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We have a National anthem, a National Song, a National Animal, but for the first time India has a national browser - Epic web browser. Yup! built on Firefox, modified and tweaked by the developers of Hiddden Reflex, an India based startup, Epic Browser aims to meet the needs of the ever growing number of Indian web users.

A majority of web users in India still think that IE is the only way to connect to the online world. Most of them are still not aware of either Firefox or any other free or opensource alternatives. This is where Epic browser might prove to be very useful in both improving the browsing experience as well as educating the Indian users about alternate FOSS technologies.

Although the browser is not open source at the moment but in a talk with linuxers, Alok Bharadwaj, CEO of Hidden Reflex, said that some of their code is not open, but as a believer in open source development the company is planning to open source the whole thing soon.

Firefox with its addon family is already a complete browser, what else could have been added to improve the experience? Epic here introduces a sidebar which resides apps/widgets to provide quick access to various web/native system services. They may look like just another way to represent addons but the aim is a little different.

Applications like, built-in word processor, an Anti-virus(Epic is the first browser to boast about this capability), support for indian languages are specifically designed keeping in mind an average Indian web user.

Not just this, while talking to us, Alok even mentioned that the big picture is to take this firefox derivative to another step, which in browser's terminology means a road to a complete browser based operating system. He said 

In terms of moving things to the cloud, we also believe in that future. Epic is itself a step in that direction with things like our File Backup App and you'll see some more akin leaps in that direction from us in the future.

This initiative by the startup reminds me of Ubuntu. How it adopted the giant Debian OS and is now the most widely used Linux Distribution. A sad news for Linuxers though - it runs on only windows now .

There are still a lot of improvements to be done in the browser.  It certainly has a long way to go before rising as a competitive participant in the browser wars. But their initiative of taking Firefox to the next level and the attempt to introduce the biggest democracy in the world to open source technologies is marvellous. This is just the first release and as a fresh startup, we can expect a lot from these guys in later versions.

With Firefox 4 first beta release, comparisons have already started to see which browser is better in both speed and performance. Simon Mackie of WebWorkerDaily used the Mozilla's Dromaeo testing suite to get the stats and although this beta scores twice more than the Firefox 3.6, it continues to walk in the slow lane, relatively.

Before you start judging Firefox, let me remind you that this is just a beta release, there are still a lot of things to come and as far as the test stats are concerned, first of all pure Javascript speed is not a complete measure of performance and the new JS engine, JägerMonkey, has not yet landed in the beta, which will give a boost to JS performance.

So, lets not make judgements based on this beta release. We are already looking at improvement in the JS performance even without the new engine. And speed is not a complete measure of usability and performance, although its important and ofcourse developers are working very hard to make Firefox 4 as fast as possible.

Simon also ran the Peacekeeper Test but Firefox 4 doesn't show much improvement over 3.6 there.

Recently there have been a growing craze for Chrome browser and why not? Chrome scores highest in every test. We are all influenced by stats and speed but we forget that in the end Software experience is what counts. With its addons capability and the new UI improvements, Firefox is more than just speed and stats. Finally I would like to quote a statement from this comment 

I’m also quite certain that if, for example, Firefox 4 Final was the fastest browser on the planet – inevitably the next nightly of Chromium or Opera would edge it out. It’s going to be an indefinite battle for supremacy.

Its Firefox time people, after all this wait, the first Beta of Firefox 4 is available now . Firefox 4 aims to bring more for both end users and web developers and its clearly visible with this beta release. Hardware acceleration for HD quality HTML5 videos, the plugin protective feature is now supported on all platforms, web sockets, new addon manager and a lot more. So, while you are downloading it, let me show you some of its features.

UI Improvements

In case you have not been in touch with the development plans of Firefox 4, one of the primary focus for this release was to come up with a sleak interface, introduction of incontent UI waving good-bye to dialog boxes.

In order to improve the UI, the windows version got a Facelift by moving the tabs at the top(like Chrome does) to save space.This feature will soon be introduced in Mac and Linux.

Addon Manager

Probably the best example of this incontent UI is the new and improved Addon Manager.

Improved Privacy

Remember we talked about browser fingerprinting a few months ago. One of the primary tool to do so was a user's history. Just imagine, hundreds of thousands of URLs combined with a lot of other such stuff(screen-size, fonts etc.) are enough to identify a host. This problem has been taken care of in the new Firefox 4. Now, websites won't be able to browse through your history, thus maintaining your privacy. Great Job! Firefox Devs.

