Firefox has released the Firefox 3.6 beta 1 for developer preview. It Visually doesn’t feature any changes from version 3.5. But it features integration with Windows 7 Taskbar and also Windows 7 Style switching of tabs using Ctrl + Tab. Yes it’s able to display the tabs preview.

Download it here.

(Click on this, if you need a Direct link to Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 English for Windows)

Windows 7 Like Tab Preview

Firefox 3.6 ca now display tab previews like Windows 7(the very same way of Alt+Tab in Windows 7).

This feature is disabled by default in the beta version.

type about:config in your address bar and on the appearing page, search for browser.ctrlTabPreviews. Set this as true.

OK now you’re done. Start Exploring

You can select the required tabs using mouse as well by holiding down the Ctrl+Tab key.

What if you’ve too may tabs? Ctrl + Shift + Tab will show up all tabs in the firefox window. Alternatively you can do this by holding down Ctrl + Tab and Click on “Show All Tabs” displayed in the very same windows

This preview window display features a search box where you can quickly search for the required tab if too many tabs are open. As this Shift key assigned with Ctrl+Tab to show up whole tabs, I’m sadly missing shortcut I previously used to traverse back in order.

You can also close the tabs if necessary in this view.

Windows 7 Taskbar Integration

On hovering the taskbar icon of firefox, you can see the preview of tabs in the aero peek window. To enjoy this feature you will have to enable aero theme in you Windows 7.

On hovering the mouse over the windows displayed in the peek view, surely you can peek to see the window. It’s the real Windows 7 peek feature. You can also close the tabs if necessary in this view.

If you’ve too many tabs open, then it will be displayed as stacked list as your seeing above.

Cool eh! This is a quick post on my first look, if you find something really cool, please do share with me in twitter, facebook, or as a comment in this blog.

It will be very nice if we can temporarily removing the update from the friends. So that I can check each and every updates in ease, on removing seen entries, the next entry should come up. Tweetdeck has a feature like clear seen tweets. This something similar to that. Without deleting the facebook entry, temporarily removing the entries. Something like below, it’d be nice if we put a close button like this per entry to hide the facebook updates. I believe something like this would make the facebook less noisy! What do you think?

Friendfeed is a cool aggregation service which took aggregates many social media websites. They’ve introduced the service with a cool new feature called “Like this”. You can press the like button to mark your emotions towards the shared content. Finally the number of people liked the story and comments give every author a good satisfaction and inspiration to share more! Of course believe me.

Facebook also introduced the “Like” option to the shared contents inspired from friendfeed. but recently I’ve noticed that, lot of good, bad news are happening around but without having any common sense or understanding people are “Liking Stories” (even myself accidently liked a sad story, which I never supposed to").

This came to my attention when Barack Obama’s page posted the Passing Away for Senator Kennedy. You can see 38,847 people like this story so far.

It surely doesn’t make any sense. It’s a great loss for a nation. People may clicking the like button for showing the interest to the stories or may be just because the news was shared by a “The President” who’s a celebrity on the same platform. It’s method to convey your feeling towards what’s he shared.

Another story is shared by the Indian Army. It’s again the feelings of a nation, a sad news shared by the protectors of great India. But still lot of people liked this story (I accidently clicked by misunderstanding the trooper with trespasser. Anyway I unlike it quickly) .

I think facebook (or any other service providing this feature) should provide an option to control this by the author itself. Because social networks are not simply automated robots. Ultimately it aims people and Sharing their thoughts and information. The services should be flexible and apt to make good sense and value to their users stories and emotions.

I finished with "The Angel of God" by Jyothi Menon. Jyothi is currently Senior Vice President and Head of HR Shared Services at Scope International, Standard Chartered Bank based out of Chennai. (as described in her LinkedIn profile)

The book is talking about three parallel stories of Moosa, Bhaskaran and Aboobacker(also his lost brother coming into seen in the half way). Moosa had born and brought up in Dharawi which is regarded as the largest slum in Asia. The bad living condition and his family situations made him a criminal, who started everything by killing his own father who tried to rape his sister. Soon he became a hired professional killer. He built up his own gang and he slowly started controlling the Mumbai underworld. He started various business and those made his rich than anyone else. Even he’s doing dirty business, the people who were working for him was very happy. His generosity was infamous among people.

