By now, you have probably already seen tons of Firefox 4 reviews, previews and whatnot. Firefox 4 will officially be released tomorrow and will be available here, but if you’re impatient, you can get it here. You can also get it off Mozilla’s FTP server, but they politely request you don’t do that since the hordes of Firefox users leeching off those servers will kill them. At the moment, the Release Candidate version is still up on the Mozilla website.

Anyway, here’s an early review of the shiny new browser’s main features!

Main Window

That was the main window of Firefox 4. A radical change! You can say it looks like Google Chrome and you won’t be wrong. You can see the comparison below:

One of the more noticeable changes is the orange Firefox menu that replaces all the other drop-down menus, such as File, Edit etc… They have all been merged and stuffed under that one menu.

Update: Carrotmadman6 points out in the comments that you can access the traditional File, Edit, View, etc… menus by pressing ALT. They have been… shrunk!

Now, when I installed Firefox 4, almost all of my addons were not compatible with it yet. I cannot tell you where all the addons will now add their menu options as submenus, possibly under the Main Menu, like “Web Developer” did. That remains to be confirmed though.

Buttons have been combined: Reload and Stop have merged and placed inside the address bar area, as you see above. Not a bad thing. This shows Firefox 4 wants to have a minimalistic user interface.

Opening many tabs has some usability issues as you can see. I prefer multi-row tab bars but Firefox 4 wants to keep clutter at a minimum so it took the scrollable-tab-bar approach. Addons will probably fix that when they become compatible again.

Firefox now includes “Paste and Go” as a menu item! Excellent!

Firefox 4 now allows you to pin your favourite sites on the tab bar as App Tabs: they will lose their title and keep the favicon, essentially becoming a button. Think of it as a sort of speed-dial to access your favourite apps online such as Gmail or bookmarks such as Twitter.

One of the more interesting features of Firefox 4 is Tab Group which presents your tab in thumbnail format for easy grouping and organizing. Users who keep lots of tabs open will love this feature, allowing them to easily find tabs. For example, you can have a tab group: “Productivity” which will load your email, documents and calendars while another “Fun” group loads Youtube, Farmville and whatever sites you want, all while making switching easy.

Clicking on the Tab Groups option in the menu or using Ctrl+Shift+E will lead you to the Tab Group window where you can see your various groups and the tabs they contain.

To create a new group, click and drag over an empty space. A group will be created. You can now drag and drop tabs in the new group. You can also assign names to tab groups.

Add-ons Manager

While browsing the menu options, you will see that the addons center has been revamped and looks prettier now. It shows you Addon Collections, Recommended addons and Featured addons, all of which are easily installable from the window.

The addons you have installed have their own section and that is changed too. It now uses colors to differentiate between running addons, addons that have just been installed, those that are not compatible and those that are disabled. A minor annoyance is the usage of the word “Extension” in the sidebar while “Add-on” is used in the messages and titles e.g. “Add-ons Manager”. That needs to be fixed.

Sync

You can also see the new Firefox Sync as a menu item. Firefox Sync is a service that allows you to synchronize your bookmarks, history, bookmarks and even open tabs online and then access them from other Firefox browser, a bit like the XMarks service and addon works. Now that is included in Firefox – a feature many users will like, especially those that use Firefox on different computers or laptops.

You’ll need a Firefox Sync account for that, and the window will ask you to register for one if you don’t have one already.

Downloads

The Download window hasn’t changed at all since Firefox 3.6. Even the menu is still the same. The button to “Open Download Folder” is still missing – a feature which I really liked from Firefox 2. Hopefully I’ll have an addon to put it back for me.

Options

The Options Menu has a few items which you usually found under the “View” menu of Firefox 3, as well as an option to move the Tab Bar to the bottom of the screen. Don’t know why you’d want that, but it’s there.

The Options window itself hasn’t changed much. You will notice the new “Sync” tab to allow you to customize your Firefox Sync options.

Under the Advanced – General tab, you will find the new “Do not track” feature of Firefox. Essentially it tells websites and ad networks not to track you as you’d have expected. However it is left to websites to decide whether to oblige or not. Currently, the feature is not widely implemented by websites and ad networks so you won’t see much difference. Hopefully, checking this in the feature will prevent websites tracking your browsing habits and serving ads based on that. A good move for privacy… in concept for now.

Update:

You can enable an option under the Tabs tab (lol), which will allow you to get Tab Group previews as Aero Peek, saving you the need to Ctrl+Shift+E and putting the feature for quick access from the taskbar. “Nice!” say people who love opening tons of tabs!

