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

It may happen that you need a directory listing, that is a list of all the files in a folder. Unfortunately, there is no direct way to do this simple task in Windows.

Say you need to send a list of all the files found in a directory to a friend. You could take a screen-capture of the folder and send it to them. What if there are lots of files? You’d have multiple screen-captures and files will repeat in various captures. Not very elegant. So I’ll show you 3 methods to get a list of all files from a directory and save it as a text file.

1. Using Command Prompt

In my opinion, this is the simplest of the 3 methods. It’s portable since it uses in-built Windows tools. As the title says, we’ll be using the Command Prompt. No need to worry if you have no experience with command line interfaces. The commands are easy to understand and there are only a few. I’ll be using Windows 7 for this post, but it should work for all version of Windows, especially XP and after.

1. Open the folder which contains the files you want to list.
2. While holding down the Shift key, right-click in an empty space and select “Open Command Window Here“
3. A Command Prompt window will open. It usually has a black color, and you will see something like this by default: “C:\Users\your username>“
4. Type “dir /b > mylist.txt” then press Enter
   • The “/B” part means “bare”. It will only print the file names, while skipping all the attributes, file sizes etc. This is usually what you want.
   • The “>” sign means: “take whatever output the previous command produces and put it in the file that follows. Create that file if needed.”
   • You can try various options. Try viewing help first: “dir /?“
   • If you want to sort, add the “/O<x>” switch (slash-Oh) where <x> is: E – extensions, S – file size, G – group by directories. E.g. “dir /B /OG > mylist.txt“
   • If you want all file sizes etc… remove the “/B“: “dir > mylist.txt“
   • If you want to include files found in sub-folders too: “dir /B /S > mylist.txt“
5. After that, you’ll find a file called “mylist.txt” inside that directory which will contain all the filenames of files found in that directory. You can then open that file in Notepad to print it, or send it to a friend or whatever you wanted to do with the list of files.

2. Use File List

Alternatively, you can make use of the very simple utility called File List.

Just drag the folder which contains the files you want to list over the application. It’ll generate a list of files which you can then copy and paste, wherever you need.

To print the output, open Notepad, paste the contents inside and then Print.

You can also use the “…” button to browse to your required folder.

One thing I didn’t find in that application is the ability to list files in sub-folders. So you’ll have to do that manually: List each folder, copy and collate their outputs manually.

3. Use Karen’s Directory Printer

If simple is not good for you, try a heavyweight app when it comes to listing files: Karen’s Directory Printer.

It has tons of features and really customizable. You can list files on network shares, local files and files in subfolders. You can select to show files by attribute and decide how you want the files sorted. The greatest feature of it is to output file attributes such as date created along with names. After selecting what you want, you can customize the output it generates to some extent. Overall, it offers lots of customizations.

I found that it provided everything I wanted when it came to listing files. It hasn’t been updated since November 2009 (at the time of writing) but that shouldn’t be a problem since it runs fine on Windows 7.

My only complaint is that its user interface takes some time to get used to.

Whatever tool you choose, they’ll all provide you with a list of files at the end. Up to you to decide what to do with it.

That’s it for this post. If you use some other tool to do the same job, you can share it with the world in the comments below. Thanks for reading!

This article comes from GeekScribes

How To Easily Save Or Print A Directory’s Contents [Windows]

First post of 2011! Yay! So I thought I’d start with something that can help protect the environment and at the same time, save you some cash. Quite a good idea, no?

So as the title says, we’re going to try to have your printer drink less ink, and hence reduce the amount of money you invest feeding it. You should know that I tried and am still using those measures for a laser printer, but I believe that what works for toner should work pretty much the same for liquid ink. I have no idea about how dot-matrix printers will react, so don’t ask.

Don’t print!

Stop calling me Captain Obvious! I know that point is plain common-sense, but I didn’t mean you should not print anything – but that you should select what you are printing.

Say you’re printing a web page. I doubt you really need to print the all-black header followed by all the ads scattered everywhere, the fancy sidebar and the all-black footer. You can use tools to remove those, and we’ll see about them in a moment. First let’s see what we can do about text documents and PDF files, and assuming you only want to read a part of the document.

No need to print the whole thing, and waste ink. Turns out you can select a Print Range in the Print dialog, as shown below. You can select what to print in 2 ways:

• Highlight what you want to print, choose “Selection” then print
• Select a page range, say page 2 to page 5, then print. I find that one easier, since highlighting can sometimes be a pain.

Now what about web pages? You can use tools such as PrintWhatYouLike, PrintLiminator and PrintFriendly to get rid of what you don’t like off a page – like images, then print the result. You can see a before-after comparison of what the BBC news web page looks like after I applied PrintWhatYouLike on it. That should save quite some ink!

BBC News - Before

BBC News After

Oh, and by the way? Always, ALWAYS use the print preview feature before you print anything. This has saved me quite some ink in the past. Once, I nearly printed 50 pages of the wrong range. It only costs a few seconds to check if everything is alright, but will save you quite some cash on ink in the long run.