As part of expanding business, Aboobacker is getting introduced to the scene who was very honest and brave enough and was working for a rich man in Kozhikode, Kerala. Aboobacker worked well for Moosa and the returns from Moosa was more than enough, that he can think of. Sooner he became a rich man in the area and he also started several business.

Another guy called Bhasakaran also plays critical role in Moosa’s life and later he inspired,mentored Bhasakaran to get serious about life and do well with his studies. Also Moosa finds his lost brother Raashid, who later undertaken Moosa’s business.

The way Moosa becoming the best with his business, the humanity inside him, how he made others life better. How he made his family. Those are the highlights of this novel. And Jyo did it well.

The story always propagated the fact that, "people are the key to success". (Of course we should expect this from a HR professional no?). During some chapters the novel became a people management chapters and it was quite inspiring. Jyo’s way of writing is marvellous. It’s simple, professional and never make you stop anywhere in between(**cough,cough***)

The few problems I’ve noticed are that, the redundant sentences in many chapters like "~ best in the world", "best minds where money can buy" etc. I never felt comfortable with this redundant sentences and sometimes it gives us an exaggerated or boasted feeling of the situation. Also few abrupt ending of chapters, some lame comparisons were not suitable for her stunning story. There’s a guy introduced in a chapter, who taught Moosa about table manners, dressing and all. at the end of the very quick chapter he’s passed away. Actually it was really odd in that situation. Another example is Aboobacker’s newspaper becomes "the best" in recent surveys. Actually these kind of sentences had given an odd feeling. Except all these the story is good, interesting, simple and surely it inspires, motivates you for a better tomorrow.

The surprising new feature for me in Windows 7 was it’s taskbar. It’s excellent and very user friendly (still have some pains of shifting from old windows taskbar).

On Windows 7 Feature Focus, Paul Thurrot reveals about the revamped Window 7 taskbar. An excellent article. Read it.

There’s another browser to join the browser war. We had Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari as main stream browsers. Now it’s time to the web titan Google to join the battle of browser. Through my previous posts, I already claimed that, I’m a hard fan of Firefox Browser and of course Google Services like Gmail, Google Reader, and Calendar etc. I curiously look to every Google Products. How they’re starting, how they’re growing, how they’re integrating to user’s internet life. Some services are utter flops like Google Answers

Anyway Google has joined the browser war by releasing their early beta yesterday. Till this time I’m satisfied with Firefox. In the beginning I’ve tired of its crashes, memory issue and flash video performance. But the software was getting matured with in upcoming release. The new version of Firefox 3.x has the most modern features for a browser. Till this time the other browsers like Safari, Opera and Internet explorer are behind (IMO). The strength of Firefox is its add-on functionality. Hundreds and thousands of community developers are developing cool Firefox add-ons to extend its usability. Earlier I was using Firefox for tabbed browsing. But it’s more than a tabbed browsing.

Today morning I downloaded and installed the brand-new chrome browser. The official news was first released in the Google Blog. The blog was providing a link to cool comic book created by Scott Mc Cloud, which describes the features and under the hood technologies of Chrome. The browser’s appearance was appealing. It’s really simple and clean. In a single stretch I’ve noticed few things

1 - Google Chrome Window in Windows Vista

1. The browser has a clean and appealing UI. It’s using the similar color combination used in many Google services like Gmail and others.

2. The tabs are incorporated in the title bar itself. So its give more space for the web pages.

3. The tabs are detachable from the tab bar (title bar). But it’s not possible attach it back. The tabs can be attached back to any chrome window.

