Here’s something for you, and for the tab-curious: TabCandy, a new experimental feature in Firefox that groups tabs into topical clusters to improve your work flow. It’s made entirely with JavaScript and HTML. There is no native code — just the open Web. Tab Candy also lets you group tabs to organize your work flow. You can create a group for your vacation, work, recipes, games and social sites, however it makes sense to you to group tabs.

Thus Mozilla’s new experimental feature for Firefox is aimed at bringing revolution in tabbed browsing through tab groups and reorganization. The main idea behind this is to assemble the tabs according to the user’s wish in the browser window.

So basically, Tab Candy can be imagined as thumbnail viewing of tabs.  Most avid internet users often surf a dozen of websites in one single browser window. So it is obvious that the content of each tab can be different from the web page in the other tab. Hence it often becomes a tedious job to get hold of everything at a time and thus it gets easy to lose track of the opened tabs after a while. In such circumstances Tab Candy can play a vital role in helping the user to keep the tabs organized.

What exactly can be done with Tab Candy?

- Drag and drop similar Firefox tabs and keep them together in a Group. You can create a new group for a tab, just click and drag and you are done.

- When you are working, the tabs in the work group would be visible leaving apart the rest. So no unnecessary tabs anymore. You work, tabs for work show up. You wanna play, Tabs start playing.

- You can zoom-in or zoom-out to have a better look at the groups created.

- Tab group sizes can be changed and groups can be rearranged so that important tabs such as your email and calendar are easy to find and scan.

An Introduction to Firefox’s Tab Candy

If you want to try it out, head to Raskin’s site where you can download a TabCandy-enabled build of Firefox. Note that this isn’t an extension, it’s a bleeding-edge build of Firefox with TabCandy built in, so plan accordingly.

This release of Firefox 3.6.4 offers crash protection for Windows and Linux users by isolating third party plug-ins when they crash. Mac users have to wait a bit more to get this build made for Mac, though. Firefox 3.6.4 provides crash protection for several plug-ins like Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime and Microsoft Silverlight etc. In FF 3.6.4, when a plug-in crashes, the user will be able to simply reload the tab. The browser (and the rest of your tabs) should remain untouched. Isn’t it amazing?  This would be real good stuff for the users who play online games and watch online videos.

Beta testing implied Firefox 3.6.4 to be a better and faster browser than its counterparts. It starts up a little bit quicker and it shuts down even quicker than before.

So yes, Mozilla team has done it again. They have given yet another gift to their 400 million fanboys/fangirls (users) across the globe. You have used Firefox before and what you have right now is a better, more stable and secured version of the Gem. So, what are you waiting for? Go for it. All Firefox users are encouraged to upgrade for free by using the “Check for Updates” function in the Help menu, or by visiting www.firefox.com.

How BuddyFox Plugin Works

After creating an account on BuddyFox.com you are required to download the add-on and install it in your Firefox. Once it is installed, a small icon will appear in the status bar, clicking which will slide open the chat window with the list of your friends on the side. The window opens from below thus not taking too much space, much alike the popular Firebug addon.

Using the icons you can add new new friends and even create groups where you can talk to all of them at the same time. The chat is smooth, even with multiple people at once. You can also simply drag and drop links from the pages you are viewing to your friends and this will work even if they are not online at the moment.

Pros of BuddyFox:

The biggest advantage of BuddyFox is in collaborative efforts within the browser window. This can be giving instructions to your web developer, discussing website design (it works well with Firebug), chat with your webmaster, SEO or even coordination of social media promotion. And it is great because, your friends and colleagues may forget to turn on their IM but their browser window will always most likely be started and once installed BuddyFox will be active and running when ever your Firefox is running. Isn’t that cool?

Cons of BuddyFox:

However, the bad thing is that it requires you to create an account with the service (BuddyFox.com) itself. It does not support third party protocols (so forget about it if you were planning to use BuddyFox to chat with your Google Talk, Skype or Yahoo Messenger buddies). Personally, we think that we already have too many instant messaging protocols around. Creating another one that is used by one Firefox extension alone is probably not worth it. You can always use something like Meebo.

Now that you know both the pros and cons about BuddyFox — the instant messaging add-on for Firefox, what do you think? Are you going to use it or do you think that it is not worth the pain of creating yet another IM account? Share your views with us via comments.

