add-ons

You can now get a taste of Firefox OS straight from your desktop browser, thanks to a new Firefox add-on called r2d2b2g that bakes a Firefox OS simulator right into your desktop browser.

Mozilla wrote in its blog post announcing the simulator add-on that the tool has two complementary goals for helping developers. Currently at version 0.7, the company hopes that by version 1.0 the add-on will be stable enough to let developers easily create apps for the new OS.

The second goal for the add-on is that it frees developers from having a device to install a … Read more

The Internet is full of interesting things. Because of this, it's likely that you bookmark Web sites so you can easily find them later. Unfortunately, if you bookmark too many, it can be easy to lose track of each one.

If you're a Chrome user, Bookmarks Tagger has your bookmark organization needs covered. With this extension you can add tags to each bookmark making it easier to find. Using tags is a more efficient way to locate what you're looking for, especially in the case of Web sites having names that are long or unrelated to their … Read more

There are so many easy ways to download streaming media these days that we find absolutely no reason to bother with a program that's the least bit complicated. For that reason, we recommend that users who want to download video and music from streaming sites (where that's permitted, of course) look for something other than Faster Downloader to do it with. This unintuitive program left us scratching our head and wondering why the creators had so needlessly complicated what should be a simple process.

Faster Downloader boasts that it's "fully integrated" with Firefox and Internet … Read more

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and that's especially true when it comes to spyware; wouldn't you rather protect your system than spend hours trying to rid it of malicious visitors? SpywareBlaster is a simple program that provides protection from ActiveX-based software and unwanted cookies for both Firefox and Internet Explorer users.

SpywareBlaster has a simple interface that will be easy for even novices to navigate. The main screen shows the protection status for Internet Explorer, restricted Web sites, and Firefox. By default, protection is disabled for each of these, but you can easily … Read more

If you're not a fan of relying on browser add-ons and plug-ins, you'll probably want to enable a feature that can help you ditch at least one of them. Firefox now has a built-in PDF reader, and while it doesn't offer all of the same features that Adobe's version does, it's more than sufficient for most uses.

Before you get started enabling the PDF viewer, make sure you have the latest version of Firefox and you've disabled the Adobe PDF viewer.

To check the version: click the menu at the top left-hand corner and … Read more

The new tab screen in Chrome normally displays a thumbnail grid of your most visited sites or a list of your Chrome apps. But how often do you really make use of either of those screens? If you're a weather junkie, you might like a Chrome extension called Currently. It's a very simple extension that displays the current time, date, and weather forecast.

You can still access your old screens by clicking on the icon in the lower-right-hand corner of the screen. If you don't like the dark color, you can change it to light (gray) or … Read more

Firefox users who've installed a custom theme may bump into trouble if they upgrade to the latest version of the browser.

Released earlier this week, Firefox 14 offers a few enhancements, including better security. But it comes with one gotcha -- lack of support for a lot of existing themes.

Many Firefox users probably know that they can change the style of their browser by installing one of many custom themes, available at the Themes section on Mozilla's Add-Ons page. You can choose from among hundreds of different themes to customize the look and feel of Firefox's … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Tugging on Chrome's coat tails, the popular Dolphin browser has announced alongside the Google I/O developer conference a new framework for developers called Dolphin Garage.

Garage is an open API program for extending the functionality of Dolphin. Powered in part by Adobe Phonegap and Dolphin's own HTML5 framework called Engine, it will include the release of more than 150 APIs, which will allow developers to create their own add-ons for the browser.

Engine has proven to be a big boon for Dolphin, explained David Dehghan, technical architect at Dolphin. While at a W3C Web standards meeting … Read more

The bottom line: Sync remains the killer Firefox for Android feature, but the revamped interface, fast page-load times, and tabbed browsing make it much more usable than before.

Review: Firefox for Android used to be a must-use mainly for Firefox fans. It was good at what it did, but it wasn't great, and the competitive field of Android browsers surpassed it on many levels.

As a reaction, Mozilla spent the better part of a year redesigning the browser from the ground up. The new Firefox for Android brings an interface powered by native code, competitive page-load times, and Flash … Read more