Schedule your Email with RightInbox Extension

Firefox/Chrome: Right Inbox is an extension for Chrome and Firefox that works with your Gmail account to schedule emails for sending later, much like Boomerang, but free and simpler.

Scheduling emails could be helpful for quite a few reasons. One example is that you might know the recipient gets to their desk at around 10am, so you could schedule your email to be delivered at some point around that time. Otherwise, your important message could become buried by all of the other emails that the person has gotten since you wrote it.

The add-on places a "Send Later" button in Gmail with options to schedule the email in 1, 2, or 4 hours or select a specific date and time and, optionally, time zone. It's very straightforward and intuitive—and useful. Use it to send yourself reminders or send emails to others at just the right time.

Overall the app is lightweight and definitely worth installing and you might start seeing faster responses from the people you’re emailing if you start thinking about the best time to fire that important message off. If you want this feature and a whole host of others, definitely check out Boomerang, which is a paid alternative.

>>Install RightInBox for Chrome & Firefox

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Mozilla Shows off Previews of FireFox for Tablets

Fire Fox for Tablet

Mozilla has offered a first glimpse of its Firefox for Tablets web browser.

Mozilla is expanding development of Firefox for Android with new efforts to improve its performance, lower its power consumption, adapt it for tablets--and keep the browser maker relevant in the hottest area of computing.

Firefox is the second-most widely used browser on computers, but things are different in the mobile arena. There, Firefox is at a serious disadvantage compared to mobile browsers such as Apple's Safari and Google's unbranded Android browser that are built into the operating systems.

The company described the new product as “an evolution of its phone based predecessor, with some added enhancements that take advantage of a tablet’s larger screen size,” in a blog post.

From what we can see (which is admittedly not much at this point), that seems to be a pretty good description. The tablet version has room for more UI elements, such as a row of tabs, unlike Firefox for mobile. A tab menu appears on the left side of the screen in landscape mode or on the top of the screen in portrait mode.

Theme-wise, the browser heavily borrows from Honeycomb, Android’s operating system for tablets. But you’ll still find familiar Firefox elements, including a big back button and Firefox’s signature “Awesomebar” — a URL field that also searches bookmarks, history and synched desktop activity.

When Mozilla programmer Dave Mandelin began an active discussion about what Firefox needs to run better on ARM processors, which dominate the phone and tablet market, a broad, active discussion took off. Mandelin wasn't very gentle.

"If you have a powerful device, Firefox performance is in many ways pretty good. But UI [user interface] responsiveness and memory usage seem to be in pretty bad shape," Mandelin said. "So we need to get better measurements and start improving performance in those areas, today."

And Mozilla, barred from bringing its browser to major mobile operating systems such as Apple's iOS and Microsoft's Windows Phone, is moving beyond browsers, too.

"Smartphones and tablets are where the next billion people will expect their personalized experience to be available to them anytime, anywhere," Mozilla said in its vision statement that Mozilla Vice President of Products Jay Sullivan published earlier this year. "To significantly affect Internet life in the future, we will have to deliver value on major OSes, whether we are allowed to ship our own browser engine or not."

Some Glimpses of Mozilla Fire Fox On Tablet.. 

 
Mozilla has still not announced a release date.

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Mozilla Launches Firefox 6

Firefox 6.0

Firefox 6 is available for download today, and Mozilla wants developers to know the release includes some special tools just for them.

There aren’t any major interface tweaks in Firefox 6; you’ll pretty much be seeing the same browser you’re used to already. Some of the user-facing changes include a highlighted URL in the address bar, easier access to Firefox Sync and some performance enhancements. The new release also gives users a new permissions tool that lets them set permissions for saved passwords, pop-ups and cookies on a site-by-site basis.

For developers, the most significant additions to Firefox 6 are the element, which displays system progress bars for tasks in progress; touch events, which support touchscreen functionality; and server-sent events, which allow server-side script to generate client-side events accompanied with data.

