Category Archives: Software & Scripts
Aug 24, 2011 by Matt | Posted in Software & Scripts
Mozilla engineers have began and effort known as “MemShrink” to reduce Firefox’s rather large memory footprint, with the changes being made in Firefox 7. (I still haven’t quite figured out Mozilla’s new version numbering scheme, and Firefox 5 is the current release…)
In short:
Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less. In particular, Firefox 7′s memory usage will stay steady if you leave it running overnight, and it will free up more memory when you close many tabs.
Also, there are already some early mock-ups of what the UI in Firefox 8 might look like.
Firefox 7 is lean and fast [Nicholas Nethercote]
Aug 18
If you just upgraded to Firefox 6, you probably noticed the new “domain highlighting” feature. The address bar now greys-out the protocol and path in the URL, leaving the domain highlighted in the darker black text. The theory is that it will help less-savvy…
Jul 29
Mozilla is in the early stages of planning a project that would not only compete with Google’s Chrome OS, but would go a bit beyond. Boot to Gecko—named for Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine—would be a bit of Android-based software (primarily the kernel, drivers and…
Jul 18
Users like fast websites. That’s one of the universal rules of web development. To attain faster speeds, it’s common to use a process known as “minification” to compress the file size of JavaScript and CSS. Yahoo developed one of the most commonly-used tools for…
Jul 1
Users of Espresso and CSSEdit have been complaining for some time about the lack of updates to the software. In a surprise announcement, MacRabbit (the developer) announced that Espresso 2 is on the way and that CSSEdit’s functionality is being rolled into it. The…
Jun 20
Need a fast and lightweight way to generate QR codes in-browser, without relying on a third-party service? There’s a new jQuery plugin that’s exactly what you’re looking for. Weighing in at only 4kb, it generates QR codes using only JavaScript—no image resources, no calls…
May 6
A couple years ago, I heard about an interesting Mac RSS reader in development. Caffeinated, as it was called, sounded like a good alternative to my current feed reader (NewsFire). There were some neat screenshots, but the software was nowhere near ready for release.…
Apr 13
Prior to Firefox 4, the Mac version didn’t display favicons beside items on the Bookmarks Toolbar, unlike its Windows counterpart. I’ve become accustomed to this behavior, as it uses significantly less space. (I tend to use the Bookmarks Toolbar not just for frequently-used links…
Apr 6
Firefox 4 has made the browser faster and much more responsive, but its startup time can still be a bit on the slow end. According to Mozilla, the root problem is definitely extensions. In a new blog post, they stated that on average each…
Mar 23
Just yesterday Mozilla released version four of Firefox, bringing with it a new UI and many changes under the hood. It looks and feels a bit like Chrome, but without losing the customizability that has always set it apart from other browsers. The most…
