TableTools, and Searchbar Autosizer (note that the full list of nominated extensions is at the end of this post).

I am not a heavy add-on user as I believe that, by default, Firefox provides almost everything needed to browse the web with. Outside of a few extensions, such as the BlueOrganizer and Scrapbook extensions, most of the extensions I use are small add-ons that provide for an increase in browsing efficiency and speed. This is the type of extensions that should be folded into Firefox. Those extensions that have little impact on users who choose not to use them but which provide increased productivity for those who do.

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AdaptiveBlue recently released a new version of their BlueOrganizer Mozilla Firefox extension. As I wrote about in August of last year, BlueOrganizer is a tagging and search tool designed to help organize and bookmark found on the web. It allows for the personalization of content found on sites such as Amazon and eBay, tracking and managing books, movies, music and anything else on the web, providing a more intelligent way to store items which are of interest to you.

Several significant changes have been made for BlueOrganizer 3.2. These changes did not really affect the visual interface of BlueOrganizer but affected the insides of the extension, making it easier to store and organize the information and providing an improved ablity to publish the stored content on the web.

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On the heels of Microsoft’s release of Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla has released the newest version of their Firefox browser. Since the first release of Firefox the browser landscape has changed dramatically, with new versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera resulting in a new sense of competition and browser improvements. Firefox 2.0 continues this trend with several new features and performance enhancements to help it stay at the front of pack.
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