Firefox Home Submitted to Apple App Store

Firefox Home is a free application for iPhone that provide access to your Firefox desktop bookmarks, history and open tabs. You can view your sites directly in Firefox Home, open them in Safari or send them to your friends through e-mail. The application works by getting your synced items from Firefox Sync.

If you want to use this application, once is approved, you should install Firefox Sync so that when the app is available you will be ready to go!

Firefox Home has been submitted to the App Store and waits for approval from Apple. Lets hope that Apple will not consider this application as a Safari competitor and reject it. It could take weeks for Apple to test and approve or reject the app. We will keep you posted with what happens next.

Firefox 4.0 tabs on top. Why?

Firefox 4.0 will bring a major overhaul of the user interface. Mozilla is planning to include the Ribbon/Fluent look by removing the menu and adding a button on top just like the Windows Ribbon, Office 2010, Opera, etc. but also to change the placement of the tabs by putting them on top.

Alex Faaborg, Principal Designer at Mozilla, explained in a video (included on the bottom of this post) why the tabs are on top in Firefox 4.0. He also stated that this is a preference that users can change by right clicking on any of the toolbars they have.

In the Firefox 4 nightly builds, and in Firefox 4 Beta 1, we are changing the default tab position so that tabs are on top. This is a preference that users can change by right clicking on any of their toolbars. Moving the default tab position is obviously a significant and to some extent controversial change to the Firefox UI, which is why we made the video above to help explain our rationale. [...] The change to placing tabs on top isn’t about one browser versus another browser, it’s about the evolution of the Web as a platform, Faaborg stated on his blog

IE9 Beta In August

From the leaked Windows 8 documents it appears that the beta version of the browser will be released in August.

The current developer preview doesn’t have the full functionality and doesn’t give any clue about how the new version is going to look like (maybe it will have the tabs on top ).

I guess the beta will be released in second half of August, somewhere around 23-29 August, following the 8 week release pattern. The dates for the release candidate and when the browser is released to web are currently unknown.

I think that the new version of Internet Explorer will be a great competition for the other browsers. What do you think about the new version? Are you going to use IE9 and give up your current browser? Leave a comment!

No more Bing Cashback

Microsoft is getting rid of Bing Cashback as it didn’t get the broad adoption they were hoping for. When introduced in May 2008, Microsoft had held out the program as a significant way it could change the economics of search.

“In lots of ways, this was a great feature – we had over a thousand merchant partners delivering great offers to customers and seeing great ROI on their campaigns, and we were taking some of the advertising revenue and giving it back to customers,” Microsoft said in a blog post. “But after a couple of years of trying, we did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for.”

You can still use Bing Cashback until July 30.