Performance

Time to wrap up this short review. Firefox 4 hasn’t reduced its memory usage by far. 222MB usage for 8 open tabs (2 with Flash content) and almost no addon (they were not compatible!). Not very good I say. Chrome uses about 100MB for the same tabs.

Firefox 4 passes ACID3 test with a score of 97/100. Great score!

Under the hood, Firefox 4 includes numerous performance upgrades like using hardware acceleration for graphics, support of WebM for HD videos, enhancing javascript performance to make online applications more fluid and better HTML5 compatibility, plus usual bug fixes and security fixes. You’ll find all of those additions in the Release Notes if you wish to learn more.

Conclusion

So that’s it for this review of Firefox 4. I’d say it’s more about correcting annoyances and making usability enhancements rather than introducing revolutionary features, while imitating Chrome’s simple user interface. Is that the trend now? Internet Explorer 9 and now Firefox 4? In the end, Firefox remains a great browser. At first, you may feel lost by the new user interface but when addons become compatible again, we may see quite a few creative ones pop up to work with Firefox 4.

Thanks for reading!

This article comes from GeekScribes

Firefox 4: The Review

Sniper: Ghost Warrior

Hello!

This is like, my second review of a game. My first was Race Driver: GRiD, which was awesome after some tweaking. For today, I’ll be reviewing a game from a little known publisher called City Interactive. It is titled with the very imagination-provoking Sniper: Ghost Warrior.

Before I proceed, I discovered something funny about this game. We all know how aiming using Analog sticks on consoles are. Workable yes, precise no. There’s usually auto-aim involved. However, a game that requires precise aiming such as Sniper: Ghost Warrior was also released on Xbox 360. Go figure out how to make precise aims with those sticks.

Anyway, I got it on PC, so let’s move on. What motivated me to try this game was that I was going to play as a sniper again. After going through the awesomeness of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2′s sniper moments, I thought that playing a sniper-simulation would be great too. And just check out that cover! Reminds you of something, eh?

Ok, enough ramblings, let’s get to the actual review.

General

The game runs on the Chrome 4 Engine, that was employed in Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. I didn’t play that one, but I got to say, the engine is good. The foliage, bushes, trees etc… were nicely detailed, even if I toned down the settings a bit. Performances are good with a recent-enough computer. A Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM and a recent-enough graphics card, such as the excellent Radeon 4850 is enough to get you playing without too much degradation in Frames Per Second (fps).

The weather is another nice touch. The water effects impressed me most, without going into a lot of technical details. I’ve got a few pictures for you to see for yourself. The visuals are absolutely stunning.

On to the gameplay part. As its name suggests, you are going to be playing as a sniper. Yay! But no. There are some level where you play as a soldier, in a classic First Person Shooter (fps) situations. Such as the oil-rig level, which will remind you of a much more famous game. It is very similar. Very similar indeed. These moments are just run-and-gun, so aim-shoot-aim-shoot, dash for cover. In recent FPS games, when you hide behind cover, your health slowly goes back to full if you have taken hits. Not in Sniper: GW. You have to use the good old first aid, so you need to be conscious about getting shot. And boy, you’ll get shot a lot!

There’s not much to be said about those moments, so let’s go back to the actual sniper moments. Sadly, this is where the game sucks most.

When we think about “military sniper” and “jungles”, we think about a guy (or lady, why not), dressed in a funny suit. It’s actually called a Ghillie Suit. So, we have that guy in Sniper: GW, dressed in his ghillie, and sneaking through the forest.

BAM! Someone shoots at me! WHAT THE HELL?! CROUCH! Is there any sniper around? I scan the environment, I can’t find anything. I stand up again, more shots! Whaaat? I check the red pointer at the top, and see that the attack seems to be coming from the front. So I stand up, switch to the scope, and slow-down time using the appropriate key. Oh there you are, behind a bush. Sneaky bastard, die!

What I just described above is one of the very common things that happen in SGW (it’s getting shorter, I know). Your enemies seem to have eagle eyes! Sometimes, I wonder who’s actually the sniper, me or the AI?

Damn AI!

When they are not aiming at me from the moon, and getting to hit me with their automatic rifles, they are plain stupid. They friendly-fire! I’ve seen a guy cross the path of another, and get mowed down by machine-gun fire! Sometimes, they just stand up and do nothing. Most of the times, they hear a gunshot, see their friends go down, and they won’t even bother to duck to cover, but instead scan the environment. Worse, they won’t even alert their friends, or sound an alarm! Pathetic AI.

