The Download Blog

Besides blazing fast JavaScript benchmarks, privacy mode is the big new feature in modern browsers. The latest version of Firefox includes many privacy enhancements that can keep others from seeing what you've been up to while online. But what if a friend, family member, or boss wants to borrow and/or look at something on your computer? How do you play it cool and hide tabs you don't want them to see?

Developer Diego Ruiz has come up with a solution called HideTab that does just that. You can very quickly hide one or all open tabs with a keyboard shortcut or right-click contextual menu. This means the tabs can't be seen both along the top of your browser, and in the list of open sites. Instead, you can only see what you've hidden in a small, and subtle pop-up menu that sits in the bottom-right-hand corner of your browser. There's also a keyboard shortcut that restores all of the tabs you've hidden.

HideTab lets you hide certain tabs one at a time, or all at once in case someone comes by when you're looking at something you don't want them to see.

(Credit: CNET)

One thing to keep in mind is that hidden tabs still continue to run in the background, which means if you're watching a video or listening to music it's going to keep playing. Hopefully a future version will provide the option to mute the audio from any tabs that are hidden.

Beyond privacy, this add-on can be a useful tool for leaning down the number of tabs you want to see. I regularly do tasks in my browser that involve hopping around to a few specific tabs, and sometimes it's nice to hone down to just those few without transferring them to a new window or doing a lot of reorganizing.

HideTab is an experimental extension, which means there may be a few bugs that have not been worked out prior to its review by the Mozilla community.

Related: How to hide your tracks at work

Considering that it's based on Mozilla Thunderbird, it was a bit of a surprise that add-ons weren't available for Postbox when it debuted. That's now been remedied in Postbox beta 13 for Windows and Mac. Given Postbox's emphasis on social-networking technology and Mozilla's own success with add-ons, this move puts the e-mail client in an excellent position to attract more users.

The latest Postbox introduces add-ons to its users.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

A Webware 100 winner, the list of supported extensions isn't long at the moment, and notably it doesn't include Thunderbird's calendaring tool Lightning. Since Postbox doesn't have its own supported calendar, this could prove to be a deal breaker for some. However, the list does include several plug-ins that Thunderbird users should be familiar with, including ReminderFox, QuickText, and MinimizeToTray. MozBackup and Zindus are listed as "coming soon." There's new support for localized dictionaries from Mozilla, too.

Users who wish to install Postbox add-ons while running Firefox can either save the XPI file to their desktop and then install it manually, or drag-and-drop it into Postbox's open Add-ons window.

Other changes include fetching profile pictures from your address books in Postbox, Mac OS X, Twitter, and Facebook for the Inspector Pane. Settings can be imported from Mail.app. Multiple attachments can be dragged to your desktop. Along with a large number of stability and usability fixes, the security improvements made to Firefox 3.0.10 have also been folded in. Full release notes can be read here.

Oh yes, I did just go there. Hands-down, without a skerrick of doubt, AutoCopy is the best Firefox extension. It may also be the best Firefox extension you've never heard of. Here's what it does, and then I'll tell you what makes it so great.

The top image shows text being highlighted, while the bottom displays the AutoCopy copying options box that pops up immediately afterward.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Developed at Mozilla, AutoCopy is a lightweight, single-feature add-on that copies any text you highlight to your clipboard. No more hitting CTRL+C, or using the context menu. That in and of itself is not so revolutionary. The feature has been around for a while in other programs. What makes it the must-have extension is that there's practically no other reason to highlight text on a Web page except to copy it to your clipboard.

Sure, highlighting can be used to reveal hidden words or perhaps make poorly-colored text stand out from a background, but those instances are few and far between. If they're not, you're spending too much time looking at badly designed sites. To do either of those when using AutoCopy, just hold down the CTRL key as you highlight and it won't copy it to the clipboard.

Once you've highlighted anything from a single letter to entire multipage New Yorker articles, the add-on opens a small options box where your cursor is. Through the extension options, you can configure how long that box appears for, or turn it off.

AutoCopy's add-on settings box offers a reasonable amount of configuration.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

If you choose to use it, the post-copy options box offers a couple of useful choices. You can undo the copy, or access up to 10 previous clipboards and bring them back as the active clipboard. You can also paste to the location bar or the search bar, search from your default provider using the clipboard text as the search term, or open the text in a new tab. This doesn't use the "feeling lucky" search, so it only works for URLs or FTP sites. The last option copies the URL to the clipboard.

Options to configure add-on behavior include toggling a status bar icon for the add-on options, paste on middle click, deselecting after you highlight, toggling AutoCopy in text boxes, blinking to notify you when it copies, and copying plain text. That last one requires an additional extension, and I found it to be more than I needed.

