Firefox Home, a free application, is now available for download on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Firefox Home provides access to your Firefox desktop history, bookmarks and open tabs on your iPhone. Get up and go and have exactly what you are looking for on the Web on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Firefox Home uses your browser data, securely synced from Firefox on your desktop to the cloud, to let you search and browse quickly and efficiently. You can view the sites you want directly in Firefox Home, open them in Mobile Safari or share them with friends via email. Your Firefox data is private and only you have access to it.

Quick Start:

If you have Firefox Sync on your desktop, skip to step #3.

1. Install Firefox Sync, a free add-on for Firefox, on your desktop.
2. Restart Firefox and follow prompts to create an account with both a password and a secret phrase.
3. Go the App Store on your iPhone and search for “Firefox Home” or install it directly from iTunes.
4. Launch Firefox Home on your iPhone. You’ll be prompted to enter your Firefox Sync account info. Enter your username, password and Secret Phrase and tap “Done.”
5. Enjoy!

More detailed set-up instructions are available, as well as a answers to frequently asked questions.

From text that is too small to read, to user interfaces that do not offer keyboard navigation options, users with special needs face a lot of challenges when trying to access websites they are interested in. Google Chrome team believe that extensions can complement the work the team is  doing to make Google Chrome more accessible and can help users with disabilities turn the web from an often unwelcoming place to an environment they can truly enjoy.

Today Google is  launching a new category of featured extensions under the name “Accessibility”. On this page you’ll find ChromeVis a brand new extension from Google that allows users with low vision to magnify and change the color of selected text. You will also find extensions like Chrome Daltonize that can help color blind users to see more details in web pages or gleeBox that provides alternatives to actions traditionally performed via the mouse such as clicking, scrolling and selecting text fields.

All users can benefit from these extensions – not just users with disabilities. To encourage more developers to incorporate best practices in accessibility when designing extensions, Google’ve open sourced the code behind Chrome Vis and created relevant documentation. You can get more information in the Chromium blog.

One can develop a lot of great extensions to benefit users with special needs. Google plan to release a few more in the next months so stay tuned for more updates.

In Google’s most recent stable release of Google Chrome, they talked about beta-testing Adobe Flash Player integration into Chrome. They’ve enable this integration by default in the stable channel of Chrome. To read more about this integration, check out the Chromium blog.

In testing Flash Player integration into Chrome, the Chrome team admittedly spent many, many fun hours with a few of our favorite Flash-based indie games. So as a side project, they teamed up with a few creative folks to build Chrome FastBall, a Flash-based game built on top of the YouTube platform.

If you’re using Chrome, your browser should be automatically updated with Flash Player integration as of this week. And if you haven’t yet tried Chrome, download this newest stable release of the browser at google.com/chrome and take it for a test drive!

I’ve just read last week that Firefox would implement calc() in their new version of Firefox. It’s not out in any publicly released version yet but it is coming as they talked about it on their developers blog.

Why should you care?

Ever had an element that needed to have a percentage width with padding? Up until now, because of the way the box model works in modern browsers, you had to wrap the content in a container to which you’d apply the padding. That’s because when you define padding to an element the value is added to the width, which is the proper way of doing it.

Now the thing is that percentage width don’t mix well with fixed padding values, that where calc() comes into play.

Lets say you have a box with the following css rules:

#box {
padding: 20px;
width: 60%;
}

If that box is in a container 1000 pixels wide, the box would be 640 pixels wide total, that’s not what you want, that’s not 60% wide! You coud use calc() to achieve the desired result:

#box {
width: -moz-calc(60% - 40px);
}

You can even be wild and do basic calculations in there:

#box {
width: -moz-calc(60% - 2 * 20px);
}

Taking it further

What would be even cooler is if you could get the actual padding values as a variable in calc(). Something like:

#box {
width: -moz-calc(60% - (padding-left + padding-right));
}

This way you could even forget about updating your width value when you play with your padding.

Oh well, one day maybe, now let’s just see if other browser vendors implement something of the like. Let’s not forget this is not part of the W3C CSS3 specs.

Is it a feature you were waiting for?

After a bit of evolution and lots of work by the Google team, they thrilled the world by introducing a new stable version of Chrome for Windows, Mac and Linux. Since last December, they’ve been chipping away at bugs and building in new features to get the Mac and Linux versions caught up with the Windows version, and now they finally announce that the Mac and Linux versions are ready for prime time.

Google Chrome for Windows

Google Chrome for Mac

Google Chrome for Linux

The performance bar for all three versions keeps getting higher: today’s new stable release for Windows, Mac and Linux is our fastest yet, incorporating one of Google’s most significant speed improvements to date. Chrome is  improved by213 percent and 305 percent in Javascript performance by the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks since their very first beta, back in Chrome’s Cretaceous period (September 2008). To mark these speed improvements, Google also released a series of three unconventional speed tests for the browser:

(If you’re interested in how Google pitted Chrome against the forces of a potato gun, lightning, and the speed of sound, take a look behind-the-scenes in this video, or read the full technical details in the video’s description drop-down in YouTube).

You may also notice that today’s new stable release comes with a few new features, including the ability to synchronize browser preferences across computers, new HTML5 capabilities and a revamped bookmark manager. For more details, read on in the Google Chrome Blog.

If you haven’t tried Google Chrome since the stone age, check out this brand new stable release. If you’re already using Chrome, you’ll be automatically updated to this new version soon. To try it right away, download the latest version at google.com/chrome.