Tabbed browsing was a nice innovation, and the Mozilla team are taking tabs to the next level.

Take a look at this video about the forthcoming Tab Candy feature.

[7 minutes]

An Introduction to Firefox’s Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

In Firefox 3.5, when you only have one tab open it doesn’t have a close button. You can get this back by editing your userChrome.css file. For Windows users:

1. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to:
   
   %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<your profile>\chrome
2. Look for a file called userChrome.css. If it doesn’t exist, create a copy of userChrome-example.css called userChrome.css.
3. Edit userChrome.css using Wordpad (Start > Run… > write)
4. Add the following code to the bottom:
   

   /*
 * Firefox 3.5 doesn't show the close button on the last tab
 * http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2009/07/disable-tab-tearing-and-six-other-firefox-3-5-tab-tweaks/
 */
.tabbrowser-tabs[closebuttons="alltabs"] > .tabbrowser-tab > .tab-close-button { display: -moz-box !important; }
.tabbrowser-tabs:not([closebuttons="noclose"]):not([closebuttons="closeatend"]) > .tabbrowser-tab[selected="true"] > .tab-close-button { display: -moz-box !important; }

5. Save your changes and restart Firefox.

The other thing that bugged me was that when I close the last tab, Firefox would exit. This is easily fixed by tweaking an about:config setting:

1. Open Firefox and type about:config in the address bar (and hit Enter).
2. If prompted with a warning, read and accept it.
3. In the Filter box at the top, type in closewindow
4. Double click the entry named browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab so that the value is set to false.

[ Found on Mozilla Links ]

I love the idea and hope it does well and would love to use it, but it’s not for me at this stage. Let me explain why.

I installed the addon and restarted Firefox, but was greeted with an instant crash on startup. To recover I had to restart in FF Safe Mode, disable Ubiquity, restart normally, saved my session, close all my open tabs, reenable Ubiquity, and restart again before all was well.

The privacy and security issues that can arise are putting me off. Take, for example, the first feed they recommend – Herd. The about:ubiquity page says:

“Help us. Subscribe to the Herd, which will add your data to the dashboard—it’s completely anonymous and will help us make Ubiquity better and safer.”

So I click the link and I’m taken to a page of referrers, one of which is:

https://mail.google.com/mail/?account_id=aoctavio%40gmail.com

Hardly anonymous…

Then there’s the comments in the code for the second most popular feed. Comments like:


// TODO: Security hull breach!
return eval( splitString[1] );

// Ugly hack to parse out the event description.


Also, the frightening security warning:

“Since a Ubiquity command can do anything, and it has full access to your web browser, a bad person could write a Ubiquity command to steal your personal information or do malicious things to your computer. You should not install Ubiquity commands unless you are confident that the source is trustworthy.”

Finally, I’m wondering whether the addon grabs the latest version of the feed if it’s changed, and how I would be notified of that? If I subscribe to one of the user submitted feeds and the user decides to abuse that feed, am I only affected when I accept a new update, or do they have full access from the moment I subscribe? I can check the code when I subscribe, but would I see any changes before they take effect?

So with the comments, the security warning and possibility of malicious feeds I think I’ll leave it for now, but do tell me how you get on with it if you use it. I’ll certainly be revisiting it once it’s a little more fleshed out and I wish the team the best of luck.

Help set a Guinness World Record for most software downloads in 24 hours.

I pledge to get Firefox 3 during Download Day to set the Guinness World Record for Most Software Downloaded in 24 Hours.

• open a new tab
• type about:config in the address bar and press return
• in the filter bar, enter browser.search.openintab
• double click the entry in the list to set it to true
• restart Firefox for it to take effect