Tuesday, May 1st will mark the One Year Anniversary of the beginning of the Firefox Extension Guru’s Blog! I can not believe it has already been a year! Yep, started out over at Blogger but would later move over to WordPress (see New Blog Home). Here’s the post that started it all: A Blog is Born! In all honesty I was not sure if the blog would be a success, but judging by these stats (from September 6th to present) I would say it has: Posts^: 391 Comments: 631 Views: 170,000+ Most Views in One Day: 3,050 Subscribers*: 79 Spam…
April 2007
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The folks over at WordPress have once again added a nice feature. This time they have added Clouds and Drop Downs for the categories. While I am not much one for tag clouds (the bigger the tag the more popular it is) I do like the new drop down option. One of the reason I had “cleaned-up” the tag list a couple months ago was because of how much space it took up on the sidebar. But now they have been place in to a nice little drop down menu. Even better the archives are now in a drop down…
One of the reasons I have not upgraded to Windows Vista (besides that I don’t see any need to) is compatibility issues. My system is a few years old and at the time I had it built was when I finally upgraded to Windows XP. This video will show you how to install Windows Vista in about two minutes… [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVbf9tOGwno]
Over the past months I have received several complaints about the link to Go Firefox! in the Blogroll. These complaints stem from Prospero’s (provider for Delphi Forums) advertisement policy. Simply put whenever an unregistered/non-paying (Delphi Forums) user visits a link to a forum such as Go Firefox! they are immediately presented with a full screen ad before they are allowed to proceed into the forum. I have also heard reports (unconfirmed) these ads leave adware/spyware and/or tracking cookies on visitors computers. Also Prospero makes it (I am sure intentionally) unclear that there is an option to “Skip This Advertisement“, usually…
Mozilla has released (early) for testing purposes the next milestone in the Fx 3.0/Gecko 1.9 series, Alpha 4. Some new features include: Inclusion of the FUEL Javascript library for extension developers. New page info window Cocoa user interface improvements and bug fixes Crash reporting via Breakpad (Mac OS X only) Improvements for off line application support Next up is Alpha 5 which is due out on May 31st. If all goes as planned, this should mark the return of Places which is the integration of History and Bookmarks with powerful tagging and search capabilities. Should Places actually make it into…
It appears Mozilla has made some major updates to the Firefox 3 Roadmap. One of the most noticeable is actual release dates (example Fx 3.0a5 is due out on May 31st) for each milestone no more of this beginning/mid/end of whatever month type of release dates. Further there is a lot more info as to what is coming which each milestone: Alpha 5 – May 31st – Reintegration of Places, Idenity Framework (CardSpace support) Alpha 6 – June 28th – More integration of Places including adding tagging feature, download manager improvements, updates to Cairo and Cocoa Widgets on Mac OS…
Here’s the latest info from this week’s Weekly Update meeting: Fx 1.5.0.12/2.0.0.4 – Due to the 39 open blockers, the code freeze which was scheduled for 04/20/07 has been delayed until later this week. Due to this the release which was scheduled for around May 15th has been pushed back. Thunderbird 2 – Released last Wednesday (April 18th) and has nearly reached the One Million downloads milestone! Firefox 3/Gecko 1.9 – Alpha 4 scheduled for release week of April 30th. Don’t forget to check out our Upcoming Releases section for a comprehensive list of upcoming Fx and TBird releases.
Okay it is official per mozillaZine, Thunderbird 2 has been released! Scott MacGregor of Team Thunderbird writes in with news of the release of Mozilla Thunderbird 2: “Thunderbird 2 is now available for download on Windows, Mac and Linux in over 35 languages. Thunderbird 2 offers easy ways to manage and organize your email with message tags, advanced folder views, message history navigation, find as you type, and improved new mail alert notifications. Thunderbird 2 also includes a refreshed user interface and support for Microsoft Vista. “Thunderbird 1.5.0.x users will be offered Thunderbird 2 via software update at a later…
While reading Wladimir Palant’s (Adblock Plus author) blog about the improvements in ad blocking with the future Firefox 2.0.0.4 build, I came across this interesting piece of information about Yahoo Maps & Fx Nightlies: Finally, Yahoo Maps uses browser sniffing that causes it to behave strangely in Firefox nightlies. To “fix” go to about:config, find the preference general.useragent.extra.firefox and replace “BonEcho” by “Firefox”. So what exactly does “behave strangely in Firefox nightlies” mean? Take a look at these screen shots below (opens a new tab) with general.useragent.extra.firefox set to: Firefox BonEcho/2.0.0.4pre I had stopped using Yahoo! Maps because it did…
We are still about a month out on the next Fx build (2.0.0.4). One of the improvements with this build is going to be major improvements to ad blocking using the Adblock Plus extension. A couple patches have been added to the Gecko 1.8 branch which will work with the upcoming Adblock Plus 0.7.5: The patches ensure that content requested by plugins like Flash and Ajax based applications will be subject to the same content policies as regular web pages. So if for example you have asked to block images from server “http://ads.server.net” they will be blocked even if requested…