Hardware acceleration and WebM support

The WebM technology has been adopted by various websites as a solution to HTML5 videos; the biggest being Youtube ofcourse. And with this beta release you can watch hardware-accelerated, super-smooth, HD-quality HTML5 video on YouTube using the new WebM format.

Addon Improvements for both Users and Developers

From this Beta, you can forget about the days when you had to restart the browser to install a new Addon. With the new and powerful Jetpack SDK addon development is quicker and simpler now.

A lot for Web Developers

The new Firefox 4 has HTML5 parser, Web sockets, IndexedDB to provide offline storage, a web console to let you take a look at Dynamic websites. Check out the full list of web technologies supported by this Beta.

Performance Improvements

Developers have worked on improving the responsiveness at browser startups and page loads. As they say, "This is just the beginning for performance improvements in Firefox4". There is a lot to come and if you want to help improve your favourite browser, do provide feedbacks. This time they even have a great way to take user feedbacks, using a pre-installed addon.

Check out the release notes for more changes and improvements.

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was one of the great leaders who played a prominent role in the Independence of India. One of the many famous things about him is this quotation, "Give me blood and I will give you freedom", basically fight with me and I will assure your freedom. Talking about a freedom fighter at the beginning of a firefox article doesn't seem to be the expected start but if you think about it, Firefox has always been like a leader, fighting for the Internet Freedom, with a similar motto, "Surf with me and I will show you Freedom".

No doubt, Microsoft's Internet Explorer was the first and the most prominent web browser to bring the world of Internet to people but Firefox was the one who acquainted them with true web experience. If I were to tell the one biggest difference between an IE and Firefox user, it would probably be that only a Firefox user has heard and understands the power of the word "Web Browser".

I have seen a lot of IE users and no matter how much time they spend on Internet, all they know is that there are some very cool and beautiful websites out there. They don't even have the slightest hint that there is something so powerful sitting between them and the web. A firefox user knows it and respects it.

You can even try it out, go to an IE user and tell him about Firefox, its capabilities, features and ofcourse the amazing cuztomization power provided by its huge addon family. Now, just look at his face. It is a feeling of surprise cum happiness cum regret to what he has been missing this whole time. It doesn't sound like the freedom I have been talking about, but is definitely an essence of it.

Firefox is not just about the web experience or Internet Freedom, it has shown this world, the power of an open source software brought to glory by its hard working developers and amazing community. It is fair to say that Firefox is the most popular cross-platform FOSS of all time.

Around a month ago, I wrote about the dawn of Firefox's era but when I read about the two billion addons downloaded, all I was thinking how stupid I could be to question its future.

Lately, Firefox has been accused of falling behind other browsers in terms of performance and speed but just look at its customization capabilities. It is by far the most flexible browser out there. And with the upcoming version, the "falling behind" won't be an issue anymore.

Firefox has always been for its users and something with such a large community behind it is not going anywhere. So, lets give a salute to this brilliant software which has shown and given us the best  web experience we could ever imagine.

For those people using XMarks and NoScript in Firefox who are having issues with the latest update not being allowed to sync here's a solution I've found. Other solutions may be available. I am using Linux Mint 8 XFCE with Firefox 3.6.6.

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So, if you have been wishing for a long time to run Firefox on your iPhone, then there is a chance that your wish may come true, not completely, sort of. Thats because the application submitted by Mozilla, Firefox Home, is not another version of Firefox for Mobile, Fennec, its rather a window to access your Firefox world, making sure that you don't miss any of your bookmarks, open tabs on other firefox etc

Back in May, Mozilla announced that they are working to launch a Firefox browser for Apple's iPhone. But since the Apple's software development kit prohibits a competitive browser, Mozilla couldn't have come up with a complete browser to replace Safari. So, the only solution was to come up with an iPhone version of Firefox (rather than the other way), which with the enable the users to fetch their Firefox data from other devices on their iPhone, using Firefox Sync.

Firefox Sync, previously known as Weave Sync, syncs users data - open tabs, history, saved passwords, bookmarks, securely on a cloud which can be later accessed or downloaded by the user using the same application.

Firefox sync is the backbone of Firefox Home. It provides a user with all his synced data - open tabs across all his Firefox installations (desktops, laptops, office/home), bookmarks, history etc.

This way while using your iPhone, you won't miss the tabs open on your Office computer(running firefox) or the bookmarks on your Home computer.

Ofcourse, to see the best results you will need to install the Firefox Sync addon on all your firefox installations.

