When you open a new tab in Firefox a blank page opens up and same happens with IE and Safari. On the other hand Google when it came out with Chrome replaced that blank page with thumbnails of your most recently and commonly visited websites thus giving you a jump to simply click and go on. Opera on the other hand offers “speed dial” feature with user customizable thumbnails for your favorite websites.

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Songbird this week finally made its 1.0 release:

What is Song Bird?
Songbird is an opensource music player build on Mozilla technology, VLC Player & SQLite. Purely based on Mozilla’s Gecko engine, the same engine that powers Firefox. Like Firefox, Songbird allows for tabbed browsing, themes and addtions of add-ons to customize the extendibility of your media player. So far packed with more then 90 Add Ons you can customize SongBird as you want.

“Songbird promises to be the Firefox of media players” according to Aaron Boodman, Greasemonkey.

SongBird is currently in its early stages but have a very active development teams, this week they released there 1.0 release, powered with an addition in features, performance according to their blog post

• Drastically Faster Search: Searching in Songbird is now anywhere from 10x faster for small libraries to 1000x for large ones.
• Reduced RAM Usage: There’s a 70% reduction in RAM usage when importing and using large (100,000 track) libraries.
• Faster Media Importing: Importing media into Songbird is now 2-4x faster.
• Reduced Startup Times: Large library users (10,000 tracks or more) will notice that Songbird startup times are now twice as fast.
• Efficient Scrolling: Scrolling through your library now uses half the amount of CPU.
• Snappier Sorting: Sorting your library is now 3-4x faster, which adds up to significantly smoother browsing when scrolling and filtering.
• Optimized DB Size: We’ve optimized the database in Songbird and reduced its size by, on average, 60%. This leads to a variety of performance improvements throughout the application.
• Fewer Crashers: We’ve worked hard to identify and fix 11 of the most common crashes in Songbird.

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Mozilla Corp on Tuesday released Ubiquity an experiment to connect web with a language or a command line to run daily tasks more quickly and more easily. Ubiquity is a sort of a Mozilla plugin which helps in creating command lines for different web tasks or you can say which can help you create mashups that get activated on the commands you set for it.

What really Ubiuquity is ?

According to Mozilla the main goal of Ubiquity is to give users the power to create mashups that can fetch data of there choice with a single command from different websites. It can be a sort of web agent that instead of forcing you to search will get data of your choice from your recommended web properties. With Ubiuquity you can set up commands to manipulate web tasks like mapping, translation, shopping or retrieving entries from Wikipedia, Yelp or Google Maps any many more.

What can i do with Ubiquity ?

If you happen to plan vacation your process of planning would be to first search the list of good vacation spots, then you would find about air fares and available flights, then hotel reservation and compare their price and then of course you want to fetch the map of the location along with pictures of the spot this kind of task can consume allot of your time. For each task you make searches, sort and compare records. But with ubiquit you can simply set up a command line stating ‘vacation’ and create mashup that will fetch data from various websites of your choice including vacation spots, air fares, hotel reservation, and Google maps of the location with just one command line ‘vacation’ & help you compare and make descions. Thus instead of spending more time on search you can create your own web agent that will perform all such tasks for you.

How to install configure Ubiquity ?

The current version is prototype and is available at Mozilla website for free download, you can follow their tutorial to install the application here.

Mac Users > You’ll need to install Growl. This is a Mac OS X system extension that applications can use to display unobtrusive transparent messages. Ubiquity uses Growl notifications to show you the output of commands and tell you about errors.

Windows Users > On Windows (XP and later), you don’t need to install anything special, as Ubiquity will use the operating system’s built-in “toaster”-style pop-up messaging.

Linux Users >On Linux, we don’t have a good messaging system yet. If you have a suggestion for how Ubiquity can display messages on Linux (preferably in a way that will work on all major distros and window managers), please tell us about it.

Source Mozilla Labs, Ubiquity Tutorials

Oh yes Firefox3 broke the Guinness world record, well of course they did it reason being there is no other record to broken so no matter how many downloads they got the Guinness world record was to be made.

So Mozilla Firefox did make a Guinness world record of the most downloaded software within 24hours. The number of downloads went up to 7378216. But there is bit confusion on that as well. If you check on the home page of spreadfirefox on the right top you will find a heading with blue background stating Firefox downloads : 579137807 [check here] & if you look on the world record page with the map of the world you will find downloads : 7378216.[check here]

So which is the actual value & this does put doubts in its authentication as well.

FireFox 3 Review

Apart from that most important promise of the Firefox was fullfilled with the new version, yes Firefox3 is much faster then Firefox2 & Internet Explorer. The new tabs & new windows open really quickly.

The interface is more mature and decent not bad indeed, some hidden and interesting feature have been added one of my favorite  is the ability to drag any image from a website to a folder on your desktop no need to use save image as.

The Website ID feature is quite cool and protects from phishing and help authenticate the sites who have purchased certificates for authentication like paypal, ebay. This feature has been added to the Firefox’s new Smart Location bar. The location bar has been the core focus of development, and have integrated three great features to it, one was the website ID click on the favicon on location bar and you can see its ID to verify its authentication. Second you can simple bookmark any site with only one click by clicking the star on the location bar or usding [ctr + d]. Thirdly once you type your address there is a list of recomendation which do have a flaw as it shows the Title of the site and its URL and sometimes its difficult to find the exact URL.

Apart from more on the features can be checked out at Mozilla Firefox3 Features

Mozilla’s has released Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 an email application which is more powerful than ever. The new version launched is packed with some of the awesome features.

Enhancement with Mail Management
One of the core enhancement to the thunderbird updated version is the new enhancements to help better manage inbox. Thunderbird has added advanced folder views, you can now view your folders as by favorites, recently viewed or unread messages. You can also creat your own folders and organize them the wan you want. Another exciting thing added by Mozilla is “Message Tagging” it will help you tag messages like to-do, to reply, ignored, you can create as many tags as you want and tags can be combined with search views easy to search & find and managed. Apart from these two Message history navigation has been introduced i.e. you can navigate just like your browser with “Foward” & “back” buttons.

Enhanced Search Facility.
The tagging feature will no doubt help alot in searches as we do remeber tags. This version has also made reasonable improvement to the search features. The quick search  which starts showing messages while you type is one cool thing. You can also save your searches into a folder.

Updates & Safety , Security.
Thunderbird 2 has been updated to provide more informative and relevant message alerts containing sender, subject and message text for newly arrived messages. Folders provide a pop up summarizing new messages in that folder. Apart from all this Thunderbird has all improved

• Easy Integration of Gmail and other web mail accounts
• Added Phishing Protection
• Auto Blocks for remote images in email
• Updated the Junk mail filter
• Auto Updater to update for security updates
• add ons in Thunderbird can provide functionality to make VOIP calls, listen to music and much more ..
• Add auto message templates like “out to vacations message”

Mozilla Firefox our favorite browser who’s market share has reached 21.1% this year have  reveled its plans of the new Mobile Firefox Browser. So far Opera has been the leader and major market player in Mobile Browsing, but with Mozilla coming in with its tremendous marketing support from Google things are going to go tough for Opera. Its to early to make a statement on that regard. So far Mozilla has unveiled the first designs of the there user interface for the Mobile Browser. The design has been made keeping two major audiences together one who have a PDA’s and smart phones with touch screen and the other with screen navigation from keypads.

The main window looks very clean with a thin title bar, a main toolbar that can be hidden by tapping on the title bar and features a refresh/stop button, a location/search bar and Firefox 3-style star/bookmarks button.

Ref : Mozilla