One of the tools that I use daily is the Firefox add-on Firebug. If you’re dealing with web development in any way, Firebug will give you an enormous wealth of information and tools:

• monitor how long it takes for each component of your web page to load;
• edit css and html with a live preview;
• debug javascript errors;
• analyze DOM, and more.

Although this is a plug-in, it has its own environment of extensions to add even more to the fun.

The Mozilla team has announced that Fiirefox 3.1 will come with native support for Theora and Vorbis media. So, this means that:

1. open source media can become a bit more mainstream (finally moving away the proprietary mp3 monopoly);
2. no longer will we have to install Firefox plugins to see embedded audio and video files (as long as they’re in .ogg format)

The code is already out, available in Firefox’s nightly builds releases for large scale testing.

We have a bunch of Theora and Vorbis files and the quality is pretty good (some say ogg audio is even better than mp3). If you’d like to see/hear for your for yourself, go to Jamendo.org, they have tons of music files you can download in ogg, and you can check out the Wikimedia page to watch some ogg videos.

The Firefox add-on Gears, formerly known as Google Gears, allows you to use web applications as if they were installed on your computer. Consider it as a fancier offline browsing.

So, basically the data instead of being completely stored on the web is actually stored in your computer. You’ll have access whenever you want. The number of websites compatible with Gears isn’t that huge at the moment but there are some very good ones already adopting it such as RememberTheMilk, Google Docs, Zoho, Google Reader, and most recently MySpace.

Gears has been extra handy on my laptop, in places with no wi-fi I can still browse through the day’s headline news and continue to work on some documents with Google Docs. I just wish for the day to come when GMail comes out with Gears support.

Dear readers, any other websites you would like to use Gears with?

The folks at Mozilla will be giving us the full stable Firefox 3 in a bit more than 24 hours. A really really nice improvement from the 2.0 release which now seems pretty ancient for all of those already testing beta releases and release candidates.

Mozilla is even trying to set a new world record for most number of downloads of a single software in one day. Join in the campaign if you’d like as well.

Most importantly, download Firefox 3 on June 17th. Your computer will thank you with less resources consumed, your patience will thank you for not having to go through a bunch of frequent browser crashes, and even web developers will thank you for the switch (actually, web developers thank you using anything besides IE).

Firefox, our favorite web browser, is coming closer and closer to its version 3. I’ve been using Firefox v3 beta 5 for quite some time now and I can say it is working amazingly fast and more stable.

Today Mozilla released Firefox v3 release candidate 2. Compared to the old Firefox v2, the new release is safer, faster, easier to manage with their plug-in management, and even looks nicer! The full list of features for v3RC2 is here.

Download the newest release if you’d like, but be warned that your plug-ins might not work.

We’d like to hear from you dear readers, are you still sticking with Firefox 2 or started migrating?