Firefox/Chrome: Small netbook screens make you really appreciate every last pixel on your device. The Mini Wide userscript for Gmail adds a “netbook mode” shortcut to Gmail that removes navigation and ads for a streamlined, netbook-friendly, message-focused view of your inbox.

Once installed, just tap ‘w’ to toggle between the default Gmail view and netbook mode. That’s all there is to it. Assuming you’ve mastered Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts, the lack of navigation isn’t all that big of a deal—plus you can easily bring back the default view with a quick press of the ‘w’ key. The tweak is a little rough around the edges at times (I couldn’t use ‘g’ + ‘l’ label navigation unless I toggled out of mini mode, for example), but it’s a nice start, and could be really useful for netbook users.

You’ll need the Grease monkey extension to install it in Firefox; Chrome supports installing userscripts as extensions, so just head to the homepage and click Install.

For eager beavers who want a taste of Firefox to come, Mozilla issued a second preview release Wednesday of the browser.

The software is based on version 1.9.3 of the Gecko browser engine that underlies Firefox. The current Firefox 3.6, and an update called Lorentz, are based on 1.9.2.

The headline feature of the new preview release is the same for Lorentz, though: out-of-process plug-ins, which means that Adobe Systems Flash Player and the like run in a separate memory compartment to protect the browser overall when they crash. Mozilla hopes people will see how well it works on an OOPP testing page.

However, according to a mailing list posting by Benjamin Smedberg, who’s working on the OOPP feature, it only works on Linux and Windows systems at present. “MacOS presents some unique challenges: the traditional drawing and interaction model for plug-ins is very difficult to do across processes. We are working on Mac support for multi-process plug-ins, and hope to have a preview of this work available soon,” Smedberg said in an OOPP blog post.

The new alpha release also should cool off some hot spots that consume a lot of labor when laying out Web pages, Smedberg said, thereby improving performance.

Remember how Google Chrome’s market share grew last month, but Firefox and Internet Explorer’s shares slipped downward ever-so-slightly? That trend continued in February, according to web analytics company Net Applications. This time, however, Chrome was the only browser to grow at all (Safari moved up a little bit in January, but not so this time around).

Chrome Chrome grew from 5.22% to 5.61% (0.39%) over the course of February. Internet Explorer Internet Explorer shrunk from 62.12% to 61.58% (0.54%), FirefoxFirefox from 24.43% to 24.23% (0.2%), Safari from 4.53% to 4.45% (0.08%) and Opera from 2.38% to 2.35% (0.03%).

Chrome’s adoption is (unsurprisingly) moving faster among web and tech enthusiasts.

While 14.8% among enthusiasts and 5.22% among the general population might not seem like much, it’s actually very impressive progress for a new browser. Chrome passed Safari to become the third most popular desktop browser in the world in December.

Net Applications also found that the archaic Internet Explorer 6 browser version declined another 0.24%. We’ve been saying “IE6 must die” for months now, and it looks like we’re slowly getting our wish. Expect the decline to speed up this month when YouTube drops its support.

You’ve clearly made an educated decision in choosing the Firefox browser, so why not make further decisions about how it looks? As you may know, Firefox can give you a totally personalized browser experience, with plenty of options to customize its look and feel.

We’ve trawled the plethora of available add-ons, themes, and features to bring you ten great options to beautify your Mozilla-made browser — from super skins, to improved tabs, to better buttons. There are even a few kittens along the way.

Check out the options we’ve highlighted below and let us know in the comments any add-ons you currently use to make your browsing experience a bit more beautiful. After all, when it’s this easy, why settle for default?

1. Firefox Personas

Taking advantage of Firefox’s “Personas” feature is a really quick and easy way to spice up the basic look of your browser with skins that decorate the browser bar. Install the plug-in and you can chose from 35,000+ Personas that can be changed on a daily basis, or even just to suit your mood, with a super-simple click-through-and-choose process.

With so many options available, you can imagine there really is something for everyone as far as the skin designs go. They range from art, scenery, brands, and games to TV- and celeb-themed choices.

