The Blog Year In Review: November 2006

November 2006, was an unusually quiet month for the blog. All the hype and anticipation associated with IE7 and Firefox 2 were over. However, Firefox and Thunderbird 1.5.0.8 were released. I added a couple minor tweaks for Firefox 2 which are not in the tweaks guide. Plus, a vulnerability in the Firefox Password Manager was exposed affecting 1.5 and 2.0 builds. All this plus some noteworthy Firefox/Mozilla news.

  • Memory usage has been a hot topic issue with both Firefox 1.5 as well as Firefox 2. I found a couple methods to view your Firefox cache both disk and memory caches. You can either use Firefox’s built-in viewer or the extension which presents the same information in a GUI display plus displays the contents of the cached items.
  • Another “tweak” I found allowed user to prevent Firefox from automatically resizing large images. Oddly enough this use to be a user settable option in the old Firefox 1.0.X builds, but for some odd reason they took aways this option starting in the 1.5.0.X builds. No word yet if it will come back in a later 2.0.0.X release or in 3.0.

Thunderbird

  • On November 8th, about two weeks after the release of Firefox 2, the next release on the 1.5 builds came out. Firefox 1.5.0.8 included some security fixes along with this message: “All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 2. ” In addition users were reminded support for these builds would end on April 24th, 2007.
  • Also released was Thunderbird 1.5.0.8 that same day. Don’t know much about this build since I am using version 2 beta 1 right now.
  • The Firefox Kid (Blake Ross),was IEEE Spectrum Magazine’s cover story in November. Most the article serves as an introduction to Blake Ross & Joe Hewitt’s joint project, Parakey, but also include Blake’s childhood “as part of the first generation to grow up with the Internet.”, how Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox came about and an humorous account of a dinner with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team after Firefox became popular.
  • In other Mozilla news, Corel announced forthcoming versions of its new consumer oriented office suite Corel WordPerfect Office X3 – Home Edition 2007 will bundle Mozilla Firefox. This will be the first time Firefox would be available through ‘retail’ channels.

Firefox Circle

  • Google Maps has added the ‘Firefox Circle‘. The crop circle was created by a group students from Oregon State University Linux Group in an oat field near amity Oregon.
  • Wrapping up is a YouTube video by PcPitStop demonstrating a (notebook) system that they created to purposely instigate a battery explosion.

October
2006 Index December