The Mozilla Blog

Firefox 3.5 is the fastest Firefox ever – check out this video of Director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner running through the new features. Please note, you can view the video without plug-ins using Firefox 3.5 and get a first-hand look at native audio/video support in the browser. You can download the Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate here.

In other Mozilla video news, later today we’ll be releasing the latest in our series of Fastest Firefox videos. Check out the already-posted World’s Fastest clapper and World’s Fastest sport stacker videos.

Get ready to participate in the Firefox Screencast contest! This is your chance to use your talents and passion for Firefox to create support screencasts for the Firefox Support (SUMO) knowledge base on support.mozilla.com.

We have prepared a list of the top 100 most popular support articles from the SUMO knowledge base and ask YOU to create screencasts for one, two, three, or all of them!  You can enter as many screencasts as you like.  With 100 different articles, anyone can choose whatever article for which they would like to create a screencast.

Mozilla will not be hosting the videos during this contest, so please use a third-party application like Jing to record your screencast and send us the link so we can view it. Ever used Jing?  Here’s a great online demo.  Click “Video Tour” on the front page to see how to use it…it couldn’t be easier!  Just download and begin recording!

All entries will be judged by a team who will look at the submissions and pick the best one for each of the 100 articles. That’s 100 winners!!

What are you waiting for? Go to the Firefox Screencast Contest and start sharing your knowledge!

Any questions? We’ve got the answers.

As promised, we’ll continue to highlight some of the incredibly cool and useful Firefox 3 features you can expect to see.   Today’s installment on Firefox 3’s new bookmarking system is brought to you once again by Deb Richardson, the author of the about:mozilla newsletter.   Deb provides a clear explanation of the many improvements you’ll see, including:

• bookmark stars which allow for one-click bookmarking
• tags that allow you to add extra relevant information to a bookmark so it’s easier to find and organize
• smart bookmark folders or “saved searches” that automatically update when you add new items matching that search to your bookmarks

 Firefox 3’s bookmark dialog box

Take a look at her post for more details, as well as a great how-to.  I’ve found that I am using Firefox 3’s bookmarking with renewed gusto thanks to the little star and intuitive organization and search!

Deb Richardson, author of the about:mozilla newsletter, wrote one of the better explanations I’ve seen on the “AwesomeBar,” Firefox 3’s revamped URL bar.   It’s not the most humble of names, but if you check out Deb’s post you’ll see why it’s earned it.

In Deb’s words, here’s a quick snapshot of what makes Firefox 3’s URL bar just so awesome:

Dubbed the “AwesomeBar”, it lets you use the URL field of your browser to do a keyword search of your history and bookmarks. No longer do you have to know the domain of the page you’re looking for — the AwesomeBar will match what you’re typing (even multiple words!) against the URLs, page titles, and tags in your bookmarks and history, returning results sorted by “frecency” (an algorithm combining frequency + recency).

Not only that, but the drop-list results show you the page’s favicon, the full title, the URL, and whether you have bookmarked and/or tagged the page in a richly formatted two-line display.

Example:  I start by typing “ginger”, and AwesomeBar searches through my history and bookmarks to return everything that matches that keyword, showing the first six and letting me scroll through the rest. You’ll notice here that several of the results are bookmarked (blue star icon on the right), and tagged (tag icon). The sites’ favicons are displayed on the left, making it really easy to scan through the results if you know what site you’re looking for in particular.

Check out Deb’s post for more on the AwesomeBar and check back here for more on the cool things to expect in Firefox 3!

[SpreadFirefox.com post courtesy of Sarah Arora]

We’re excited to announce the launch of another tool that will allow you to surf your web, your way: Rock Your Firefox!

Rock Your Firefox is an application built on the Facebook® Platform allowing you to personalize, customize, and essentially rock out your browser, and share it with your friends. Browse through more than 2000 add-ons and recommend those you like to your friends – and see what they recommend for you.

Add-ons in your favorites list will appear in your profile and encourage others to rock their Firefox through newsfeed stories. The more add-ons you list as your favorites, the more people will find out about the awesome ways to rock out your Firefox. Through this method, we hope to be able to seed Firefox throughout the Facebook community.

But that’s not all. If you add the application before August 8th, 11:59 pm Pacific Daylight Time (PDT), you will be in the running to win one of 20 exclusive Rock Your Firefox t-shirts. Get started now at rockyourfirefox.com!

We often get letters, voicemails and emails asking, “How do I get help for Firefox?” That’s a good question, so I thought I would share the available and very helpful resources.

Currently, the best ways to get help are to:

1. Search the Knowledge Base at MozillaZine.org, our community-run support and news site, for answers.
2. Search for your problem on the MozillaZine.org user-to-user forums.
3. Post your problem on the MozillaZine.org forum for one of our community volunteers to answer.
4. Review some basic FAQs we have prepared.

Because Firefox is a free product, Mozilla has relied on dedicated volunteers to provide support for users of Firefox. A group of those volunteers and Mozilla employees are currently working to improve support for Firefox. You can check out their recommendations for improvement here.

A great deal of Firefox’s popularity is due to the ability to personalize it and add all sorts of functionality via add-ons. But there are some nifty shortcuts and features right in Firefox. I asked around here at Mozilla for favorite Firefox features and time savers. The list was huge, but here are some highlights:

• Session Restore: Never feel the pain again of accidentally closing a website! (Editor’s note: can you tell this is my favorite?) You can recover closed tabs and windows, and even text you entered in web forms, by going to the History menu and selecting the “Recently Closed Tabs” option. You also can set Firefox so that it automatically opens the last websites you visited by going to the Tools menu, picking Options and selecting “Show my windows and tabs from last time” under the Startup section. (On Mac OS X: go to the Firefox menu, then pick Preferences)
• Crunch numbers within Firefox: You can use Google in the built-in search box (upper right corner) as a calculator. Simply type in the equation (e.g. 243 + 5,234) and the answer appears in the drop down menu of suggested search options (e.g. = 5477).
• Set multiple home pages: You don’t have to be limited to one home page with Firefox. In fact, I have it set so that Firefox launches both of my web mail accounts – Gmail and Yahoo! mail – when it opens. Learn Firefox has a great explanation of how to choose your start page in the first place. In the URL field enter the addresses of your preferred pages separated by a pipe or the “|”.
• Maximize or Minimize your font size: Using this keyboard shortcut, you can control the size of your browser font — this comes in handy when reading small fonts. Simply press the “Ctrl” and “+” keys together in Windows (or the “Command” and “+” keys on the Mac) and the “Ctrl” and “-” keys to decrease. “Ctrl” and “0″ keys pressed together returns you to the original text size.

What are your favorites? Let us know at blog at mozilla dot com — this will be an ongoing series here and we’d love to hear from you.

If you’re like many people who’ve recently started using Firefox, you probably have questions about how to get the most out of it. While Firefox is designed to be intuitive and easy to use, we’ve found some great additional resources that will help you take full advantage of Firefox.

Chris Rossini has published a thorough visual guide to Firefox with how-to’s on many of its features.

Leslie Franke’s Firefox cheat sheet is a handy, printable reference for many commonly used keyboard shortcuts. These will save you time as you start using them.

And Robert Accettura, a Mozilla community member, has a terrific series of Firefox tips on his blog.

Our Japan team and their lovable mascot Foxkeh have also created instructional, yet entertaining, videos.

There’s a lot you can do with Firefox. We’ll have more tips for you soon. If you’ve created tips or tutorials you want to share with us, drop us a line at blog at mozilla dot com.