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2011
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While it is easy to make customizations via Firefox’s about:config manager, it can also be easy to really mess things up. Hence the reason Mozilla has the below warning (which replaced Be Careful,This gun is loaded! warning starting with Firefox 3) the first time you enter about:config manager. You can always change a preference back to the default by right-clicking on the preference name and selecting Reset from the context menu. This is useful if a change has borked (technical term) all or part of Firefox. But what if you have made several changes and are unsure or do not recall…
During the month of November 2011, Mozilla conducted a Thunderbird usage survey. The survey was available via link on the Mozilla Thunderbird Start Page. The results were quite interesting: More than 70% Thunderbird users are men! Please, tell your wife, daughter, partner how great Thunderbird is! Up to 90% of you use Firefox as a web browser. 65% of the respondents have 2 PCs or more and have Thunderbird on most of those PCs. +70% of respondents use either Instant Messaging or Social Network service. This is a slightly higher number than to ones measured in the industry (Forrester 2010:…
Starting with Thunderbird 9.0 Beta 3 (released November 25, 2011) hardware acceleration is now turned off by default. While the premise was good to allow Thunderbird 5.0 and newer to utilize video hardware acceleration, for many user it caused issues including blurry fonts. Thunderbird 9 Beta can be downloaded from the Mozilla Thunderbird builds page.
It appears the Gallery had gone down on November 10th due to some issues with the gallery software. Users we’re seeing an HTTP 500: Internal Server error. We made some updates to the gallery platform (ZenPhoto) and were able to get the gallery restore on November 22nd. At this time there has been no new photos added since this past summer. I do have some photos on my Android that I still need to download and hope to get those posted in the coming weeks.
There has been some confusion as to what is the most current version of Thunderbird. Thunderbird 8.0 released on November 8, 2011 is the most current version of Thunderbird. Mozilla did release an update for Firefox (8.0.1) on November 21st, 2011. However, the issues that were addressed in this update (older version of RoboForm caused browser to crash on start-up and crashing issues with JAVA heavy sites on Mac with Firefox 8.0) were related to Firefox only. Therefore Mozilla did not do a Thunderbird 8.0.1 update. At this time it does not appear there will be any other Thunderbird updates…
The Ubuntu developers are now tracking Mozilla’s rapid release cycle, releasing the updated version 8.0 of Mozilla’s Firefox and Thunderbird. Previously, Ubuntu distributions would have stuck with the major version they were released with, say 3.0, and only updated to the minor versions as they arrived, 3.0.1, 3.0.2 and so on… “ More The H Open Source: News and Features ↑Go get it↓
I knew it seemed like things were a bit too quiet. Turns out, the email stopped working Wednesday night or Thursday morning. Last night I started getting some emails on Bug 701537 (Tracking bug for build and release of Firefox 8.0.1). The first was the addition (and shortly there after the deletion) of dependency on Bug 705931 ([Mac] Firefox 8.0.1 crashes when many Java applets are loaded). Reading into Bug 701537, I noticed several comments from November 25th that I never got the notification emails on. Anyway, long story short, there is still an outstanding Bug (seems the finger is…
Not sure if folks are still recovering from ODing on Turkey over the long weekend or given today is Cyber Monday, but not much news on the Firefox front. Even at today’s Mozilla Weekly meeting, not much to report. The only thing worth mentioning for this meeting is eligible Firefox 3.6 users will be offered an update to Firefox 8.0.1 later this week. Unless something changes this is scheduled for Thursday, December 1st.
Happy Thanksgiving. We will return to our normal blogging on Monday, November 28, 2011.