Articles by ElGuru

Firefox 8.0.1, Mac & Java Crashes Update Part 2

Some clarification is needed here as to which versions of OS X are affected. Apple did not update Java on OS X 10.5 so there is no crash bug associated with this version. However, the latest Java update by Apple on OS X 10.6 and 10.7 is triggering this crash,

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Firefox 8.0.1, Mac & Java Crashes Update

Looks like the developers are making some progress in getting the Java Applet based crashes with Firefox 8.0.1 on Mac under control. The latest news on bug 705931 is the crashes have stopped by increasing the default plugin cache size from ’10’ to ’50’. They are having other users testing this out before a patch is posted. If patch is successful, I am not certain if it is going to be pushed out to Mac users as firedrill release (Firefox 8.0.2) or part of the Firefox 9.0 release on December 20th. This is a ‘critical’ bug as sites with Java…

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Thunderbird Turns 7

On December 7, 2004 Mozilla launched Thunderbird 1.0 and by the end of that week had over 1-million downloads. Seven years later there are around 15 to 20-million users world wide. I started using Thunderbird about a year later after I had discovered Firefox.

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Several Mozilla Sites Down

addons.mozilla.org (AMO) and several other Mozilla sites including Bugzilla, Sync and the Mozilla Support site are currently experiencing service issues. You can check the status here.

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Several Mozilla Sites Down

addons.mozilla.org (AMO) and several other Mozilla sites including Bugzilla, Sync and the Mozilla Support site are currently experiencing service issues. You can check the status here.

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Restoring default about:config settings

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…

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Thunderbird Usage Survey Results

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:…

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Hardware Acceleration Disabled by Default TBird 9.0 Beta 3

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.

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Gallery Fixed

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.

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No Thunderbird 8.0.1

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…

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