Mozilla has also brought back WebSockets. WebSockets enable interactive communication between the browser and the server and are used for chat and gaming programs, among others.

Another new feature in Firefox 6 is the Window.matchMedia API. “This is basically the media queries equivalent to querySelector, matchesSelector and friends,” writes Mozilla engineer David Baron. Simply put, the API will help you optimize your website or mobile web app across a range of devices and operating systems.

In the browser itself, Mozilla has added a new Web Developer menu that should help with creating and debugging sites from the browser. From this menu, you can access the new Scratchpad tool, an interactive JavaScript prototyping environment that allows you to enter, execute, test and refine JavaScript snippets in the browser. Mozilla has also improved the Web Console, giving it auto-complete features and customizable console location.

You can check out other changes for developers at Hacks.Mozilla.org.

The roll-out also included some improvements to Firefox for Android, including tablet-optimized interface features, a new homepage, better image rendering and a more “Android” look and feel overall.

Firefox 6 comes quite swiftly on the heels of its predecessors. Firefox 5 only launched near the end of June 2011, and Firefox 4 made its debut just months before in the spring.

What’s new in Firefox 6?

The most notable addition to this new release are the<progress> element, touch events, Server-Sent Events as well as the return of WebSockets.

The <progress> element

<progress value="0.4"></progress>

<progress value="60" max="100"></progress>

<progress></progress>

view rawprogress.htmlThis Gist brought to you by GitHub.

This element can be used to give a visual cue of something in progress in the page. System progress bars are being used, which means that users of MacOS and Linux will see something different than what is pictured here.

Touch events

The standard Touch events are now available on both Firefox “desktop” and mobile, enabling users to interact with web pages using their fingers on a touch screen.

WebSockets are back!

WebSockets can be used to create an interactive communication channel between a browser and a server. They are already used to build “HTML5” chats, multiplayer games, and much much more.
Note that this API will be temporarily namespaced in prevision of upcoming changes to the specification.

Main Changes for web developers

HTML

• The HTML5 <progress> element, which lets you create a progress bar, is now supported.
• The parsing of the HTML5 <track> element, which specifies text tracks for media elements, is now supported. This element should appear in the DOM now, though its behavior is still not implemented.
• The <iframe> element is now clipped correctly by its container when the container's corners have been rounded using the border-radius property.
• <form> elements' text <input> fields no longer support the XUL maxwidth property; this was never intentional, and is in violation of the HTML specification. You should instead use the size attribute to set the maximum width of input fields.
• The <canvas> CanvasRenderingContext2d properties fillStyle and strokeStyle used to ignore garbage included after a valid color definition; now this is correctly treated as an error. For example, "red blue" as a color used to be treated as "red", when it should have been ignored.
• The width and height of <canvas> elements can now properly be set to 0px; previously, these were getting arbitrarily set to 300px when you tried to do that.
• Support for the HTML custom data attributes (data-*) has been added. The DOM element.dataset property allows to access them.
• When a <textarea> element receives focus, the text insertion point is now placed, by default, at the beginning of the text rather than at the end. This makes Firefox's behavior consistent with other browsers.

CSS

-moz-text-decoration-color

This new property lets you set the color used by text decorations, such as underlines, overlines, and strikethroughs.

-moz-text-decoration-line

This new property lets you set the kind of text decorations added to an element.

-moz-text-decoration-style

This new property lets you set the style of text decorations, such as underlines, overlines, and strikethroughs. Styles include single-strokes, double strokes, wavy lines, dotted lines, and so forth.

-moz-hyphens

This new property lets you control how hyphenation of words during line wrapping is handled.

-moz-orient

A new (currently Mozilla-specific) property which lets you control the vertical or horizontal orientation of certain elements (particularly <progress>).

::-moz-progress-bar

A Mozilla-specific pseudo-element that lets you style the area of an <progress> element representing the completed portion of a task.

