Reaching voting age in record time, Mozilla has released Firefox 18 with the new IonMonkey JavaScript compiler, which Mozilla claims will improve the speed of Web apps and games by up to 25 percent. The new release also gets Retina display support (joining the already Retina-fied Safari and Chrome Web browsers) for those running Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and later. It also adds “preliminary” support for the Web Real Time Communication (WebRTC) open framework that enables in-browser video chat capabilities. Other changes include improved performance when switching tabs, improved image quality thanks to a new HTML scaling algorithm, a fix that disables insecure content from loading on HTTPS pages, and improved proxy responsiveness. Note that if you haven’t opened Firefox in a while and allowed the automatic updates to be applied, you’ll have to go through multiple updates to get to Firefox 18 (our version needed to jump first from 16.0.1 to 17.0.1 and then to 18). (Free, 36.6 MB, release notes)
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Mac OS X Zip Expanding Utility
Firefox (and possibly other applications) may ask you what you want to do with .zip archives that you download from the Internet. If you want to expand them with Mac OS X (rather than StuffIt Expander), you may be unsure of which application actually does the job. You're looking for Archive Utility (in Leopard and later) or BOMArchiveHelper (in Tiger). In either case, the application is stored in Hard Drive/System/Library/Core Services/. Don't move it from there, though, or you'll confuse matters.
Written by
Adam C. Engst
Firefox 18
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I think the most telling part of this article was this bit:
Note that if you haven’t opened Firefox in awhile and allowed the automatic updates to be applied, you’ll have to go through multiple updates to get to Firefox 18 (our version needed to first jump from 16.0.1 to 17.0.1 and then to 18).
I'm not sure I've actually used Firefox other than to check a Website in about two years . . .
Note that if you haven’t opened Firefox in awhile and allowed the automatic updates to be applied, you’ll have to go through multiple updates to get to Firefox 18 (our version needed to first jump from 16.0.1 to 17.0.1 and then to 18).
I'm not sure I've actually used Firefox other than to check a Website in about two years . . .
I switched to Chrome full time in the autumn as I was experiencing a lot of RAM hogging by Firefox. I still miss the customizable search engine field, but things are definitely smoother with Chrome.
Chrome has single-key search shortcuts - look in chrome://chrome/settings/searchEngines
I use this a lot to search TidBITS, Amazon, and Google (since I have the omnibox set to do Google Browse By Name, per http://tidbits.com/article/12099 )
I use this a lot to search TidBITS, Amazon, and Google (since I have the omnibox set to do Google Browse By Name, per http://tidbits.com/article/12099 )
Reaching voting age in record time
I shudder to think what will happen when Firefox reaches drinking age!
I shudder to think what will happen when Firefox reaches drinking age!
It's drinking now, just surreptitiously. ;-)
On my shiny new Macbook Pro Retina, it zoomed to 102% of (8gig) available ram in five minutes. I think Firefox 18 already has a wooden leg.