They are only good at aiming me from kilometres away. Hell, a computer-controlled guy saw me, in a ghillie suit, while I was sniping from inside a bush! What’s the ghillie for, AI, if you can see me from a mile away?! And not only seeing, they are damn accurate at that! They shoot with pinpoint accuracy from long distances. Worse, sometimes a guy is running, turns and he is immediately aiming at me, and shooting. Not even locating me anything. He KNOWS I’m here. As if he’s got eyes in the back of the head. Or all around the head, for that matter!

That’s about the AI enemies. What about the AI allies? Worse! They can’t aim! They REFUSE to aim. I am sniping, they run in front of me. I shoot. They DON’T die. So much for realism. Interestingly, AI enemies’ friendly-fire are fatal.

Pathetic AI. That’s all there’s to say. Either they are TOO good. Or just plain dumb.

An Enemy Model

The Environment: Pretty but restrictive

Now let’s see the environment itself. We’ve often been shown open-worlds lately. GTA, Farcry 2, Crysis etc… have all been setting the trend of an open, reactive world. Much to my displeasure, SGW does NOT include an open-world. You are constrained to the paths and such. You can go astray a few, and you’ll hit with invisible walls. These totally kill realisms. Where we have reached nowadays, there should be open-worlds. If it looks like the player can climb on a rock, then jump a fence, it should be possible. Not that you jump on the rock, jump towards the fence, and hit an invisible wall that prevents you from going on.

The problem with those invisible walls? They block off all the spots that seem to be great sniper nests. Most are off-limits. This greatly annoys me. Sniping involves choosing your spot. It should be secluded, but offer great vantage point. It should provide cover if ever you are discovered and need to scram. It should also be high in altitude if possible. SGW does not allow this freedom of choice. Worse, sometimes it tells you to walk towards the front-door of an enemy camp. Where’s the stealth in that? Ever seen a ghillie’d up sniper walk up the front door of an enemy? Me too.

The game features a grapnel. Imagine how it could be used. You find a branch overlooking an enemy camp, with lots of leaves and stuff around. You use your grapnel, and climb the tree, sit there and start shooting. After a few shots, you change location to another vantage point that you’d have marked on your map. No. SGW does not let you do this. The grapnel is only used in some scripted situations. Sigh…

Spot 2 enemies in there!

There they are! The 2 yellow flashes!

Invincible birds!

A nice off-limit sniper-nest.

The Good Parts?

The great thing about Sniper: Ghost Warrior however, is how well the sniping system works. You got your variety of rifles on different levels, and your scope as you’d expect. You’ll also get a “stealth” bar at the bottom. The moment it fills up completely, your enemy sees you and is aware of your location. He’s going to shoot with pinpoint accuracy using his eagle eyes.

While sniping, you will have to monitor your heart-rate and wind speed, which have distinct gauges at the top. You’ll also have to keep track of the range, because the further your target, the more gravity will affect the path of the bullet. All these are taken into consideration in SGW, making it a great system. If this sounds too complex for you, don’t despair. If you aim for long enough, a red reticule will show you where the bullet will actually land. So you just aim the red reticule on an enemy’s head, and voila, headshot! Without having to care about all the difficult stuff. Bear in mind that this red reticule does not appear on higher difficulties, so those wanting a more realistic sniping experience may try the higher difficulties. Remember though, on medium the AI got eagle eyes. On higher difficulties, it’s like the AI enemies are seeing you through the Hubble telescope.

You can also “hold your breath” using the the appropriate key. This will steady the scope, and slow down time, making sniping easier. This is somewhat overkill. Steadying the cope is enough, without having to slow down time. It makes things too easy. Assuming you’ve been able to aim at the enemy without getting riddled with bullets first.

The sniping system is enjoyable. That’s the only reason I’m playing SGW. Not the story.

Why not the story?

Because SGW wants to be Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. The missions are exactly like CoD’s! You are pursuing a guy, so you’re following his trail all around, trying to take off his head. So you complete one mission, just to find out that the guy has escaped. However, in CoD, the process of getting to the guy is interesting. You take alternate paths from your friends. You get support. You are on your own. It makes your pulse race.

Sniper: Ghost Warrior’s story is like CoD, but without the fast-paced action. So you’re crossing a level, fighting your way in stealth, taking out guys etc… only to find that at the end, the main target is not there. The next level? Do the same thing again, with lots of patience, only to find the guy is not there. After 3 missions, you’re tired and ask yourself how people can frack up missions that much.

