All Firefox, All the Time

Lots of Firefox stuff to cover tonight. Firefox 1.5 beta 1 is now officially scheduled for a Sept. 9 release. Lockdown on the code will be at midnight on the 7th. Fx developers have also decided to add a second beta before 1.5 is finalized, pushing that release back somewhat. If you've been testing Deer Park, you know why. There have been some major bugs in the new Gecko branch, and it will definitely take some time to iron them all flat. In the end, all the extra testing and feedback will be worth it, though.

Lockergnome's web developers RSS channel started adding a daily Firefox item about a week ago. Nothing earth-shattering has appeared so far, but there have been a couple of interesting posts.

First, there's BackupFox, a small app that will make a backup of all your extensions, bookmarks, preferences, history, etc., in .zip format. It works with Firefox as well as Thunderbird. Should be useful if a nightly build should happen to irreparably corrupt your userChrome files.

Lockergnome also mentioned an article on I-Hacked.com called Firefox Browser Hacking. While there are some good ideas here, and links to some useful extensions, there's very little hacking going on. It's sort of a quick 'n dirty guide to customizing Fx for hackers, which doesn't make a lot of sense, as most of them have been using it for a year now.

Finally, according to this Slashdot post, there's a "plug-in" available now that attempts to turn Internet Explorer into Firefox by adding tabs, a search box, and a small firewall that should cover most of the IE security holes plugged by the Gecko rendering engine. Right now I don't know if this is actual software or wishful thinking, as the site referred to, getfoxie.com, appears to have been slashdotted and is unavailable. I suppose I could troll the comments, but I don't do that. It's always more aggravating than enlightening. But I will quote the first-poster, fembots: "What I need is a Firefox-plugin that looks exactly like IE (including the lack of tabs and search box) while still providing the same level of security."