Firefox 4 Officially Released, Crosses One Million Downloads Within Hours

After a dozen betas, and two release candidates, Mozilla has finally released the public build of Firefox 4. It took nearly a year to come, but now that it’s here, expect it to break all records. With well over five thousand downloads per minute, at the moment, Firefox seems well poised to go past the ten million mark. You can tack Firefox 4 downloads in realtime from glow.mozilla.org.



Although, several planned features were dropped from Firefox 4, as it struggled to stay on schedule, Firefox 4 is a meaty update, which boasts of some pretty significant enhancements.

The user interface has been refined to give the website higher priority. Tabs are now on top (as they should be), and the menu bar has been replaced with a single “Firefox” button.

Firefox 4 is significantly faster than its predecessors, courtesy of the new JagerMonkey JavaScript engine, and should be able to hold its own against the likes of Opera 11, Chrome 10 and Internet Explorer 9. Also new to this build is hardware (GPU) acceleration and WebGL support. Unfortunately, hardware acceleration is currently not supported in Linux. WebGL compatibility means that Firefox is ready to meet the demands of the new age, graphics intensive web-applications and games.

Other new features in Firefox 4 include in-built synchronization option, “Panaroma” tab organization, app tabs, multi-touch support, DNT (Do Not Track) header support, WebM video playback, crash protection for popular plug-ins (Flash, QuickTime, Silverlight etc.), HTML 5 parser, and open type fonts support. The full changelog for Firefox 4 is available here.

Firefox 4 for Windows, Mac and Linux is available in more than seventy languages from firefox.com.

Firefox 5 Concepts Revealed; More Site Specific Features For Apps

Mozilla will be releasing Firefox 4 in the next few weeks. Firefox 4 sports a complete overhaul from the previous versions and is very similar to Google Chrome. However, Mozilla is now working on the next version of Firefox 5 which might be released in late 2011.



CNET got hold of some concept pictures which show the future of the browser. The concept pictures can be seen at http://areweprettyyet.com/5/. One of the big focus of Firefox 5 will be desktop apps which will contain site specific features in them.

For example, if you use the Twitter app, you will see options such as creating a new tweet, checking your direct messages and more. This feature will also be available for other sites like Facebook and IMDb.



Internet Explorer 9 has a similar feature where they allow websites to define tasks when a website is pinned to the taskbar. It is now known yet whether the site specific features in Firefox 5 will have their own tasks or rely on websites to define those tasks.



In addition to the site specific features, Firefox 5 will also have a new visual appearance for the search box, where the color of the button would change based on the search engine the user is using. This color could either be specified by the search engines themselves or will be fetched from the favicon of the search engine.

Firefox 5 will also promote the Firefox Sync option to users so that they can sync their passwords, bookmarks and more in the cloud and use it on any mobile device or PC.



Mozilla will also be revamping it’s add-on manager which is used to install and manage Firefox add-ons in the browser. Firefox 4 introduced a new add-on manager, but it looks like they will be revamping it again in Firefox 5.

These are just some of the key features from Firefox 5 which are available as concepts. It looks like Mozilla will continue building on Firefox 4 and add these new features to it, so the look and feel of Firefox 5 may not be any different than Firefox 4.

So what do you think about the new Firefox 5 concepts? Do you like them? What else would you want to see in Firefox 5? Do share your opinions and views about it.

Firefox and Chrome Browsers to Offer “Do Not Track” Options

Is it broke? Does it need Fixed?


Last month, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a consumer privacy report. The commission is apparently concerned about advertising and tracking cookies, which many consider to be intrusive, but not dangerous. Tracking allows advertisers to target users with custom or localized advertisements. In hopes of fixing this issue, the report suggested that web browser makers should add a “Do Not Track” mechanism.

It’s not surprising that the FTC would suggest something like this. Government bureaucrats are always offering suggestions on how free market economies should be fixed, even when they aren’t broken. However, it is surprising that only a few weeks later, Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome developers have already announced that they’ll be offering “Do Not Track” in future versions of their browsers.

Firefox Support

Alex Fowler, at Mozilla, announced support for Mozilla’s Do Not Track at his blog the other day. He said, “we’re seeking ways to provide Firefox users a deeper understanding of and control over the flow of personal information online. We’re pleased to be able to share one of these efforts today …”.

When a web browser visits a web site, the site asks the web browser for some basic information before displaying the page. This information is transmitted in the “HTTP header”, and the new DNT (Do Not Track) warning will be added to this header. Once this warning is received by a web site, it’s up to them to decide whether or not to attempt to read and place tracking cookies in the browser’s cookie cache.

 

This feature isn’t available yet, however, you can get an addon with the DNT header. Here are some frequently asked questions about DNT at Mozilla.

Chrome Support

Two days ago, the Google Public Policy blog posted an article telling us how they are handling the FTC request for a “Do Not Track” feature in Chrome. They said, “Today we are building on this work, and that of others, by allowing you to permanently opt out of ad tracking from all companies that offer opt-outs through the industry self-regulation programs”.

The Keep My Opt-Outs extension takes advantage of already existing opt-out programs offered by the Network Advertising* Initiative, which includes 50 different web tracking services. Later, an option will be added to the Chrome browser, with no need for an extension.

Conclusions

As usual, a Government agency is looking for problems to fix so they’ll be able to brag that they are useful sometimes. Nobody’s going to dispute their suggestions in this case, and paranoid consumers may actually benefit from this initiative.

It’s not surprising that the browser developers would jump onto the band-wagon. They’ll do anything to avoid provoking government agencies from putting a collar (or noose) around their necks. These browser changes are a cheap solution to a problem that many people didn’t consider as being serious.

Sometimes, an action like this can have unintended consequences. This time, it might be a win for everyone except the advertisers. What effect will these changes have on the web sites which depend on the advertising revenue?

Firefox Multiple Profiles

Creating Firefox Profiles :

Go To Terminal --> Then Type "firefox -ProfileManager" Then Select Option Called "Create Profile" Then Create how many Profiles You Need

Rename Firefox Profiles :

IF You Want Rename After You Can rename Your Profiles Also.


Managing Firefox Profiles :

Right Click On The--> In Command Paste "firefox -P -no-remote" instead of  "Firefox -%u" -->  Then Start firefox You will get this  screen

Deleting Firefox Profiles :


If You Want To Delete any Profile You can delete also


Choose any option from that & Enjoy...

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