TimburyDotOrg » firefox

EFF delivers HTTPS Not Quite Everywhere

Susan Linton — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:36:57 +0000

In the early hours of June 18 the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tor Project released a beta of a Firefox extension dubbed “HTTPS Everywhere” with the intention of providing encryption of user data when visiting certain sites. According to the official announcement, “HTTPS Everywhere” will provide SSL encryption to sites like Google Search, Wikipedia, Twitter and Identi.ca, and Facebook. more>>

Mozilla, Opera, and Flock Release VP8 Ready Browsers

Susan Linton — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 15:08:37 +0000

The latest wares of three popular browsing applications were released this week reflecting a changing Internet. Open formats are taking center stage at Mozilla, Opera, and Flock as lock-in (or freeze-out), security concerns, and performance issues fuel the drive toward the VP8 video format. more>>

Test Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 in Debian Without Changing Your Existing Installation

Craciun Dan — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 22:40:00 +0000

Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 was released on October 14, 2008 and it currently comes in 36 fully-localised languages. This beta is based on Gecko 1.9.1 layout engine and according to the official website, this release features "significant changes to improve web compatibility, performance and ease of use". You can read the release notes on the official website, here.

Debian Lenny comes with Iceweasel 3.0.3, which is actually Firefox with a changed name and a few minor changes. If you have Iceweasel 3.0.3 installed but want to test this new beta without changing anything to your system, just follow the steps below.

Download Firefox 3.1 Beta 1
Get the Firefox .tar.bz2 archive from here, then uncompress it using:

tar -xjf firefox-3.1b1.tar.bz2

Next, move the firefox directory wherever you want it, for example in your home directory, or in ~/apps etc.

Run it using a new profile
Firefox uses the default profile whenever you run it without specifying another profile using a parameter. To run it using a different profile than the default one, use this command after making sure your current working directory is firefox:

./firefox --no-remote -P new_profile

As you can see, we used the name new_profile for our profile. The --no-remote parameter will not connect Firefox to a running instance, so you will be able to run both your current version and 3.1 Beta 1.

Select new_profile (or whatever the name of your profile is) and click on Start Firefox:

You will be prompted to accept the EULA, then Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 will start and you will be able to test it.

A small window should appear prompting you to choose the profile to use. Click on the Create Profile... button, then follow the instructions as in the screenshots below. You will notice you won't even have to close Iceweasel 3.0.3 if you have it running.

Currently there are no available themes for Firefox 3.1, so you'll have to use the default until they are updated.

12 Web Browsers for Linux – Review

Craciun Dan — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 06:41:00 +0000

The GUI browsers

Firefox
Mozilla Firefox gained more and more popularity since its initial release in November 2004, and today is the browser of choice for the majority of Linux users. Although relatively new compared to other browsers which date for over 10 years, Firefox became a myth in the web browsers world, not only on Linux, but on Windows too. It uses the open-source Gecko rendering engine, it's well-known for being very secure, it manages passwords and cookies very well, it can be expanded by using various add-ons, it supports themes, and those are just a few of its features. The new release, 3.0, also brought several usability improvements, like a new location bar, which makes it easy and fast to find the address you are looking for. It's also highly configurable, and the options which are not available in the Preferences window can be set using the about:config command in the location bar. In my opinion, its only minus is that it takes a considerable amount of time to load, it occupies a lot of memory, and the interface is a little bit slow. Otherwise, probably the best browser available on the Linux platform.
Official website

Opera
Built using the Qt toolkit, Opera is closed-source, but it compensates introducing many features, like a BitTorrent and IRC clients, tabs for most of the actions available (like the transfer window), widgets, plenty configuration options, a cool default interface (the black one in Opera 9.50 and 9.51 really looks awesome if you ask me), system tray integration. And those are just some of the highlights. Opera probably offers the most usable graphical browser to date, and it's definitely a feature-complete browser.
Official website

Konqueror
Using the KHTML engine for displaying web pages, Konqueror is the well-known browser (and not only) for KDE. Although not as powerful at displaying pages as Firefox, Konqueror uses less resources, it has very good KDE integration, allows previewing of audio, video and image files, it integrates well with KGet, a powerful download manager, it supports plugins, it offers spell-checking, and it's highly configurable. For KDE users, Konqueror should be the right choice.
Official website

Epiphany Browser
Epiphany is the default web browser in GNOME, built in GTK and using the Gecko layout engine. Epiphany has a simple and clean interface, it doesn't look bloated, and it can take advantage of plugins. Some say it uses less resources than Firefox, although I wouldn't bet on it, the difference to me doesn't look significant. Nevertheless, Epiphany is a good alternative to Firefox, especially that it integrates very well with the GNOME environment.
Official website

Dillo
The first time I bumped into Dillo was when I tested a version of Damn Small Linux from the 3.x series. I remember I didn't like it at the beginning because it just didn't look to provide the features I needed. But since it's so small, Dillo is actually a great little graphical browser which is worth a try.
Official website

Galeon
Yet another GTK application, Galeon is pretty powerful and includes all the important features you would expect from a web browser.
Official website

Kazehakase
An interesting browser, Kazehakase can use the Gecko engine, it supports mouse gestures, it allows three different levels for interface, Beginner, Medium and Expert (called UI Levels, depending on which one is selected the interface offers less or more options and menus). Kazehakase also supports tabs, and allows you to modify its interface by editing the /etc/kazehakase/kz-ui-UI_LEVEL.xml files, where UI_LEVEL is either beginner, medium or expert.
Official website

The CLI browsers

lynx
lynx is one of the well-known and full-featured web browsers for command line.
Official website

links
Another CLI web browser, links has mouse support.
Official website

w3m
w3m is another popular and powerful browser for command line with support for tables and frames.
Official website

elinks
elinks is a fork of the links web browser, running only in text mode, with mouse support.
Official website

links2
Similar to lynx, this web browser supports background downloads, and can be run in graphical mode using the links2 -g command.
Official website

Updated: Jul 16, 2008 (Created: Jul 16, 2008)