The ONLY thing Internet Explorer is Good for is Downloading Firefox or Google Chrome!

But ironically, you don’t even need IE for that. If you need to download FF, just do it through FTP, and if you want chrome, download FF and then chrome! It is a known fact that IE is an inherently buggy and inferior browser, which fails to adhere to rules which almost every other major browser has no problem adhering to.

In essence, IE does suck as a browser. Some people just don’t know it because good programmers code around it so you don’t have to suffer from it.

Also Read: “If Browsers Were Girls/Women [Infographic]“

This one too: “If Browsers Were Mode of Transportations [Infographic]“

How to Use Screen Grab (Firefox)

Screengrab is a Firefox extension that makes it easy to save a web-page as an image – it’s a screen capture tool for Firefox! With it, you can save anything that you can see in a browser window – from a small selection, to a complete page. You should really download it right now.

Basically Screengrab! let’s you take what you want from a web-page: the entire scrollable document, just the visible bit, or a draggable selection. Screengrab will even save just the contents of an individual frame. Screengrab captures Flash and Java applets as long as you have Java installed.

To use it, just right-click a page to bring up the context menu and look at the options under “Screengrab”. It’s pretty self-explanatory! (if you don’t see the menu then something must be broken – better send me an email). You can save it as jpg or png. It can also capture Flash and Java applets.

Navigate to the website that you want to take a screenshot of. Once it has completely loaded, right-click anywhere on the page. A menu will pop up, and at the very bottom, you should see “ScreenGrab” as the last option. You have a 3 different ways to take a screenshot with ScreenGrab:

Save a Screenshot of the Entire Page
To grab a screenshot of the entire webpage, choose “ScreenGrab” > “Save” > “Complete Page/Frame” A “Save Menu” will pop up to save the screenshot. You can rename your screenshot and change the location to save it. You can also change the format from PNG to JPG using the drop-down menu.

Save a Traditional Screenshot
You can use ScreenGrab to take a traditional screenshot, as well. Right-click on the webpage, and choose “ScreenGrab” > “Save” > “Visible Portion.” This will capture a screenshot of just what is seen on the screen. When the “Save Menu” pops up, name your screenshot and save it to your preferred location.

Save a Section of the Screen
ScreenGrab can screenshot just a section of a webpage, the same way that Mac can. To do this, right-click and choose “ScreenGrab” > “Save” > “Selection,” and the entire page will turn a light purple shade. Holding down your left mouse button, drag your cursor over the area that you want to cap, and you will see a box appear as you go. When you have capped the area you need, let go of the mouse button and the “Save Menu” will pop up – name and save your screenshot, and you’re done.

[Also check out this: Ultimate List of Top 20 Must-Have Killer Wordpress Plugins!]

You can do all three of the above screenshot methods, but instead of saving directly to your desktop, you can choose to have the screenshot saved to your clipboard. This is a good option for those who would rather paste the screenshot into a paint program and make some changes to it before saving. To use copy instead of save, follow the same exact instructions, except choose “Copy” instead of “Save” after choosing “ScreenGrab.” If you are a webmaster or blogger, this Firefox plugin is for you.

The Mozilla developers have initially planned to release the Firefox 3.6.2. security update on March 30 but have since then changed their decision to deliver the update earlier than the scheduled release. Firefox 3.6.2 has been released and is already available through the web browser’s automatic update check and as a download at the Mozilla Firefox homepage.

Thus, users of Firefox (Firefox) 3.6 will have this update automatically downloaded and installed, but you can also manually apply it by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

Bugzilla lists 111 bugs that have been fixed in Firefox 3.6.2 of which 21 have been classified as critical by the Mozilla developers. The recently reported security vulnerability is not the only security vulnerability fixed in the latest Firefox release.

TechChunks ask Firefox users to upgrade to Firefox 3.6.2 as soon as possible to protect their computer system from possible attacks that exploit the vulnerabilities. Several stability issues have been fixed in the new version of Firefox as well. The Firefox 3.6.2 download is provided at the official Mozilla website or through the web browsers automatic update check.

Firefox 3.6.2 is available for all supported operating systems and languages. Firefox users should look at the known issues section in the release notes to make sure that they do not run into problems after updating their web browser.

