Firefox Mobile Inches Towards 1.0, Sheds Flash Support

Article updated 1/28/2010 at 8:50 am PT with a comment from Adobe and at 9:45 am with more news from Firefox.

It's been a long slog getting Firefox Mobile off the ground, but on Wednesday, Mozilla announced a third release candidate for its mobile browser. (Our First Look video gives an overview of RC2, the previous version.) Once code-named Fennec, Firefox 1.0 for Nokia's Maemo platform is achingly close.

Or is it? Firefox for Maemo 1.0 RC3 may signal that we're one step closer to getting a full-fledged Firefox browser on a mobile device, but the app has also taken a step back since RC2 emerged two weeks ago, shedding support for the Adobe Flash plug-in that Mozilla said in a blog post "degraded the performance of the browser to the point where it didn't meet our standards."

The plug-in is not the same as an extension or add-on, Mozilla stresses. Support for extensions like Weave remain intact in Firefox for Maemo 1.0 RC3. Mozilla does go on to point out that power testers can still manually turn on experimental plug-in support using about:config.

An Adobe spokesperson contacted CNET to add that "the "Adobe Flash plug-in" referenced was Flash version 9 for desktop Linux. This version of the runtime was not really optimized for mobile platforms, and as such we wouldn't expect it to perform perfectly."

There will be workarounds in place by the time the general release surfaces, which Mozilla told NET in an interview on Thursday could be as soon as this Friday. Mozilla showed us a test version of an add-on created by an in-house developer to enable Flash for YouTube videos. In the short term, users could see an extension in Firefox 1.0 for Maemo for enabling the Flash plug-in across all sites, plus individual workaround extensions like the currently unnamed YouTube add-on for enabling Flash for the more popular sites or videos.

The third Firefox release candidate does fix some performance bugs and should reduce the amount of crashing that testers have noticed. You can download Firefox for Maemo RC3 for the Nokia N900 or N810 Internet tablet, though if RC2 is already installed, expect Mozilla's automatic update.

Mozilla hinted that the general Firefox release could be as soon as Friday, bundled with one of these workaround plug-ins. That's a start. We would rather see a workaround or even a fourth release candidate than see Mozilla rush to complete Firefox before it's truly ready for the public, and for its voracious consumption of Flash sites.

Source:

http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10443090-12.html?tag=mncol

Web Site Design

SpaceTime - Your 3D Search at The Speed of Thought!

What is 3D search? It’s quite simple and yet a bit tricky to explain the concept. While constantly surfing on the web, from one link to the other, you keep opening new pages on new windows or say in newer tabs. This process keeps on going until you fall prey to boredom and finally stop your browsing activity. By this time you realize that you've opened many, in fact lots of windows/tabs and simply loaded your system with a huge number of web pages. You end up closing all the web pages all at one go!

Aren't you tired of all this? Don't you want to save your time, your space? Well, I do. I definitely don't want to lose my time on all the very assorted sites on the World Wide Web that my Browser keeps me popping up at me.

SpaceTime is a next generation, innovative browser which claims to search at the speed of thought. It claims to give you the experience for the future of the web.

It allows you to watch all your information at one space and at the same time. Now, you must be wondering as to how they do that. It's quite simple, the space which I'm talking about is the three dimensional space, the 3D Space. Yes, SpaceTime has come up with the 3D search of the web, for text and for images.

Have they come up with a new search engine?

No, certainly not. What SpaceTime does is that, when ever you search for any specific content on the web, it opens up different instances of all the links which the search page provides you. So, are they not again eating up the Space?

No, in fact SpaceTime occupies that part of the 3D space which was so far never used. We have been viewing the web; in it's two dimensional spaces alone. And that's the difference of SpaceTime.

It has also introduced the 3D Tabbed browsing. It utilizes the space between each web page and thus facilitates you to view multiple web pages at the same time. Shuffling the web pages from one to the other is now not one click after the other, but is just a simple mouse over from one view to the other on the time line provided below.

And yes, interesting news for all those you have been using eBay for all your daily needs. You can also have an eBay search and the search results are viewed in an easy to view elegant 3D arrangement. The days of mining through pages with tiny thumb-nails, in an effort to find the item you've been looking for, now no longer seem to exist. SpaceTime’s three dimensional layouts of the web pages is perhaps one of the most amazing improvements to aid in navigating the web.

As far as performance goes, it does consume more memory than Internet Explorer, but then there is simply no comparison to Firefox, as Firefox seems to take memory and never give it back. The time to load is only a split second slower than the usual browser but the lost time is made up with SpaceTime’s simultaneous search results.

This browser is definitely worth a look, and probably something that wouldn’t hurt to install; however, there are a few minor features that have gone overlooked such as a feature to search text on a particular web page, but I feel, that’s why they call it beta. And yes, SpaceTime is available for PC-users alone and not Macs.

Source:

http://www.neobinaries.com/tabid/56/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/539/Default.aspx

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