The run-and-gun parts are no better. I have no idea why the oil-rig mission is there. There’s no point at all. You storm in, save a guy, that has not much to do with the story. Nor are you told much in the mission briefings.

Overall, the story feels flimsy. Not on par with CoD:MW’s story in any case.

How it should have been?

So the enemies are no good. The environment is pretty but no good. The story is no good. Only the sniping system is kind of good. So is it recommended? Frankly, no. I’d not recommend that game to a friend. If you really want to give it a try, let its price fall first. Then get it.

But then, how could it have been interesting? Just imagine that scenario:

You get your briefing about a certain guy that is selling state secrets to an unfriendly nation, or something like that. You are given his general location, but do not know exactly where he is found. He is to be eliminated.

So your spotter and yourself are are left at your insertion point, with your equipment, a supply of food and drinks, a pair of binoculars, a grapnel and your ghillie suit.

You then make your way, slowly towards the enemy camp. The terrain is a deep jungle, with a river to the west, and mountains to the north, all in an open-world environment. The enemy camp is found near the mountains. Between you and the enemy is a civilian village, and enemy patrols in the jungle.

You have to find a vantage point to take aim at your target, so you move in stealth towards the enemy camp. You have to avoid both enemy patrols (you can’t kill them, missing patrols are soon noticed. If you do, you have to hide the bodies and expect heavier-armed guard patrols since they now expect an attack), and civilians (they panic and make a fuss, and you can’t kill them normally).

So you sneak by. You can’t take too long, because the target might leave the area, causing a mission fail. So you move quickly and stealthily.

While approaching the village, you hear civilians talking about the target’s habit of coming to the village at night, probably for some dirty business with local women. Now you have a choice. Do you find a vantage nearby and wait for the target, then snipe him when he’s in the village? This reduces the number of guards that’ll be on your trail after the hit. However, the target may not come to the village at all, causing a mission fail. Or you can go to the enemy camp, and take the hit there, where you’re sure the target will come sometime, or may already be stationed at. But after the kill, there will be many guards after you.

You choose to go for a vantage point near the village. So you scout around, and find a good spot and lay there, in an abandonned water tower, just outside a farm a distance from the village. The hole in the cliff looked interesting too. You mark it on your map as backup. You choose to “sleep”, while your spotter remains awake, and wakes you when the target comes. This causes time to flow by, up to the point where the target comes to the village (sometimes, he doesn’t, and mission fails). So you take aim, consider wind speed etc… as you are told by your spotter (or the red reticule, on easier difficulties). You take the shot, the target goes down.

Now you have to reach your extraction point. No holds barred. You can start shooting every non-civilian because they know they are under attack and will return fire. Keep in mind they don’t know where you are, but they know you’re around. So if you know how to sneak, you can prevent bloodshed. This increases your rating.

You escape safely. There it was, Mission 1, First Part. That was only a lieutenant, and not the actual guy. This hit will cause unrest, as it’d seem rival factions made the hit. This will somehow bring out the real target. That’s how Sniper Ghost Warrior should have been. In Multiplayer, there may be more snipers trying to take a target, and they might bring you down. The one who takes the target wins. The Farcry2 of sniper games. Open-world freedom to choose your path or how you get to your sniping nest, dynamic environments (rain damaging your cover bit by bit) and AI characters that do not shoot like monkeys. Not the CoD-imitation that it currently is.

Conclusion

As it is? Not worth it. But the series holds much potential. Only if City Interactive enhances the scenario, gameplay and AI. My note for this game is a paltry 3.5/10, for the great environments, and sniping system.

Other reviewers gave it a 5.5 or so. I’m more severe. I’m tired of being riddled with bullets from afar. I’m the sniper. I shoot from afar. Not the normal enemies!

So there ya go, the review of SGW, and how an utopian sniper game would be.

This article comes from GeekScribes

Sniper: Ghost Warrior PC Review

Firefox 3.5 was officially released today, Tuesday 30th. The released candidate (RC) was available for a while back, but the version we are talking here is what I call the Final version, that is officially released.

If you haven’t done so already, go to Mozilla and download your copy. If you are lazy, you can try Help – Check for Updates directly in your Firefox 3. If you are already in RC, get the final! Got to show Internet Explorer 8 who’s the boss around here (and to stop MS from bragging any further)! Note that some of your addons will not work, such as Tabmix Plus, one of my favorites. Their forum have an updated beta copy, but for now, I downloaded alternatives (TabKit) to compensate. Do a backup of your stuff, if ever you want to restore.

