Ali Kuru

Firefox has a feature called “Inspect Element” for inspecting elements on a web page. It allows you to dig deeper in both the HTML and CSS code of a web page and lets you understand the inspected elements position and styling information in the structure. Today, while inspecting the branding features of Johnson&Johnson’s YouTube page, I’ve noticed a “3D” button on the “Inspect Element” bar and found that it takes the experience in a whole new level :)

After a search, learned that it’s been around since de v11 beta and migrated to the v11 stable after testing. If you are interested in learning HTML and CSS, you should try Firefox’s 3D inspection. You can see how browsers implement the code, in a fun way :)

I’m using Firefox for almost 6 years now – since the v1.0 – and consider myself a fan but, after the 4th stable, I’m thinking that it may be the time for me to migrate to a better browser, like Chrome. Actually this is not the first time I’m thinking to switch to Chrome, which attracted my attention even from it’s initial release. Only thing preventing me is its lack of native proxy management, particularly SOCKS support. Hope they implement that future soon and save me from Firefox.

Anyway, here are the problems I’m encountering with Firefox 4 so far:

• It is slow.
  I read everywhere how fast Firefox 4 is, beats this on X test, smokes that on Y etc. Unfortunately, this is not the case for me. In my experience, Firefox 4 is a memory hungry piece of junk. I don’t care how fast is its new javascript engine or how effective its fancy hardware acceleration techniques, if it needs to consume more than half of the installed memory on my system to do that. I’m getting hard time to understand how a software, which drives the system to a swapping death, can be considered “fast”?
  I know, Firefox may seem slower to me because of my old PC and the plugins I’m using, but I’m not going to accept these as excuses. If I’m able to use the latest version of Chrome (+plugins) without any problems on the same computer and was satisfied with the performance of the previous version of Firefox, it’s the Mozilla to blame, not my PC.
• It fails to render Helvetica fonts correctly.
  Although it has been a known issue in the beta releases, looks like Mozilla didn’t care to fix it in the stable. Annoying.
• F6 is not working.
  I like using keyboard shortcuts and F6 was one of my favorites. It’s function was ( and still is on other major browsers like Safari, Chrome and Opera) to highlight the address bar for input. Now it only selects the current tab. Useless and annoying.

This is the most beautiful and clever design (with projected desktop and keyboard, integrated bluetooth/IR dongle which doubles as an haptic controller – awesome!) for a mobile phone I’ve seen so far.

Unfortunately it’s just a concept and, since it’s designed by Billy May of Mozilla, we will never have a chance to see it in its physical form, probably not even a prototype. Being created by Mozilla Labs is not the only reason we will not see a phone like this anytime soon, there is also another big problem: nobody currently has a reliable battery technology to feed this greedy piece of machinery – well, not at least for a day :)

Here is what Mozilla Labs post says;

How does this relate to Mozilla / Mozilla Labs?

• Billy is a community member in the Mozilla Labs community and created Seabird in his spare time. Seabird is not a Mozilla or Mozilla Labs project but part of the Mozilla Labs Concept Series. The Concept Series provides a place for the wider community to create and collaborate on projects which push the boundaries of the Web and the browser.

Does Mozilla have plans to produce a mobile phone?

• No. Mozilla produces Firefox for Mobile, the popular Firefox browser for mobile phone systems such as Nokia Maemo and Android.

You must see the impressive video presentation of the concept phone after the break. (more…)

Just noticed Bespin, a collaborative browser based code editor from Mozilla Labs, which announced last week. The idea of an online editor is not new, but this one looks pretty cool even in its very early 0.1 version. It has those must have features like code highlighting, and you can access your whole codebase wherever you want, share and work with whoever you want. I strongly suggest watching the screencast below to understand its features and discover its cleverly designed user interface.

[via: siberkültür]