Samsung and other Android phone manufacturers such as HTC and Xiaomi are facing steep losses as consumer are not buying new phones as often. I am not so certain the new iPhones have really made a difference, but then I have general dislike of anything Apple. Their results underscore the challenges that all smartphone vendors — with the potential exception of Apple — face as consumers upgrade their smartphones less frequently and are less impressed by newer devices’ incremental improvements. Moreover, the once hot growth market of China appears to be reaching a saturation point for first-time buyers, with cooling demand there, too….
July 2015
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Last September I announced I was closing the El Guru Blog (blog.elguru.me) and moving the content to my Firefox Blog. So here we are about a year later and I have decided to resurrect the blog and rebrand it as El Guru’s Tech Blog with the AllanHutchison.net domain. AllanHutchison.com is a school project site I created some years back using HTML and CSS only. I mainly use that site as a reference when doing custom CSS coding and to host my resume. In May of 2006, I created the Firefox Extension Guru’s Blog and in the beginning there was lots of different content. As the…
This is a continuation of The Three Pillars post as the article referenced in that post also discusses this as well. In another email, Dave Camp is “Revisiting how we build Firefox”. This one is a lot more technical as it focuses a lot on getting Firefox away from XUL and XBL. However, in the beginning of the email he does talk about speeding up deployment: Since Firefox began, the industry has continually evolved how it deploys code to users, and today it isn’t done on an 18-week cycle. We think there are big wins to be had in shortening the time that new features reaches users. Critical…
Mozilla is making major announcements about Firefox again. In an e-mail to the firefox-dev mailing list, Firefox Director of Engineering Dave Camp has outlined what he calls the Three Pillars of the new Firefox: Uncompromised Quality – aim to strip out Firefox’s half-baked ideas or carry them through to completion so that they’re “polished, functional, and a joy to use.” This program is internally dubbed “Great or Dead”—as in, if the Firefox devs can’t make a feature great, it should be killed off. Best Of The Web – a slightly more nebulous pillar that will concern itself with the add-ons community…
What has seemed like an eternity of flip-flopping about having a Windows 64-Bit (Win64) version of Firefox may very soon come to an end. Earlier this week Bug 1180792 was filed to enable 64-bit windows builds on release channel. In October 2014, Mozilla had started talking about having a Win64 release as early as Firefox 37 for March 2015. Firefox 37 came and went and still no Win64 released. There have been Win64 versions for Firefox 38 and 39, but those never offered outside the Beta channel. So, when will be seeing this Win64 release? There is still some debate about that right…
There are some regressions causing delays for the release of Thunderbird 38.1.0 (which was planned for June 30th). On 06/22/15 in TB-planning Kent posted: The current plan for Thunderbird 38.1.0 is to land patches on Monday, June 29 and try to release at the end of that week. This will have a number of fixes to regressions that were uncovered in the initial release. Two weeks later the first Release Candidate (RC) for 38.1.0 has been pushed out for the testers. If everything goes well with this RC then we could see the release of Thunderbird 38.1.0 by the end of…
Mozilla released the next update for Firefox on Thursday, July 2nd (release notes show the original planned release date of June 30th) with the Firefox 39.0 release. There are various OS related changes and fixes, the complete details can be found in the Firefox 39.0 Release Notes. Depending on their update settings, users will be prompted to update within the next 24-48 hours. Users can also manually update by going to the Firefox Help Menu and selecting About Firefox and follow the prompts to update. Alternatively users can also down and manually install the update via getfirefox.com site. The next planned release…
Currently Firefox users can go into the about:config and customize the preference browser.newtab.url to a specific web address (URL) or even set it to about:blank for a blank tab. However, so can malicious/unwanted software (McAfee, Ask, AVG, Babylon, Yahoo, etc.) by directly making changes the user’s prefs.js profile file. However, many novice Firefox users don’t know about or how to work within the about:config interface. Mozilla’s solution to this as purposed in Bug 118285 (The browser.newtab.url preference is abused and should be removed) is to only allow (approved) add-ons to change the behavior of the new tab page. This would be landed in Firefox…
Firefox 39 was suppose to be released on June 30th, but has been delayed until later this week due to a last-minute stability issue.