Now is not too many upgrades to comment on, so I’ll just go on and review those I’ve seen worthwhile of mention. And some that operate in the background and that you will not see.

I have to start somewhere, right? So let’s see what changed in the immediate interface. You will see that Mozilla (now referred as ‘they’) have modified the tab bar to make it more like Chrome’s. Note that small + button near the tab? That’s your new tab button. It follows you now. Apart from that, not much to see in the main window. Looks mostly the same as Firefox 3.

Now the menus. All the menus are similar, save for the History and Tools menu. In History, you now have the option to undo closed tabs, but now, also closed windows. That’s pretty cool for people who use multiple windows. As for me, I prefer a ton of tabs rather than more than 2 windows at once.

In Tools, you will find the Private Browsing mode, or what we common folks call the “porn mode” – this is what it’ll be mainly used for. Legitimate use: accessing your bank account. Or so the “innocent” claim they use it for!

Some other interesting features you might find interesting are:

• Ripping out tabs: Drag a tab away from the tab bar and release. Voila, you now have a window, with that tab inside. Pretty cool way for creating new windows, rather than using File – New Window, copy-pasting the address and whatever. You can also drag out tabs, and put them in other existing windows. Well, you can do a lot of cool things with dragging tabs now. If you don’t want to drag, right-click and choose Open in a New Window for the same effect.

• Firefox 3.5 is promoting porn mode or what? In the History sidebar, and some other places History-related, there is an option to “Forget about this site”. I’ll leave this one to your creative uses.

• Tracemonkey was included. That means faster Javascript. Well, a lot of stuff Javascript-related faster. If you want the gory innards, check out Mozilla’s Tracemonkey Wiki.

• Video and Audio HTML5 tags are now supported in-built. This will probably mean that sometime in the future, you’ll not need to install Adobe Flash or whatever other plugins to view video and have audio on websites. I can’t begin to imagine what crazy ideas developers will come up with to over-exploit those! Just wait and see.

• AwesomeBar filters: You know what AwesomeBar is right? It’s the address bar, for those of you who don’t. Well, now when typing in it, you can filter what results it returns. It’s easy enough to use the filters. As for remembering the symbols, I can’t say the same. Who came up with those? I also gave you a way to remember those. My own personal method. E.g. Try “Geekscribes *” in the address bar without quotes.
  • History only = ^    (Up symbol, like, from where you came previously. Assume you are navigating down something)
  • Bookmarks only = *    (The * symbol is on the 8 key, that looks like a B symbol. B for Bookmarks)
  • Tagged Pages = +    (+ for pages that I like)
  • URLs only = @    (The @ symbol is used in email addresses. URLs are called addresses)
  • Title/Tags only = #    (That one I don’t know how to remember!)

• You can restrict the search to your history by typing ^, or bookmarks with *, or tagged pages with +. To make what you’ve typed match only in the URL type @, and for title/tags only use #.

• Geo-location. Basically, now your browser knows where in the world you are. So when you are looking for pizzas in Google Maps, it’ll show you what’s closest to you. Haven’t tried that personally. I’m just scared of the implications. My browser knows from where I’m browsing porn! That’s so scary. It may even lead me to some unwanted locations (in the real world) to find what I’m looking for. I hope I’m joking, because seeing Google pointing me to the nearest porn would be awkward!

• Session restore improved. If ever your browser crashes, on the next restart of the browser, you are prompted to restore the previous session, complete with ticks to choose what tabs and windows to restore. That’s very nice of Mozilla. It’s directly there in the browser window, like one of those Pages not Found messages. You get the idea. Fortunately, I was able to recreate it by End Task’ing Firefox via Taskmanager.

• Did I mention that Firefox 3.5 is fast? It’s amazingly responsive, and hardly lags. Memory usage is still quite too. 127MB for 5 tabs and around 20 addons installed. It also loads fast. Less than 2 seconds it seems.

Not much to say apart from that. I’ll leave the rest of the goodies for you to discover. After you go, come back here and give us some comments and opinions about Firefox 3.5!

(Some info taken from Lifehacker)

This article comes from GeekScribes

Firefox 3.5 officially released: Reviewed!

So, there is another freeware review today on the menu. This time, I’m looking for way to randomly fill up my mobile phone with tracks from my music collection found on my PC. Why? Because I’m just too lazy to randomly select tracks myself. Because I’ve got no idea about what I want to listen to. Because I love using Google to find freewares and share them with you. Voila! Now you know, and on with the review.

