Now that Firefox 3 is out, I have a lot of themeing to do!
The first theme to be released for Firefox 3 will be iPox and I’m happy to announce the beta is out today.
The beta was born from the Mac default theme and has been built from the ground up. This is all new code people. 
The beta has been working great on my iMac, but it’s not as pretty on Windows. And Linux I have no idea.
Tuesday June 17th is the release date for Firefox 3! We (Firefox fans) are hoping to set a Guinness world record for the most times a piece of software is downloaded in the first 24 hours! If you could download Firefox 3 on Tuesday, that’d be a great help!
So what’s new in Firefox 3? Lots of stuff. Here are a few high points.
Remember a while ago when Charamel roamed the streets? It was one of the most detailed and perfect Firefox themes I’ve ever seen. Well now there is Silvermel; a silver version of Charamel.
Silvermel has every detail down and outstanding design everywhere you turn. It’s a work of art that you just have to see. Lucky for you, you can! It’s available on the Mozilla Addon’s site and works for Firefox 1-3 and Thunderbird 1.5 or 2.
This is one Firefox theme you have to see to believe. 
Have you checked out Dromaeo.com? It’s a Mozilla owned site that runs a set of JavaScripts and test out how fast your browser is. I tried it on my iMac, 1.83 Intel Core Duo with 1.5 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, and found Firefox 3 beta 5 to be the fastest browser. Oddly enough, Firefox 2 was the slowest, even behind SeaMonkey!
Granted, this is no professional test. Firefox 2 has the most extensions on my computer and that could cause slowness. There are always a lot of factors to take into consideration, but this is what my tests show.
Well, I spent a few hours yesterday trying to figure out how I was going to go about upgrading all my themes to Firefox 3. So far, I haven’t had any good ideas.
The new theme structure with Firefox 3 is different than Firefox 2. I knew it would be. And, at this time, there is nothing out there to help a theme developer know what to change or what to update. There is a long list of ongoing theme changes, but what does that really mean? What are the steps to upgrading a theme?
I was excited about Mozilla’s Prism application when it first arrived on the scene. But then Fluid came out and I realized how un-polished Prism was. However, Prism 0.9 is quite a large step forward.
What’s new in Prism 0.9?
The big thing is that it’s based off of Firefox 3. It’s got the speed and upgrades that the Firefox 3 betas have. Also us Mac users now get native widgets! It’s no longer got ugly checkboxes and drop downs. 
The Firefox 3 rendering engine alone makes it feel much snappier and more responsive than the first Prism 0.7 release.
The process of exporting email from Outlook to Thunderbird on Windows is really easy. Exporting it from Thunderbird and importing in to Outlook is not hard either, just time consuming. Both ways can be done.
Outlook to Thunderbird
This is actually really easy. The first thing you need is all your email in Outlook. Then, when you setup Thunderbird it will ask you if you want to import your Outlook email. Say yes and it does all the work. No, Thunderbird doesn’t have an import function for the PST file, but it can import anything that’s in Outlook on the same machine. It’s as easy as that.
In the past, I’ve talked about how to open Facebook in the sidebar of Firefox. Now, I’ve taken that idea one step farther and created a Firefox extension.
The iPhone Facebook Sidebar extension opens Facebook’s iPhone page and allows you to keep tabs on your friends, update your status, message people and accept friend requests.
Features include:
When I wrote about Mozilla’s Prism project a while ago, I was very excited for the possibility of bring web applications to the desktop. Since then, a new project called Fluid has popped up. It’s the same ideas as Prism, however is Mac only.
Fluid is a small application that is used to create stand alone applications for web apps. Think of going into your applications folder and seeing Facebook or MySpace. In the end, they are individual web browsers that are created specifically for one website.
Have you checked out Mozilla’s Prism project yet? It’s pretty sweet.
Prism is basically a version of Firefox with no address bar, no icons, no bookmarks, nothing. It’s just a browser that loads one pre-defined bookmark at a time. It sounds a little weird, but it’s really useful.
When you start up Prism, it asks you for a URL, a name, a few options and where you want to save your shortcut. Then, when you open the shortcut, it loads the website in the Prism browser and you get a clutter free, simple, web application that runs off the power of Firefox.