Back in 2007, my colleague Peter Butler thought that Tab Mix Plus was the best Firefox extension, and I agree that it's still an excellent one. If you're using the pre-release version of Firefox 3.5, you can grab a beta of the updated Tab Mix Plus here. Tab Mix Plus isn't for everybody--as he says, not everyone needs to make all of their tabbed browsing dreams come true. Not everybody cares about in-page ad-blocking, either. Copying text, though, is something everybody does in-browser, and it'd be great to see this functionality eventually built into Firefox or one of the other top browsers.

(Credit: CNET)

Every computer user needs a basic text editor for Readme files and simple note taking capabilities--that's why Windows comes with Notepad. But if you want added features like a tabbed interface, search and replace functionality, or extras that help you with coding projects, you need to look for the more full-featured alternatives. The best editors come with numerous features and work great for editing code for Web sites, but also for simply writing quick notes, and pasting excerpts from the Web when aggregating research for a project.

Fortunately, some of the best software in this category is free, but you can also use "Light" versions of paid software and still get most of the useful features.

(Credit: CNET)

NoteTab Light offers a tabbed interface and adds several libraries of premade code bits called "clips" you can access through a pull-down menu on the left side of the interface. These clips can be anything from commonly used code to quick formatting tools available at a click of your mouse. You can also quickly preview your work in your default Web browser from within the interface. NoteTab Light offers a lightweight footprint and is a huge upgrade from the Notepad included with Windows.

(Credit: CNET)

TextPad is another excellent text editor with a "light" version that most users will find offers plenty of features. Like NoteTab, TextPad offers a host of features like a tabbed-interface, and helpful formatting tools for indenting, line numbering, character transposing, and condition-based word wrapping. TextPad will bug you with a nag screen periodically, but most features are available even in this time-unlimited "light" version.

(Credit: CNET)

EditPlus is a text editing tool that's popular with a lot of people because of its ability to use simple FTP commands to get your files online from within the program. Powerful features for Web authors like a built-in Web browser for previews and syntax highlighting for HTML, CSS, PHP, ASP, Perl, C/C++, and many more make this program an excellent alternative. Added handy features like a Windows Explorer-like file directory built-in to the interface and a wealth of commonly used code clips (like NoteTab Light) make this software particularly appealing. EditPlus is a 30-day trial, but with all of its useful features, the $35 price tag is more than worth it.

(Credit: CNET)

Notepad++ is a popular choice among serious code crunchers because it's loaded with useful features and it's completely free. It supports several programming languages, offers syntax highlighting, drag-and-drop functionality, and you can easily launch a preview in IE or Firefox from within the software. As a free option, anybody wanting to see what it's like using a text editor even if it is for making lists or doing Web research has nothing to lose with this excellent text editor. But the popularity of this software among serious coders is definitely warranted, with more than enough features for most projects.

If you've been playing around with the Postbox e-mail client for Windows and Mac, beta 11 has been unleashed upon the world.

Unlike March's beta 10, though, this update includes more performance issue fixes than anything else. Still, it's probably a good idea to upgrade.

Most notably, memory and CPU usage have decreased. Postbox claims that indexing is three times faster in this version, compared to beta 10, and that indexing uses about 75 percent to 80 percent less memory than before. I don't have statistics to do my own comparison of beta 10 to beta 11, but I did notice empirical improvements in performance.

AOL Mail account support has been added, and a bug in importing data from Outlook Express has been fixed. There's also support for usernames with special characters, and you can now add a contact to your address book with one click from the contact panel.

Beyond those changes, the full list is made up mostly of fixing annoyances such as LDAP and IMAP connections hanging.

Postbox had problems accepting a change in my network password from the last time I used it, when I had to re-enter it four times before the program remembered it. This probably has to do with how the program talks to the Exchange server, but it was irritating nonetheless. Thunderbird, on which Postbox is based, required my new network password to be entered only once.

Postbox is a finalist for 2009's Webware 100, awarded by CNET.

The open-source and cross-platform e-mail client Postbox rolls out another beta and has been quickly adding muscle to its abilities.

Postbox beta 10 introduces an HTML signature-creator in the Compose window.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Based on Mozilla Thunderbird and currently available for Windows and Mac, Postbox beta 10--the third update since I checked out the program for in the beginning of February--introduces several small changes worth noting.

Since then, Postbox has seen Hotmail support, Flickr integration in the Compose window, and a host of bug-fixes including two Firefox security updates. In the most recent version, users get the ability to create and edit HTML signatures from the Compose Sidebar's Signature panel and improved calendar attachment detection.

There's also a fix for the spell checker, which had been marking contractions as misspelled words, and a new feature that prevents a message from being marked as read until it's been viewed in the preview pane for a specific minimum time.

One feature that I've just noticed is that the Message pane lets you highlight text, which you can then drag into the search bar. Once you release it, Postbox will open up a search results page in your browser for the highlighted term.

These features continue to improve on the Postbox experience. Without support for extensions and the Thunderbird calendar extension Lightning, though, and keeping in mind Postbox's social-networking friendliness, it'd be interesting to see baked-in support for a Web-based calendar as an alternative to this major and missing feature.