For this job, we will be making use of a creatively named software named… RandomFill.

Mind you though. RandomFill will work with classic “drop-and-play” audio players and mobile phones, and not iPod-like players with advanced library features, requiring specialized software to upload tracks to them. Anyways, you can download RandomFill and give it a try with your favourite player and see if it works.

Using RandomFill is a 4-step process, as shown below.

The steps are as follows:

1. Add folders or playlists from which the tracks will be chosen. Usually, this will be your MP3 directory. Optionally, if you have used RandomFill before and saved your settings, you can load these in this step.
2. Here, you are going to select where to send your random tracks. This can either be a location (your player?) or a playlist which will contain a list of random tracks. You can choose to delete everything at the storage location before the random tracks are moved there. I chose to send the tracks to Drive E, which is my mobile’s memory card.
3. This step is quite interesting. You can choose to bias the selection process to include more tracks from a particular folder which you add. For example, you can bias the search to include more tracks from your favorite album. Just add the folder, and you will be prompted to add a weight. Weight should be greater than 0. (positive real numbers!).
   If you add a folder and set the weight as 0.1 or 0.2, tracks will probably not be selected from it, and if you add a folder with a weight of say, 20, there will be more tracks from it in the “random” selection”. Add your favorite albums, and bias the weights as you wish.
4. This is the final step. Now, you select the total size of the selection in Megabytes, or how many hours of music you want. Useful if you want to only fill up your player or mobile up to only a certain limit, and not completely. You can also choose to fill up by hours if you want, but remember that more hours = bigger file size, so don’t go overboard, keeping your player’s maximum memory size in mind. Save your settings if you want, so that you don’t have to repeat the same steps completely every time. After that, just click Finish and let RandomFill do its job.

Now, there is a small “bug” I’d like you to be aware of. After the copy, if you click Finish again, it will try to re-copy a random selection to your destination, which can cause problems such as full memory. So, after the copy part, you will need to click on Cancel instead. A bit weird, but it’s useful to know. Another potential disadvantage is that the last folder used is not remembered. This will probably be made in future versions. For now, it’s not available.

That’s about it for the RandomFill review. It’s not perfect yet, but I hope you can find some use to it. Give it a try, and drop us some comments.

Ps. iPod users, you might want to check Floola as an alternative to managing your device with iTunes.

Mr. Random: A better Random-filling App

RandomFill did not particularly suit my needs, so I ended up finding a better app called, Mr. Random. It’s Java-based and requires the Java Runtime Environment and this needs to be installed if you don’t have it. Just Google for it.

The Settings window is accessible by going to Options menu. That Settings window will allow you to customize all the aspects of Mr. Random. Here’s a list of the important options there:

• Collections Folder: Where your music is found. Where the selection will be made.
• Device Folder: Where the music will be copied. I’d advise you to put it as a temporary local folder, then manually move the files after the random selection is made. It’s safer that way. Less risk of messing up during transfer.
• Device Type: If you have a Sansa, choose it there. Else leave it on Generic Player like I did.
• Capacity Slider: The total size of your player. I use it to choose what will be the combined size of all the files copied.
• File Types: What files will be copied. Eg. If you want only MP3s, uncheck the rest. There is a box for Custom extensions. Eg. for .flac files if you have those. Put .flac there.

The rest, you can just leave blank. The Advanced button allows you to select which random algorithm to use, or just leave things default.

Now, click on Ok to go back to the main window. To make the random selection, repeatedly click the “Fill List” button until the list stops filling. At the bottom-right corner, you can see the number of files selected, as well as the combined size. I marked that with a red dot.

It’s a bit annoying to repeatedly click the button, and I hope it will be fixed in future versions. I don’t know if it’s just at my place that I have to click many times though.

The Add File / Add Group button are there if you want to include some particular file/folder in the selection, that is if you want to override the random selection for some selected files. Move Up/Down is for re-ordering files. This is because Mr. Random also creates a playlist out of the files.

After that, just click the Copy to Device button and wait. If you have selected a local folder as I recommended, you will need to go there and copy all the files to your device manually.

That’s all. Mr. Random is free, and does not crash as often as RandomFill. I need to mention that Mr. Random seems to have a 20GB limit. To overcome that, I guess you just run it multiple times.