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Top 5 Web Browsers in Competition

Web browsers have created a great demand among the internet users. Every internet user wants to use the best browser which has high speed, privacy, security and user friendly features. Google Chrome and Mozilla have brought down Microsoft's Internet Explorer when it comes to percentage of usage. For past 5 years, IE has constantly been losing its demand among the internet users as other browsers provide more features, security, speed and compatibility. Yes, the browser war is heating up again and has become more vigorous today.

1. Mozilla Firefox:

Firefox remains to be the favorite browser among the web users. It is a free and open source web browser. This browser provides amenities like tabbed browsing, private browsing, live bookmarking, geolocation browsing, add on manager, download manager and advanced search which most of the browsers do not provide. This browser runs on various operating systems like Windows, Linux and Mac. Its usage tops in the countries like Germany and Poland.

2. Google chrome:

The browser developed by Google that uses WebKit layout engine is the third most popular web browser in the world. In UK, Chrome has pulled down Mozilla and is the second best browser when it comes to usage. The best browser for slow computers, Google chrome was introduced in beta version at the beginning which accelerated its popularity and people find it easy to use when it comes to browsing and downloading.

3. Internet explorer:

This graphical web browser developed by Microsoft tops the list when it comes to usage among people. The browser is fast losing its popularity when it comes to user demand as the smart users have already switched off to other browsers like Firefox and Chrome. However, it's known for its better performance even in a weak hardware but when it comes to security features, they have been a failure.  
4. Opera:

 Opera is ranked the 4th best browser by the people in Ukraine for usage as they have great security features. This provides the highest privacy when compared to other browsers.

5. Safari:

Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included with the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003 on the company's Mac OS X operating system, it became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther".It is Ranked 5th.

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Mozilla cracks down on sluggish Firefox add-ons for newer versions

Mozilla Firefox

Earlier today, Mozilla said it is cracking down on sluggish Firefox add-ons that greatly slowdown the performance and speed of the popular open source browser. Recently, Mozilla's group has been getting more complaints of its browser becoming sluggish.

Mozilla then added that within the next two weeks, it will add a warning to any add-on that slows Firefox's startup time by more than 25 percent, and in an upcoming version of the browser, third-party add-ons won't be installed unless the user specifically approves the installation first hand.

"It’s an all-too-common practice of third-party software to install all kinds of so-called toolbars and other endless bundled add-ons in your browser without permission," Mozilla says. "We know that these add-ons account for many if not most of the performance issues reported to us, and Firefox users often don’t know how the add-on got there in the first place or how to remove it."

Requiring approval for the installation of all add-ons, Mozilla believes, will have a huge impact on performance. Every week, Mozilla will run automated performance tests on the top 100 add-ons in its add-on gallery, and it will display the results on its site.

After the first round of tests, the slowest performing add-on is the hugely popular website debugger, Firebug. According to Mozilla's stats, Firebug slows startup by at least 75 percent, and sometimes even more.

Ironically, the seventh slowest add-on is inappropriately called "Fastest Fox". It's designed for speedy browsing, but it generally slows startup time by 31 percent or more depending on the speed of the computer's CPU and overall memory installed.

And in the coming months, Mozilla will also provide tools to help developers and that will allow them to test add-on performance on their own side, and it will be contacting other developers whose add-ons are seriously increasing the startup time of the open-source browser.

"Firefox overall performance is extremely important to our users, especially how quickly it starts up and loads websites," Mozilla says. "Customization is also very critical, and while most add-ons cause only a small performance impact, others can still significantly slow down the browser. Many users don’t realize add-ons can cause these delays, and that’s why we’re truly committed in improving performance, and to reduce if not completely eliminate these issues."

Mozilla added that it will eventually test all add-ons as they're submitted to the gallery, and it will further expand testing to measure overall load times.

In other browser news, Opera said in January that it repaired its browser to remove a cross-platform security vulnerability that created a potential mechanism for attackers and hackers to inject malicious code into vulnerable Windows systems.

The critical security flaw stemmed from bugs in handling large form inputs, as explained in an advisory by a Norwegian software developer. Version 11.01 of the browser also addresses two less serious security holes.

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