It has been a while since I’ve done much with this blog. That is going to change this year, call it a ‘New Year’s Resolution’ if you will. Most of what I plan on doing with this blog is going to be more Computer/Internet related. To be more specific: WordPress. Been doing a lot of work with WordPress for the past few days. I currently have around 10 WordPress sites four of which are actually blog, the others are ‘websites’. The Weaver II theme is one the best themes out there on WordPress. I’ll be doing a more in-depth review later on of this theme. There are…
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The move away from Flash is ever so slow, but at least there is movement. Starting with Firefox 20 (due out in April 2013) Windows users will have support for H.264 videos via the Windows Media Foundation Playback. Also Firefox for Windows will be able to support AAC audio in MP4 and M4A files, and MP3 audio files without having to rely on third-party plug-ins such as Flash and QuickTime. This feature is available, but not enabled on the current Windows Firefox Nightly Builds. Those currently using (can also get it here) the current Firefox 20 wishing to take advantage of this…
It seems Benjamin Smedberg has had a change of heart (or was it all the negative feedback) in his earlier decision to discontinue the Firefox 64-Bit Windows builds. After I announced my decision to disable 64-bit Windows nightlies, there was significant negative feedback. After reviewing that feedback, and consulting with Release Engineering, I believe that we can keep a set of users happy by making a modification to the original plan. At this point, the Mozilla project does not have the resources to actively support this use case. Making these builds, however, is not a significant burden on our Release Engineering…
Mozilla Engineering Manager Benjamin Smedberg had started a discussion on Google Groups about ceasing development of Windows 64-Bit builds last Friday (November 23rd). This had been purposed as well back in March of this year. Shortly before Mozilla’s Thanksgiving recess on Wednesday, Smedberg announced: Thank you to everyone who participated in this thread. Given the existing information, I have decided to proceed with disabling windows 64-bit nightly and hourly builds. Please let us consider this discussion closed unless there is critical new information which needs to be presented. The reasons for ending the development of the Windows 64-Bit builds were many but…
From the Firefox Add-ons Blog comes this alert: The problem is that the window load event handler that many add-ons depend on isn’t fired under some circumstances. So far it appears that this only happens when a popup window is opened, and only in cases where the domain in the new window is different from the one that opened the window. Since most add-on scripts rely on the load handler being called, many of them will not work in the newly opened popup window. There’s more information about this in bug 799348. Depending on the scale of this issue (how many…
I have learned a couple more thing about Waterfox and the AVG Security Toolbar. In regards to Waterfox, according to a source from the Firefox Builds forum, the Waterfox developer did partner with AVG due to the high cost of bandwidth associated with the downloads from Source Forge. Again, it is important to understand that my outrage was not that the developer choose to bundle the AVG Security Toolbar with Waterfox as the user does get the option (though not easily) to not install the toolbar. The issue I have is that when you use Waterfox’s uninstaller, it takes it…
Once in a while Firefox or Thunderbird does not close gracefully. This could be caused by the application crashing or simply the application didn’t do some “housekeeping” after it closed. You go to run Firefox or Thunderbird and you get the message it is already running, but it is not. The majority of the time, going into the Windows Task Manager via Control+Shift+Esc and clicking the Processes tab you will find firefox.exe or thunderbird.exe listed. Highlight the process and click ‘End Process’ and confirm. Once the process has been ended, you should be able to launch the application again. But what…
Brain R Bondy has posted an update on the status of Firefox for Windows 8 Metro Modern User Interface. There is quite a bit of progress in getting Firefox adapted to run in this unique Windows 8 interface: Crash reporting pdfjs (Built in PDF viewer without the need for a plugin) Windowless Flash, although full screen flash doesn’t work yet Some accessibility hooks Front end event refactoring to be faster and to treat mouse input normally and distinct from touch input File pickers updated to be asynchronous on all platforms because it was needed for WinRT Front end awesomescreen work…
Mozilla announced earlier today they have added older (older than 5.1.0) versions of Microsoft’s Silverlight Plugin to the Plugins blocklist for Mac OS X (no word yet if this will be extended to include Windows users). Unlike the recent JAVA plugin blocking, this plugin block is not due to a security volunerabitly. Instead, these older versions of Silverlight are causing stability issues including crahses on Microsoft’s Hotmail site. Users are urged to check to ensure they are running a more recent version of Silverlight (as well as other plugins such as JAVA and Flash/Shockwave) and check the status of their…
A while back we mentioned that Firefox was working on getting a Windows 8 Metro Modern User Interface prototype going. There are some ‘internal builds’ that have been completed, but so far no Alpha or Beta release. This topic came up on Sunday in the Firefox Build forums today as a beta users was looking for the Windows 8 builds of Firefox and then also trying to get the Windows 8 Metro Modern UI of IE10 working. Turns out in Windows 8 you can only have one browser using the Modern UI in Windows 8. Further, this browser needs to be your…