This article comes from GeekScribes

Randomly fill your audio player using RandomFill

Without much delay, on with the review. But first, you might consider getting your own copy here, and help with the World Record initiative (you need to download from the official mirrors of Firefox, else the download does not count!). Beware though. Some of the pages of the Mozilla website have yet to be updated, and are still showing Firefox 2.0 downloads. Also, the page is taking a significant time to load, probably considering that lots of people are currently downloading.

A word of warning. Before installing Firefox 3, make sure all your add-ons are compatible with the new Firefox. A number of my add-ons are not yet compatible with the Firefox 3 Final. Specially Tabmix Plus, which is not yet compatible. Even Unplug is not yet compatible, according to the default install. So, check beforehand, or simply backup your Firefox profile before upgrading, in case you want to revert. As you can see below, some of my extensions are not compatible with Firefox 3.0. Unfortunately, you will have to check manually via the Mozilla Addons site.

To backup your Firefox profile, you could use the FEBE extension (cross-platform) (doesn’t work with Firefox 3 Final yet), or you could use the MozBackup (Windows only) application. More info about manual profile backup is available from Mozilla, here.

Upon opening the new Firefox 3.0, you will see a changed interface as compared to the 2.0 versions. The list of immediately noticeable changes is:

• The Back button grew in size
• The buttons have glossy effects. Looks prettier now.
• The favicon is separated from the address in the address bar
• There is a star icon in the address bar which allows quick bookmarking of an address
• If you enable the “Bookmarks Toolbar”, there is a “Most Visited” buttons there now
• The tabs have a close buttons each now, though to see it, the tab must be active. This is to prevent accidental tab closure
• The tabs look slimmer though it might just be me

Note that depending on your Operating System, you might not be seeing the same interface as me. Apparently, Firefox 3 has individual themes for individual OS’s.

I specially like that star icon that allows quick bookmarking. Saves me a trip to the Bookmarks menu. The back button is now more prominent, and probably more usable. We’ll see about that in the long run. However, there is a single drop-down arrow now. So back and foreward pages were grouped in that single arrow. Strange…

Before seeing the features, I’d like to stress that add-ons problem. Not all add-ons are compatible with Firefox 3.0 Final yet. I’m specially dependent on Tabmix Plus in my daily browsing, considering that I’m one of the people who has at least 10 tabs open at any one time. Tabmix allowed me to do a number of operations, like duplicating tabs and tab size, and I’m missing these features. Before upgrading, make sure your add-ons will work, and that you are do not rely too much on those that won’t immediately work. If you are upgrading from 2.x versions, 3.0 will check for incompatibilities automatically, but that will be after the install is made. Mozilla team could have made the add-ons compatibility check before the upgrade actually takes place, and ask you if you want to continue upgrading. Duh!

On with the specific features. The File, Edit, View menus are almost the same. The Zoom submenu (in the View menu) has the Zoom Text Only feature, which is interesting for people with sight issues, allowing to preserve other elements of a page, and zoom only text. This is important considering that Firefox 3 will also zoom images and other elements when you use the Zoom feature.

The History menu has a “Recently Closed Tabs” feature which is was available in TabMix Plus, and now is available in the default install.

The Bookmarks menu underwent some radical changes, and is now much more usable. Note the “Recently Bookmarked” and “Recently Tagged” submenus. Quite useful if you want to access a site you recently bookmarked, but don’t want to fish in the Bookmarks tree. The newest feature is the re-designed “Organize Bookmarks” window, which I will call the Bookmarks Library.

The “Recently Bookmarked” , “Recently Tagged” and “Most Visited” menus/button is called the Smart Bookmarks feature of Firefox 3, which kind of allows you to create custom views of your bookmarks. You can check here and here for more info about Smart Bookmarks, how to use them, and how to create your own “views”.

It is now much more intuitive to use. A search box is now available directly to locate bookmarks. There are now more ways to sort your bookmarks, as you can see from the screenshot below. You can also check out the Columns submenu to see more details about your bookmarks. Note also the introduction of tags for bookmarks. I’m not sure if I have time to tag all of mine, but you might find it useful, and it introduces a new way of finding your bookmarks. This new Bookmarks Library is better when compared to the old version.

Still with the menus, you might want to check out the add-ons manager, which allows you to perform more actions now. Like, you can install new add-ons directly from the add-ons manager, which includes a search box. The Extensions tab is pretty much the same, except that the right-click menu has more options. Also, note the new Plugins tab, allowing you to selectively enable or disable plugins. For example, you can now easily disable the Java plugin if you wish.