It hasn't been updated since February 2005, but the free Firefox Preloader continues to help users who want faster boot times while maintaining a heavy load of tabs and extensions. Weighing in with an installer at 840kb and using around 30MB of RAM, the program gave me dramatically improved start-up times on a fully loaded Firefox 3.0.7.

Light on options, Firefox Preloader does one thing and does it well.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Somebody running a clean, unencumbered version of Firefox probably wouldn't find Firefox Preloader all that useful, so I tested it against Firefox with 22 extensions and about 40 open tabs. The extensions ranged from the bulky Cooliris to the svelte AutoCopy, while the tabs included everything from text-heavy, easy-to-render message boards to the main Facebook page and YouTube.

How dramatic were the improvements? Without using the Firefox Preloader, it took 32.1 seconds for Firefox to open, and 2 minutes, 34.2 seconds to finish loading all the tabs. With Firefox Preloader running, Firefox opened in 7.8 seconds, with another 1 minute, 36.7 seconds to complete all the tabs. I tested the times by hitting a stopwatch at the same time as I opened Firefox, so my times might be off by a couple tenths of a second, but even with factoring in the imprecision of the test, the results are still impressive.

Firefox Preloader is not otherwise laden with options. You can set it to run when you turn on your computer, and it installs a convenient system tray icon for accessing it on the fly. From there, you can unload the preloader, which clears out the program from the list of active tasks. And you can reload it, which dumps it from the active cache and then reloads it.

The Preloader doesn't play well with certain browser functions, notably when Firefox restarts after installing an extension or theme. It almost certainly adds at least a small amount of time to the computer's boot cycle, since it's one more thing that needs to load before Windows is ready to go. But for users who want to have their cake of extensions and tabs and eat it, too, Firefox Preloader remains a reasonable way to gain back more than a few precious seconds.

There aren't a lot of Microsoft Outlook competitors out there, but Mozilla's open-source Thunderbird is one of the best. Postbox for Windows and Mac, and built on Thunderbird code the way that Flock is based on Firefox, is a new face on the e-mail field.

Postbox looks like Thunderbird, but offers a lot of Web 2.0 features.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Still in beta, Postbox takes desktop e-mail hard toward Web 2.0, with fast links to upload contacts to Facebook and pictures to Picasa. Click on an e-mail, and the preview pane not only shows the text, but extracts all links, images, other attachments, and contacts into a sidebar for easy management. Postbox is also obsessed with tabs, which are coming in Thunderbird 3.0 but not to this degree--at least not from what we've seen. Postbox can also upload to Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace, del.icio.us, and Google.

When Postbox starts, you can import e-mail, contacts, and other messaging data from Thunderbird, Outlook, Google, and Yahoo. Once you get going, Postbox's tabs can be used to filter out the text of a message and focus on only attachments, images, links, or contacts. Messages themselves can also be opened in new tabs, cutting down on the excessive clutter that Web mail eliminated ages ago.

An excellent remix of a Thunderbird feature is Topics. An expansion of Thunderbird's Labels that automatically searches across folders for messages tagged with the same Topic, Postbox's is undeniably what its progenitor's should have been. Thunderbird's Labels can be configured to behave the same way, but it's not done without extra effort.

The Compose Sidebar pulls contacts, links, images, and attachments into a separate pane.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Postbox doesn't feature all of Thunderbird's abilities. The biggest one missing is that add-ons have been killed. So while Thunderbird 2.0 can be given calendaring via the Lightning plug-in, and Thunderbird 3.0 will integrate Lightning natively, Postbox only has a To-Do list. Depending on what you're using your e-mail for, this may be a major drawback, or much ado about nothing.

Social-networking junkies who are looking for a desktop solution should take a good look at Postbox, or at least keep an eye on its progress. Support for Flickr is hopefully coming, and I'm interested in seeing how Postbox reacts once Thunderbird 3 finally leaves beta later this year, but Postbox is proof that alternative desktop e-mail clients are far from dead.

Good news for Firefox users who have lusted over Chrome and Safari's option that lets you "tear" away tabs from an open window. The latest build of 3.1 offers it as a standard feature--and it works marvelously.

As in Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari browsers you simply pull away a tab from the interface and it turns into its own window. Likewise you can drag it back into an already opened window, just like you'd do to re-order your existing tabs.

While not a ground-breaking feature, tab tearing is a large step forward in changing the way we interact with our browsers. It's a cross between the idea of having multiple tabs and multiple windows, but does not relegate the user to being pigeonholed in either one permanently.

If you're feeling brave you can download the latest development build of 3.1 here. As mentioned before, this also comes with some nice JavaScript speed improvements and a new look for Windows Vista users.

Below is a quick demo of how the new tear-away feature works, both with dragging tabs and choosing to open them via contextual menu.

(via MozillaLinks)