Mozilla submitted Firefox Home to Apple's app store yesterday. Its a fair chance that it should be accepted, but no one knows how much time Apple will take to accept or reject it, could be days, weeks, months . We will keep you updated with the result.

Firefox developers are planning to bring some very productive changes in the next version of their mobile browser, Fennec 2.0. This upcoming browser will support Hardware accelerated rendering and out of process web content. Mark Finkle wrote in a post about the inclusion of Project Layers and Project Electrolysis which will enable these two powerful features in the next Firefox for Mobile.

Firefox for Mobile, codenamed Fennec, is a Firefox web browser for ARM devices. As of now Fennec officialy supports only Nokia N900 running Maemo 5. Their decision to stick to only smartphones enables as well as challenges them to make the best use of the technology in the devices and provide a great User Experience.

Out of Process WebContent

These two projects will be making an appearance in Fennec for the first time. We have already seen the magic of Project Electrolysis in the form of out of process plugins in Firefox 3.6.6. But this was just a taste of its power. Electrolysis aims to use separate processes for the browser UI, web content and plugins. And this is what developers are planning to include in Fennec 2.0. Since, its not all about plugins anymore, instead of oopp they are named out-of-process/OOP Tabs.

As far as implementation goes, work is going on to complete the Phase II of Fennec OOP-Tabs.

Electrolysis is not all about using a separate process for everything to prevent crashing or freezes; they have a big impact on the speed, stability and security of the browser.

• Since, the webpages will be isolated(running in different processes) and if an Operating system runs them at lower privileges, it will be difficult for an attacker to compromise the system.
• Since we are talking about multiple processes, we can divide the work among separate processes and make use of the multiple processor cores available to speed up the task.
• Using separate processes, a crashed or high CPU consuming web page or plugin can be very easily isolated and terminated without affecting the browser.

This has been well explained by Benjamin Smedberg.

We can hope for multiprocess webcontent to be included in the first alpha, arriving soon.

Hardware Rendering

Another important feature will be the integration of Project Layers which will enable hardware rendering on mobiles and removal of the custom build canvas-tile-cache rendering solution. As stated by Mark.

Layers supports a “retained mode” rendering system, which means the application can drop the canvas-tile-cache system and use traditional XUL <browser> elements for the browsing surface.

From the Fennec 2.0 planning document, there are plans to provide better integration for Android mobile devices too. We have already seen a pre-alpha release of Fennec for Android, so its fair to say that by the time 2.0 releases, Fennec will be supporting various mobiles running Android.

There are going to be various UI changes in Fennec 2.0 but no doubt the major attaraction will be the added support for Android and inclusion of the two projects to improve the performance, stability and speed of this Firefox Mobile browser.

Problem

Sometimes you’ll get a dialog box that pops up saying that firefox is already running when you know in fact that it isn’t.

Firefox Already Running Dialog Box

Solution

This is typically caused by the existence of 2 files in your ~/.mozilla/firefox/<profile> directory. For example in my case:

1
2
3

% ls -la ~/.mozilla/firefox/rhwevaqa.default/|egrep "lock |lock$"
lrwxrwxrwx  1 tstacct users       16 2010-06-22 18:49 lock -> 127.0.1.1:+11131
-rw-r--r--  1 tstacct users        0 2010-06-22 18:49 .parentlock

Just delete these 2 files and firefox should start right up.

References

For more info about Firefox startup issues check out this mozilla FAQ

NOTE: For further details regarding my one-liner blog posts, check out my one-liner style guide primer.

We use web for our day to day activites, most of which we want to be secret - Financial transactions, private conversations, emails etc. HTTPS makes sure that nobody is able to steal your personal data, by encrypting it. Even though most of the websites are shifting to HTTPS, they still have some holes which rebound you to unencryption.

Electronic Frontier Foundation and The Tor Project have collaborated to bring a new Firefox addon - HTTPS Everywhere, which aims to make your daily web life safer.

Sometimes the websites which support SSL encryption defaults to unencrypted websites or an encrypted page will be filled with insecure unencrypted (http) links. This is what HTTPS Everywhere tries to fix for you. It will rewrite every request to these websites to HTTPS. Ofcourse the third-party/external links might not be supporting encryption, in such cases the addon won't be able to help you.

We are all aware of the secure web search Google introduced a while back, but it defaults to unencrypted search engine. One will have to deliberately use HTTPS  to use secure search. HTTPS Everywhere defaults this for you.

HTTPS Everywhere already supports a number of websites including Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, Paypal, The NewYork Times, The Washington Post and more. If you want to define other domains to be redirected to HTTPS you can easily do that by writing your own ruleset.