Cost: Free

2. ChromaTabs Plus

For those that think it’s the little things that add-up to make up the bigger picture, ChromaTabs offers one simple tool that will make your browser more colorful. This add-on makes the usually gray browser tabs colorful with a rainbow of shades by tinting each tab a different color depending on the website loaded. The coloring-in works automatically depending on the color of the site’s favicon, but if you’ve got the time, tabs can be assigned site-specific colors.

Cost: Free

3. Walnut for Firefox

Ideal for fans of retro style and reminiscent of your classic wood veneer, Walnut for Firefox gives your browser a wooden look and feel. Walnut is a complete skin redesign, which means that all windows, widgets, panels, and even other add-ons get the tree-themed look, kindly offering a more natural feel to your browsing experience.

Cost: Suggested donation of $4.99

4. about:kittens

If you think the presence of a cat is always going to improve matters, then about:kittens is the add-on for you. It somewhat randomly sticks a kitty in the “Help > About” box, chosen from the vast selection on kittenwar.com. No more boring “about box” logo pics to snoozify your browsing experience, as with this add-on, every about window will offer an adorable little kitty.

Cost: Free

5. Browser Backgrounds

As opposed to just spicing up the browser bar with imagery, this add-on lets you add an image to your browser background in the same way you can with your desktop background. You can choose from a vast selection of images offered within the add-on, or can pick to display your own photo, offering an even more personalized option.

Cost: Donation requested

6. PinkTheme

For just about the girliest browsing experience you could wish for, the PinkTheme add-on really does pink your browsing experience to the max. Look no further if you’re aiming to rouge-tint the online world, as well as see the Firefox user interface elements pinkified. There’s also extra pink modules, such as the pink search and the pink home. It’s basically all very pink indeed.

Cost: Suggested donation of $1.01

7. Canvas

We find it hard to believe you can’t find at least one of the over 35,000 browser skin Personas to like. But if you are all about personalization, then Canvas can help you out by letting you select any one of your own photographs as a background for your browser bar. You can add any photo from your PC, or any image from the web, giving you the option to have a familiar face greet you every time you go online.

Cost: Suggested donation of $2.99

8. Aero Big

If you don’t want to skin your browser but you’re seeking a fresh new look to brighten it up, Aero Big offers some funky, chunky buttons that will liven up Firefox with some fresh graphics for your browser bar. As well as super-sizing and coloring in the icons for all of the browser’s toolbar and context menu items, there are also icons for a number of extensions you might use.

Cost: Free

9. iPhox

If you are iPhone-mad, then iPhox (“if Firefox and the iPhone had a kid together, this is what he would look like”) will iPhonify your browser so you can enjoy the Apple mobile look and feel while you’re at your desktop. The dev promises “the same familiar icons, toolbars, and menus of the iPhone, only instead of being on an amazing little handheld device, it can now be on your favorite browser.”

Cost: Free

10. NASA Night Launch

Looking a little like Darkle, this night-themed add-on is perfect for anyone looking to go to the dark side as far as browsing goes, with its NASA tie-in adding a little space ship chic. Said to have been inspired by the night launch of STS-116, the add-on can be installed as a simple dark theme with a dark toolbar, or after a few extra steps, with a choice of cool NASA toolbar images.

Cost: Suggested donation of $5

Ever seen a picture online that you’re kicking yourself for not saving, especially now that it’s been removed? There’s a good chance it may still be saved on your computer; all you need to do is familiarize yourself with your browser’s cache.

Front page photo by Jeffrey Beall

Covering resurrecting images from your browser cache and highlighting how to recover images in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari, but the browser landscape has changed a little. Luckily, recovering images from Firefox hasn’t really changed, and popular alternatives like Chrome and Opera all have similar recovery methods. In Firefox, it works the same

1. Type about:cache in the address bar.
2. Under “Disk Cache Device,” copy the folder path to where Firefox stores your cache entries.
3. Navigate to that folder in Windows Explorer or Finder. The files there will have strange names and no extension, so it can take some time, but you just have to open each one to see if it’s the photo in question.