4. The tab home page is really impressing. It shows, most used websites as thumbnails, recently bookmarked items, recently closed items… etc…

5. On entering something on the address bar, it also search for the titles rather than only searching the web address as Firefox. This feature is also there in IE 8 Beta 2

6. On creating each tab, Chrome creates a new process. It’s similar to Forking in Linux. The advantage is that, the crash with some web pages won’t affect other running pages. Believe me I used to open lot of tabs in my Firefox browser. I can’t think of the number of process my operating system has to manage while I’m browsing

7. There’s no Main menu for the browser. It’s incorporated just near the address bar.

8. The status bar is not there. It will come to the bottom side whenever it loads data from web server and disappear once it complete getting the content. It’s again saving space for the webpage

9. The find bar is streamlined with the address bar on the top and it will be appeared when we press Ctrl+F. The incremental search feature like Firefox is supported in Chrome as well

10. The download bar at the bottom side shows the progress of active downloads and just completed downloaded files.

11. The wait cursor is truly impressing with its nice animation.

12. Application shortcuts are really impressing. We can launch the websites as simple application using Chrome browser. The window will be rendered as a normal application window. It will not be having the title-bar and other theme rendering of chrome. It’s not possible to attach an application window back to the browser window

2- Application Shortcut opened in Chrome

1. The browser support private browsing with incognito window

2. The zoom facility is there (you can use the same key combination of Firefox)

3. Importing bookmarks are painless. You can get your bookmarks from Firefox or IE

4. The tags and shortcuts supported in Firefox browser is supported in Chrome as well.

5. The address bar is acting as the search bar newly introduced in Firefox and IE. Chrome takes the IE6 style of search using the address bar.

6. Quick bookmark feature is available as Firefox 3.x

7. It’s stable so far regardless it’s a first beta

Java script performance

Chrome outperforms the other browsers in the Java script test. Google has its own Java Script test called V8. I just plotted the graph with the score I got with V8 performance test with Chrome, Firefox, IE and Safari. The scores were 617, 72, 21 and 26 respectively.

The other test I ran was SunSpider Javascript Benchmark. Again the Chrome won the game. See the result I got after the test. I can’t understand what really happened with Safari. Apple claimed that it’s the best java script performer among the browser community. Anyway this is the final score I got (smaller is better).

You can check the whole result of my test online (click on the links below)

• Chrome Beta

• Firefox 3.0.1 Result

• Internet Explorer Beta 2

• Safari 3.0.4 result

What I felt missing!

1. The Zoom is not really good as Firefox. In Firefox, the whole page can be zoomed with the images. i.e both text and image will be zoomed and we can see the real zoomed version of the webpage. But Chrome only zooms the text and layout size are still being fixed. I believe it’s because they’re using the Webkit rendering engine. Firefox is Gecko powered.

2. Even we’re getting more space in Chrome with reduced menus and all, it’s still missing a full screen option.

3. It’s missing an integrated RSS reader. It’s quite common with all new browsers. It can at least redirect to Google Reader

4. Double clicking on the empty area of tab won’t create a new tab. Since it’s the address-bar, it just restore/maximize the window. We’ve to find the small new tab button there or has to use short cut Ctrl+T

5. The status bar is showing is very short. It can’t display a moderate sized url fully.

6. Can support alternative themes.

7. Firefox users have to suffer without add-ons. Hope Google can start a new community for hosting add-ons for Chrome

8. Even the bookmarking is easy as we do in Firefox, the Chrome still displaying a small window just down the bookmark button. It could be avoided and best to show when pressing the button twice.

9. It misses a good bookmark organizer

10. The download window could be a smaller one.

11. They could have adopt the search style of Safari which is simply stunning

12. The new browsers support different website search like, search with Amazon, Wikipedia etc… in Chrome, we’ve can only have one search engine.

13. Managing tabs with multiple processes saves us from crashing. But each process creates its own memory foot prints and operating system has to allocate a new process for each tabs which is very costly. 

That’s all for now.. Let me conclude. It’s impressed me at first sight and let’s see what’s gonna happen with the final release of the shiny new browser.

PS: Chrome Suffers with its first security flow