Thin Fonts / EcoFont

Turns out you can save ink just by changing which font you use for your texts.

If you haven’t heard of EcoFont yet, you can go check it out on its homepage. Basically, EcoFont is a font (duh!) with holes in the characters, so for every character printed, you’re saving a tiny bit of ink.

Some folks were not convinced (down at the time of writing). Why use a special font, when you can use thin fonts like Century Gothic or Calibri? Printer.com has an article on their blog about which font made the most savings with respect to ink, and the conclusion was using Century Gothic was even better than EcoFont. A quick Google search revealed several other articles claiming Century Gothic is the “greenest font”.

So choose whichever font you want, be it EcoFont, Century Gothic or Calibri (as long as it’s not Impact) and make some savings.

No bolding!

Avoid using “Bold” fonts. As simple as that. Bolding fonts implies making them thicker, and so more ink goes into the characters. While it may be impossible to completely stop using bolding, try to avoid it.

Instead, where possible, try using underlining or italicizing the text. If italics are not eye-catching enough, you can try increasing the size of the font a bit, or maybe even use a different font, like if you are using Century Gothic, use Courier New to highlight some text. Up to you to see what you like best. For me, underlining works best as the alternative for bolding.

85% Black

I’ve only tested this one with laser toners and it does make savings. If anyone tests this measure with inkjets and see it works, please report back. Thanks!

As the title says, instead of printing in pure black, just set the color of your text to 85% black instead. Or even less, depending on what you consider “readable” text to be.

How do you do that in Microsoft Word? Well just set your Text Color → More Colors → Custom, then set the RGB values to 60,60,60. (Those values work best for me. Feel free to experiment)

The end result (if you are using toners) is that you somewhat make every font look like EcoFont. If you look closely, you’ll see empty spots in the characters. Check the comparisons below, for 100% black vs the 60/60/60 greyish-black color.

While you are at it, make pictures lighter. You can do that in any picture editor by playing with the Brightness/Contrast settings.

100% Black

85% Black + Toner Save (printer setting)

Bonus: Green Print / Fine Print / Eco Print

You can also use desktop-based software to help you with some more savings. You can use the free version of Green Print or the paid Fine Print or Eco Print software to make some more savings.

These software allow you to extensively control your print job, such as giving you the ability to turn documents to grayscale, remove unwanted pages or images and especially, allow you to have a better print preview feature.

If you have the money, you can try investing in those applications. But I think the measures above should cause quite some savings on their own.

Well, that’s it for this first article of 2011. I hope you enjoyed the article and that you find it useful. If you have tricks that help you save ink, please share via the Comments below. Thanks for reading!

This article comes from GeekScribes

4 Innovative Tricks To Save Printer Ink

This error has also been reported to occur when call events happen but I’ve not personally witnessed it.

Turns out the solution is simple, but quite awkward. The steps are:

1. Go to Tools → Options.
2. Under the General section, choose Sounds.
3. Click the Enable all Sounds button.
4. Click the Save button. This is important! Changes will only take effect after you click Save and exit out of the Options window.

Now if you were like me, and trying to test ringtones, you can go back to Tools → Options → Sounds (steps 1, 2 above) and playback your sound (green play button) and you won’t get the error.

An alternative solution, if you get the error during call events is:

1. Go to Tools → Options.
2. Under the General section, choose Sounds.
3. Click Mute all Sounds button.
4. Click the Save button.
5. Repeat steps 1 and 2 to return to the Sounds window.
6. This time, click Enable all Sounds button.
7. Click the Save button.

Hopefully those steps should solve your problem, and I hope this simple solution is useful to you.

(source: Skype forums)

This article comes from GeekScribes

Skype: Playback Not Supported Error [Solution]

I’ll confess that I love Media Player Classic (or its newer flavor, Media Player Classic – Home Cinema). I have yet to find a player that has a simple interface yet packs so many features. Undeniably there are other great players out there, such as KMPlayer, SMPlayer and VLC among others. But I still find MPC’s interface to be better than the rest. Or maybe it’s simply nostalgia…

Recently I was having a small problem with Media Player Classic (MPC). When I set MPC to play different videos in different instances, that is, two videos in two different MPC windows, one had sound, one did not.

The volume control was not muted, and it was nothing to do with Windows’ volume settings. It was just a misconfigured setting in MPC and it’s simple to correct.

A quick journey to the MPC IRC channel (#mpc-hc on Freenode) gave me the answer, which was simply selecting the right option from a drop-down menu…

The steps are:

• View menu – Options
• On the left, under Playback – select Output
• Set your Audio Renderer to this option: “Default DirectSound Device”
• Problem solved

Answers are sometimes as simple as that. I don’t even know how to conclude this post, so I’ll just leave it at that. Thanks for reading, and hope this helps you.

I’ll also thank the developers of MPC for the awesome program they provide to us and the quick help I got from the people present in their IRC channel. No “RTFM” or anything, just a straight answer. Thanks!

This article comes from GeekScribes

Media Player Classic: No Sound When Playing Multiple Videos – Solution