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A month after Firefox 3 beta 1, Mozilla has released Firefox 3 beta 2 and available for download here.

What’s new about Beta 2?

Compared to Beta 1, the Firefox 3 Beta 2 has improved location bar that makea the search result easier to be identified. The results for the location bar are shown in 2 lines: page title and web address, in different colors. The matched keyword is bolded and underlined.

Image: Firefox 3 location bar search

You also notice that the Go button at location bar is hidden until you enter a website address in the location bar.

Firefox 3 beta 2 also has a better search panel that allows you search for history, tags, and bookmarks. You can add as many search rules as you like, and save the search as a dynamic folder, much like Thunderbird’s email search.

For more details, check out Firefox 3 beta 2 review.

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I just updated Firefox 2 to version 2.0.0.10 from 2.0.0.9. The minor update fixed 3 bugs to improve the stability of Firefox. No new feature.

On the other hand, Mozilla released the 1st beta version of Firefox 3 at November 19, 2007 — Firefox 3 Beta 1. It is the next generation of Firefox web browser with many new and improved features.

I tried Firefox 3 Beta 1. It looks great but is not compatible with many Firefox add-ons, even tried forcing to be compatible using Nightly Tester Tool. No choice. I reverted to Firefox 2 in just a few minutes.

One shall wait for the final release version of Firefox 3. According to the release roadmap, it will be released at late 2007 or early 2008.

Off topic: Just checked my blog taffic statistic yesterday, 42% site visitors are using Firefox!

browser, firefox, mozilla

Prism is an application that lets you split web applications out of your web browsers and run directly on your desktop. That’s cool isn’t? This means you could add your favorite web applications to your desktop environment. When you need the application, just run directly from your desktop.

This software do more than just a shortcut. According to Alex Faaborg (a staff of Mozilla labs and should be the project leader of this exciting Prism project) claimed that:

By being trapped inside the browser, Web applications are unable to fully integrate with a user’s computing environment, and when accessing Web applications, users are constantly forced to think about what underlying technology the application is based on.

Now with Prism , web users are jumping out from the browser’s trap and it simply allow us to use web applications with desktop experience!

Why use Prism?

The simplest reason of course is no hassle on software installation. You simply integrate the web apps into desktop and it works like desktop apps. Further more, Mozilla labs is working to increase the capabilities of Prism such as support for offline data storage and access to 3D graphics hardware (by using canvas3d in Firefox 3).

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The Mozilla team released a special edition of Firefox called “Firefox Campus Edition“. It combines the Firefox web browser with additional Firefox addons that give you access to music, cool sites and useful research tools.

The Firefox addons are:

• FoxyTunes lets control almost any media player and find lyrics, covers, videos, bios and much more with a click right from your browser
• StumbleUpon lets you channel suft the Internet to find great websites, videos, photos and more based on your interests.
• Zotero helps you collect, manage, and cite your research sources — in the web browser itself.

Download Firefox Campus Edition or

mozilla, firefox, campus, zoterp, foxytunes, stumbleupon

Mozilla Thunderbird is a great email client but it lacks of calendar functionality (scheduling, tasts, etc) like Microsoft Outlook. Lightning is a free calendar extension that tightly integrated with Thunderbird.

The latest version is Lightning 0.5 (download).

Image: Mozilla Lightning calendar

I installed Lightning 0.5 for Thunderbird on Mac. It runs smoothly and automatically import iCal (can import Google calendar with addon). Lightning adds a small calendar view and list of agenda, to-do, and calendars at the bottom of Thunderbird sidebar. It allows seamless switching between email accounts and calendar.

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