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Firefox is the most extensible web browser around but you don’t even need to install any add-ons to take advantage of the numerous shortcuts that make tabbed browsing even better.

Over at MakeUseOf, the software and technology-centered blog, they’ve put together a guide to being more productive with Firefox tabs, among the great add-ons they suggest like previously covered New Tab King, Tab Navigator, and Tab Preview, they also highlight some great built-in shortcuts—seen in the chart above.

Using the shortcuts expands the versatility of tabs without a single bit of memory bloat to your Firefox installation. You’ll definitely want to learn the shortcuts above as well as one they missed—using CTRL+Page Up and CTRL+Page Down to move up and down through your list of tabs.

Have a favorite shortcut in Firefox, tab-related or otherwise? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Name: Kikin

The pioneer of user-centricity, kikin is changing how people find and consume information and defining the phrase: “My Web Always With Me.”

Kikin is a browser plugin for Safari(Mac), Firefox and Internet Explorer(Chrome support is coming soon) that adds some context and rich media to your searching and surfing experience.

Even as different search engines try to cram in more relevant information into the top of search results, getting data from networks and places you trust isn’t consistent. Kikin adds consistency. You can choose what sites you want Kikin to scour for your searches – stuff like iTunes, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Hulu,Google Reader, Wikipedia, YouTube, Bing and so on, and then when you search for a topic — like let’s say a band, you get this at the top of your results page:

What we like is that if you connect your Facebook or Twitter account, you can see not only public comments from those services, but just comments from your friends that are related to the topic in question. Context is key, and we like that you can focus that context.

Furthermore, if you go to view a YouTube video or look at an album or movie on Amazon.com, a Kikin bar will appear at the top of the page (you can easily close it), showing you recent searches for that item, feedback from Twitter and Facebook, and other options.

For media searches in particular — stuff like movies, music and TV shows, Kikin offers a nice bit of context and a very easy to navigate menu, that actually is more convenient that going to individual sites or even using some of the search engine specific aggregation services.

You can also easily share content you find on Twitter, Facebook or e-mail, which is a nice touch. Mac users, be aware that if you want to use Kikin in Safari and you run Snow Leopard, you’ll have to run it in 32-bit mode — so our recommendation would just be to use the Firefox plugin as it works the most reliably.

Do you use any search-enhancement plugins to learn more about media items? Let us know!

Want the power and add-ons of the Firefox browser in the palm of your hands? That dream is quickly becoming a reality, starting with the Maemo OS and owners of the Nokia N900.

Mozilla has officially introduced Firefox for Maemo, the first officially launched version of Firefox for Mobile. It’s been in testing for some time, but now it’s available for download for those of you who own an N900 smartphone.

The new mobile browser comes equipped with an array of quite awesome features: the awesome bar, weave sync (sync your bookmarks, passwords, tabs, and history between mobile and desktop), tabbed browsing, and location-aware maps are all part of this launch.

Our favorite feature of the Firefox for Mobile launch though has to be the inclusion of add-ons. Yes, you’ll be able to customize your mobile browsing experience with add-ons like TwitterBar,AdBlock Plus, and YouTube Enabler. There is a Firefox mobile add-on website with around 40 add-ons, but the number is growing.

If you’re not an N900 owner but want Firefox on your iPhone, Blackberry, Android, or other smartphone, we have some good news and some bad news. The good news: Firefox is investigating Android and launching for other mobile phones soon. The bad news: don’t expect them on the BlackBerry or iPhone anytime soon.

Feeling adventurous? If so, you can try out the release candidate of the upcoming new version of Firefox, 3.6. The 7.7 MB download will give you a taste of what’s to come in this version, and we’re talking about some very interesting changes.

Firefox 3.6 runs on the well-tested Gecko 1.9.2 web-rendering platform, bringing support for new web technologies, better speed, stability, faster startup and load times, as well as improved Javascript performance.

As far as new features go, perhaps the most interesting one is Personas, which lets users change the appearance of the browser with one click. Furthermore, the new Firefox will alert you when your plugins are out of date, and, finally, it’s optimized for small device operating systems, for example Windows CE and Maemo.