For Windows, Mac, Linux: Thunderbird, the open source desktop e-mail client reaches another important milestone. The first alpha of Thunderbird 3.1 has just been released. The Thunderbird team wants to align its development cycle more closely with that of the Firefox web browser, so that Thunderbird can better leverage the constant stream of improvements that the Firefox development community is making to Gecko and other components that are shared between Firefox and Thunderbird. More
Mozilla’s Stephen Horlander that showed us some iterations of Windows design mock-ups for Firefox 4 has posted again on his personal blog a couple of animations showing what might be tab-tasks in still-to-come Firefox 4.
The goals of these animations as Stephen puts it, is to give a visual clue to the functions of Tabs. The animation posted here simply shows how adding a new tab is will be an animated task.
For more details and Tab tearing animations with affordance move to Stephen blog.
Google Chrome for Linux Dev Channel has been updated to version 5.0.307.1 with “preliminary” desktop notification support, for GTK builds of Linux only.
Chrome desktop notifications in Linux uses D-BUS notifications also known as libnotify. Also, GTK+selection colors when using GTK theme mode gets noticeably better. Other adds and fixes in this update include;
– Improved complex text support, fixing a number of bugs in Hebrew/Arabic/Hindi/etc. display.
– Plug-ins will now be loaded from ~/.config/$PRODUCT_NAME/Plugins.
Follow-up; Why not libnotify, Linux FAQ. More on Chrome releases
If you get to implement Chrome desktop notifications on your Ubuntu, let us know how youdid it. 🙂
Many years back, Aaron Boodma wrote the Greasemonkey extension “exclusively” for Firefox, now working with Google, he has bent and twisted Greasemonkey so well that thousands of user scripts written in JavaScript now natively work in Chrome – just like any regular Chrome extension. Its a big smack to Firefox, if you consider that its even easier to get user scripts working in Chrome unlike in Firefox where you have to install the Greasemonkey add-on then get the script. More
While the Dev and Beta channels are still stuck in version 4.0, Chromium for Linux Daily builds make it to version 5.0. The Daily PPA is updated more frequently than the Dev PPA, but it is completely untested, that certainly makes it more unstable and unreliable. It works and loads web pages quickly too. More
