Imagine being able to transform your boring old browser window into a virtual window looking out into the world. With Personas developed by the Mozilla Labs team you can do exactly that with the click of a button.

Personas is a FireFox plug-in that allows you to install light weight skins for FireFox that you can preview and install without having to restart FireFox each time. To preview a persona on the persona website all you have to do is roll your cursor over the picture and it instantly shows you what it will look like. To activate the persona click on the activate link and it will take affect automatically.

Making your own Persona is just as easy as activating one that is already made. Ally you need to do is upload two images one 3000×200 px and another 3000×100 px, you will then need to select a color that will contrast well on the background images you just made and pow, you have your very own FireFox theme.

There are many different premade Personas to choose from that will go well with any holiday or mood.

The Mozilla Thunderbird team released an application called Raindrop to Mozilla labs today. Raindrop aims to centralize all types of communication such as e-mail, Facebook, and even Twitter into a single interface that has enough smarts to separate those important messages your Mom sent you from everything else.

When email was first invented it was the main method of communication on the internet, but now with Twitter, Facebook, and Skype that is no longer the case. These new ways of communication are great but all this means is that we now have to check ten different places for new messages. In a blog post one of the Raindrop developers said, “We hope to lead and spur the development of extensible applications that help users easily and enjoyably manage their conversations, notifications, and messages across a variety of online services.”

Raindrop will recognize messages from various different mailing lists or other services that send numerous updates and files them into separate categories.

Raindrop is not a downloadable piece of software, it is actually a web application. Developers say “Our flagship applications will be built entirely for any modern web browser that supports open web technologies.”

Would you use Raindrop to centralize all your messages?

Out of the box Firefox is actually pretty fast, but who said it couldn’t be faster? With a few tweaks to Firefox’s internal settings we can make it 10 times faster.

The first thing you are going to need to do is type “about:config” into the address bar. There well be a warning message, don’t worry we arnt doing anything too dangerous so just click the button that says “I’ll Be carefully I Promise”

Now you should be a text field at the top, enter this in it “network.http.pipelining” (without quotes) Now, double click the top entry and that should set it to true. This will allow your browser to make more then one connection to the website at a time so you dont have to wait for the first one to finish to start the next one.

Now in the text box type in “network.http.proxy.pipelining” (with out the quotes) Double click this one, it should now be set to true. The will also allow you to make multiple connections to the same website, this allows you to load more then one part of a website at a a time.

Now in the text box type “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” double click it and a window should pop up. Put any number around 30 into that field then click ok. Tris will tell Firefox how many connections to make at the same time. WARNING: do not put a number that is too high because it may actually slow Firefox immensely.

Lastly in the white part of the screen right click and select New -> Integer. A window will come up asking for a “preference name” put “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” in (again without quotes) another window will come up asking for a value, enter 0. This tells the browser how long to wait to act on the information it receives. Since you want the page to load as fast as possible this will make the browser to render the page as soon as it receives the data form the website.

If you would like more firefox edits check out this website.