Review: Tracer

One feature I really like with Chrome is when opening a new tab, you are provided with Thumbnails of your recently/most visited sites to select from as seen in this Chrome screenshot.

This is something that is still in development with Firefox and the developer as experimenting several ways to accomplish this. In the meantime there is Trace, an add-on which replicates the behaviour of Chrome’s new tab interface plus some other enhancements (choose from Stickies, Most Visited or Recently Visited as well as a list of recently closed tabs). The thumbnails are served by ShrinkTheWeb.com. A couple issues have been posted on AMO about this addon in regards to ShrinkTheWeb service. One being the thumbnails can at times be slow to load. You can however specify another thumbnail provided. Further, the developer for ShrinkTheWeb has been trying to contact the addon developer in regards to continuing to offer the service due to the rather large increase in usage. The latter could be one the reasons why the addon is still marked as Developmental.

Tracer is about 27 KB and works with Firefox 1.5-3.0.* (but can be forced to work with 3.1*). You will need an AMO account to download this add-on.

Source: Mozilla Links

Fx 3.1 Private Browsing

One of the more popular new features in Firefox 3.1 is the Private Browsing feature. Private Browsing means the sites you visit (while in Private Browsing mode) will not appear in the browser history or search history, and won’t leave other traces, like cookies. This is already a feature (Incognito) with Google Chrome browser, however unlike Chrome, Firefox’s Private Browsing works a little lot (at least when it comes to activating).

Claus (Grand Stream Dreams) pointed me to the Mozilla Links article: Meet Firefox private mode…

“Once confirmed, Firefox will save and close your current session and restart in Private Browsing mode. The only hint of this are the words (Private Browsing) displayed next to the window title.

Once you’ve finished, just click back on Private Browsing in the Tools menu. Your session will be restored as it was before entering private mode immediately or, if you exit Firefox (or crash), the next time you start it.

So, yes, there is no way to have normal and private mode windows or tabs at the same time. As Ehsan Akhgari (who’s worked on the implementation for the last ten months) explains, it would require deeper architectural changes to Firefox that may or may not occur in a future release.”

At least with Chrome activating Incognito via CTRL+SHIFT+N opens a new Window all in that Window are Incognito, whilst you regular browsing  is still sitting in the background. Not sure how private browsing would work in the future IE8.

Private Mode is now in the nightly Firefox 3.1 releases and can be obtained (at your own risk) via the Mozilla FTP site.

Release Recap: November Week 1

Just Released

No New Releases during this week.

Schedule this Coming Week

Firefox 2.0.0.18 - November 12th
Firefox 3.0.4 - November 12th

Future Release

• MU Firefox 2.0.0.18 >> Firefox 3.0.4 - No Earlier than November 24th
• Firefox 2.0.0.19 - December 16th
• Firefox 3.0.5 -  December 16th
• Firefox 3.1b2 – November 21st
• Thunderbird 2.0.0.18 – November 19th
• Shredder (Thunderbird) 3b1 – TBD