Joel Liu's Library tagged firefox →  View Popular, Search in Google

I tend to use Chrome a lot more, but I always keep Firefox installed and updated as well.

We’re very excited to report that 85% of Firefox 4 users have chosen to install an add-on — that’s more than 60 million users every day! This number doesn’t include Personas, and even excludes popular add-ons bundled with other software that the user hasn’t actively agreed to install.

Firefox 4 desktop add-on usage from March 22 through June 19, 2011, excluding Personas and several commonly-bundled add-ons

When we first saw this number, we expected it to drop as more and more users upgraded to Firefox 4; remarkably, it has stayed between 89% and 85% since launch in March. It’s also interesting to note that on the weekends when Firefox (and Internet) usage slumps, the percentage of users with add-ons increases, indicating those who browse on weekends are more likely to have customized Firefox.

We’ve also learned that on average, users have 5 add-ons installed, with the following distribution:

Firefox 4 desktop add-on distribution from June 19, 2011, excluding Personas and several commonly-bundled add-ons

With more than 2.5 billion downloads and 580 million add-ons in use every day in Firefox 4 alone, there’s no better time to browse our gallery and make Firefox your own.

Probably the most impressive thing (next to the new Add-Ons Builder based on Bespin) was the upcoming Features of Firefox 4:

 
• HTML5 Video display
• Painting with Canvas
• Image manipulation with Canvas – pixel testing, face detection with opencivitas
• Green screen technologies in images and video by detecting pixel colours.
• HTML5 embedded inside SVG (yes!)
• SVG as an IMG
• SVG as a CSS background
• SVG filter/mask/clip
• SVG animations
• Inline SVG inside HTML5
• CSS3 (selectors, @font-face, 2D Transforms, Transitions, Shadow, Gradients ,calculations – calc(2em-10px) )
• APIs: Geolocation, Offline (IndexDB, localStorage, AppCache, FileAPI – binary content of a file input, file drag and drop, web workers, websockets)
• Websockets controller running the presentation from the mobile.
• WebGL

As to upcoming features to the core of Firefox, we heard about:

 
• TraceMonkey (a new Javascript engine)
• Lazy Frame Construction
• Reducing I/O from the main thread
• Improved startup Time
• Hardware accelleration
• GPU text/graphics/video rendering
• Using GPU for text rendering
• JavaScript JIT (JaegerMonkey)
• HTML5 parser running own thread
• slicker interface
• no more modal dialogs
• no startup interuptions
• updates in the background

Besides the API they have published also a little project "Chrome to Phone" that adds a little button in your chrome browser to send whatever page you are currently viewing to your phone. But despite all the nice features of Chrome I still prefer to use Firefox, the Chrome interface still looks too weird to me and in general I know that I Firefox works mostly the way that I want.

So the next step was quite obvious: it was a Sunday with some free time so I created the Send to Phone extension. It was funny but quickly after publishing it I realized that another guy had the same idea and he beat me by 3 minutes, fortunately it seems that none of us have a big ego so we have agreed to merge both extensions, I picked some of his code, added a few extra things and we got now a nicer version for you to enjoy.