The Tools – Options is almost the same as previous versions, but the new Applications tab is a nice addition, allowing you to determine how Firefox should deal with external formats like PDFs, image formats or even feeds. For example, you can have Firefox always save PDFs, and open Feed links in your favourite feed reader.

The Password Manager features a search box now, to quickly locate a site, and its corresponding password. All these search features really increase Firefox’s usability.

Coming back to the main interface, we are going to be looking at the upgraded address bar, which some call “AwesomeBar“. It’s been re-designed to better integrate with your bookmarks and history. Now, when you start typing an address, you will see past visited pages, and pages from your Bookmarks being displayed, in an auto-complete way. If you use the drop-down arrow on the address bar, you will see that the URI is now completely displayed, along with the site name. Those new features are pretty good, but I don’t like the way the address bar increased in size (2x the height for each item now!). As an example, 12 links in the address bar nearly filled up my whole screen when I use the drop-down. For people with low vertical screen resolutions, this will be a major pain.

Also, pausing your cursor in one of the links of the address bar and pressing the Delete key on your keyboard deletes the entry from the bar. This might be useful if ever you have mistyped an address and you find it in the address bar. This trick also works for other kinds of forms, like Username boxes.

Firefox 3 also brings the new Remember Password toolbar. The obtrusive Remember password box was replaced by a docked toolbar which asks you if you want the password remembered. This change allows you to continue using the site, without having to close the prompt first. When is this useful? Assume you have typed your logins, but are not sure if they are right. In previous Firefox versions, if you had clicked “Remember” and the logins were wrong, you had to manually go in the password manager, and delete them there. Then, logout, and re-input the correct details, then ask the manager to remember it. With Firefox 3, you can login successfully, then choose to Remember the password. If it is not right, then make amends, and only click the button once you are successfully logged in. That’s a very good improvement.

(Note for the shot, I cropped it a bit so that it becomes easier to fit in. The toolbar takes up the whole length of the screen in reality, and the three buttons are on the rightmost of the screen.)

It has been reported that Firefox 3 has also changed the way FTP directories are represented, making it easier to navigate, and more pleasing to the eye through the use of colour and styling. Unfortunately, I don’t have a screenshot to show it yet, but I can tell you it’s better now. Looks more user-friendly than the plain old black-and-white Index of page.

The Download Manager was also re-designed. Text links for “Pause” and “Cancel” have been iconified. There is also support for resuming downloads, which we are told, is better than for previous versions of Firefox. I tested the resume feature with some direct downloads and it works. I will have to put it to test for other applications like FTP transfers or something and see. Also, notice the Search bar introduced in the Downloads window. Quite a nice addition.

Firefox is legendary for hogging memory. Well, unfortunately with Firefox 3, it’s still pretty much the same. I have to confess that I have a number (>10) of add-ons installed, and these eat up memory, but still, with a single tab opened, Firefox eats up 62MB of memory. I then proceeded to open 10 tabs of common sites like Youtube and Wikipedia, and the memory usage increased to 112MB. Not very pretty…

I’ve not tested it, but according to reports, Firefox includes better protection against Phishing sites. I’ve got to see this with my own eyes.

Well, that would be it for my reviews. Quite a number of improvements in Firefox 3 as compared to 2.x versions. And guess what? Mozilla developers are already eyeing Firefox 3.1, expected by the end of the year. Now, if only add-ons developers could provide updates to their respective add-ons to make them Firefox 3 compatible, it would be really great to use Firefox 3 to the fullest of its capabilities. For now, I think I’ll keep 2.0.0.14, awaiting the update of my favorite add-ons, then I’ll start using 3.0.

Ps. Just for fun, type “about:robots” without quotes in the address/awesome bar. Yaay! An easter egg. Want another one? “about:mozilla”.

Some more “about” features to try out. Be careful with “about:config” though since you can really mess up your browser. Try “about:cache“, “about:license“, “about:config” for some useful Firefox-related info.

If you want to add something, feel free to use the Comments box. We’d be glad to hear what you think about the new Firefox 3 Final.

Ps. Some people have reported that they don’t like the Firefox 3 address bar (SmartBar/AwesomeBar). If you are one of them, then you can make use of the Oldbar add-on for Firefox 3 which reverts the address bar back to Firefox 2.x-like.

Other Firefox 3 reviews: (not many for now, more updates later as they come)

• Lifehacker’s Top 10 Firefox 3 features
• Lifehacker’s Power User’s guide to Firefox 3
• TheMediaGuru’s Firefox 3 review

This article comes from GeekScribes

Firefox 3 Final: The Review