The new mobile browser comes equipped with an array of quite awesome features: the awesome bar, weave sync (sync your bookmarks, passwords, tabs, and history between mobile and desktop), tabbed browsing, and location-aware maps are all part of this launch. Many of the features and capabilities that users find on the desktop version are preserved in the mobile browser, such as the “Awesome Bar” which learns about your favorite Web sites and can suggestion search options for you, minimizing your typing on the handset. Mobile Firefox users also can load “add-ons,” the small packages of code that customize, personalize and extend the browser.

Firefox for mobile supports some features HTML 5, which is the next major revision of the markup language, intended to provide a foundation for a new generation of powerful Web applications with many of the characteristics of native applications. The specific HTML 5 capabilities in the mobile browser include Location-Aware browsing, the

Our favorite feature of the Firefox for Mobile launch though has to be the inclusion of add-ons. Yes, you’ll be able to customize your mobile browsing experience with add-ons like TwitterBar, AdBlock Plus and YouTube Enabler. There is a Firefox mobile add-on website with around 40 add-ons, but the number is growing.

Will Mozilla’s Firefox Mobile become a serious headache for other mobile browsers on advanced platforms? Yes, we think so. Especially future Apple iPad competitors could use Firefox Mobile as a powerful incentive to choose alternative 3G tablet solutions. If you’re not an N900 owner but want Firefox on your iPhone, Blackberry, Android or other smartphone, we have some good news and some bad news. The good news: Firefox is investigating Android and launching for other mobile phones soon. The bad news: Don’t expect them on the BlackBerry or iPhone anytime soon.

And the trend lines favor Firefox in the long run: IE’s market share continues its slow decline while Firefox has sustained steady growth over the recent years. StatCounter uses its tracking codes on 3 million websites (5 billion total pageviews) to generate the numbers and this recent revelation is based on this powerful pool of browsing data.

However, as you can clearly see the above graph doesn’t include Google Chrome while comparing the stats, although the ‘other’ category has experienced a significant rise. It would have been certainly interesting to see how Chrome has been performing as compared to other industry leading top browsers.

At any rate, IE8 is rising fast (along with Windows 7), but over the last few months the slope of Firefox’s worldwide curve has been steeper. (In the US, IE8 has always been ahead of Firefox 3.5; in Europe Firefox has led since late summer.) But what is most unfortunate is the fact that IE6, though down, still has a 14% global share (5%-7% in the US and EU; China and Korea are holding up IE6’s numbers). I seriously wonder when the world will cease to use IE6.

However, lest the anti-Microsoft brigade get too excited, it should be pointed out that the combined weight of IE6, IE7 and IE8 far outweighs Mozilla’s Firefox, which pushed users much more heavily to the latest version.

In a nutshell, the updated features and improvements in Firefox 3.6 beta 1 look like this:

- Users can now change their browser’s appearance with a single click, with built in support for Personas.
- Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
- Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
- Support for the WOFF font format.
- Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
- Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.

In case you want to give this latest beta a try but don’t want to mess up with your current Firefox 3.5, extract 3.6b from your Firefox .DMG to a file on your desktop, or any directory other than where your 3.5 build is located. This way you can have both FF 3.5 and FF 3.6 Beta running at a time. You don’t install Firefox, by the way, you just drop the .app file in a folder and then run it.

If you’ve heard enough about it and can’t wait to give it a try right away, here are some direct download links to get you upgraded to the Beta ASAP:

- Windows: Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 Setup.exe
- Mac OS X: Firefox 3.6 Beta 1.dmg
- Linux: firefox-3.6b1.tar.bz2

Review:
We here at TechChunks.com tried this latest beta and we are very, very impressed by the speed (and stability so far) of this beta. We have noticed a few small inconveniences though.

1. The close tab button is only shown on the active tab. We realize this can be changed in the about:config page, but the option to put the close button on all tabs no longer does so, unfortunately.  Anyway, any active tab can still be closed by middle clicking on it (as before, thankfully).

2. Scrolling down a page seems to move at a way little faster than normal pace. It’s slightly unsettling, actually.

3. Middle clicking to open a link in a new tab places the new tab after the active tab, instead of at the end. Again, a minor inconvenience. But again, that’s how Google Chrome behaves these days, doesn’t it?

However, overall we are LOVING the speed boost. Everything seems so much snappier. Have you given Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 a try yet? How have been your experience? Let us hear.