Firefox 2

Hot on the heels of IE7, Mozilla have released Firefox 2, and yeay, twas downloaded twice millionfold. What is new in Firefox 2?

• Built-in session restore. So you can undo closing tabs, or restore your tabs after a crashed session, including all form data, etc. This saves me a couple of extensions, and should be a more thorough implementation. Good stuff.
• Spell checker. Will save me a few ctrl-clicks. The thing with spell checkers, though, is how many words they don’t have. For example, and you’d think they’d know this one, but Firefox isn’t in there. I might just buy a Mac.
• Phishing protection. Not sure if I really want this, but I guess it’s one of those things that you don’t really cry out for until just after it would have been handy. Good phishing sites are actually quite hard to spot, so this sounds like a good back up.
• New theme. Shinier. Yeah, I was pretty happy with the old theme too, but apparently this has some nice tweaks. Such as side-scrolling tabs, or a go button integrated into the address bar, both of which I have tweaked/disabled.
• Close buttons on tabs. This is great for new users, and I totally support it. Having said that, I am switching it off right now.
• A new website. Ok, not really part of the browser, but it’s pretty good. The best bit remains that prominent download link that actually downloads the browser. Take note, every other piece of software I have ever tried to download.

So, nothing too exciting in there (the rendering engine is basically the same as Fx 1.5). But that’s fine – why go changing something so good? The people, they love it. (See the Firefox crop circle on Google Maps!) The latest statistics tell us that the gains continue – various sources suggest Firefox is approaching a global share of 15%.

Anyway, perhaps you remember Firefox Flicks? Efforts are now underway to, with the community’s help, get those ads on TV. And do you remember Blake Ross, co-creator of the Firefox project? He has since been working on another project, along the lines of a web-based local operating system for desktop PCs. Doesn’t sound that great to me, but then, he is Blake Ross. Fear him.

Thunderbird

Yeah, no one ever talks about Thunderbird, so I only have one piece of news: future Eudora Versions will be based on Mozilla Thunderbird. However, I did find this buried in my linkpile: Thunderbird with tabs! And there’s some info about that at this broken link.

Sunbird & Lightning

Yeah, pretty quiet on this front too. However, Sunbird and Lightning 0.3 released recently. I dunno, I use a text file to do my calendaring.

The Platform

At the heart of every Firefox beats a Gecko. You may need to be hardcore to find these interesting, but I really enjoyed these words from two of Mozilla’s most important contributors: Boris Zbarsky and Brendan Eich.

Mozilla Is In No Way Affiliated With the Foo Fighters

Yeah, so I was in The Warehouse the other day and saw CDs on special and bought everything on the spot. Specifically, The Ramones – Greatest Hits, REM – Greatest Hits, and Foo Fighters – The Colour and the Shape. However, when I got home, I realised I was one of those losers who buy music that they already own. But what, I hear you asking, does this mean for you? Specifically, what can you get for FREE?! Well, here at Rambleschmack we’re pleased to present a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get a second-hand CD for, yes, FREE!! Get nostalgic about the Foo Fighters before they were shit! Call now for FREE!!, and we’ll throw in a bonus FREE waterfront stadium! Our operators are standing by! CALL NOW!! FREE!!

Internet Explorer 7 was released on October 18. How the last five years have flown by. So, let’s begin with the good news:

• Numerous rendering bugfixes/improvements. Yay!
• Improved security. (Probably most notably, ActiveX will no longer install stuff from websites without asking. Because I bet we were all surprised at how badly that turned out.)
• New UI.
• Pushed out by automatic update, so we should see a rapid decline in IE6 usage.

Alas, the bad news:

• The rendering improvements were only tweaks, as opposed to the Trident rendering engine being booted out the door, kicked in the guts a few times, then having petrol poured all over it and being set on fire as web developers had hoped.
• They closed some of the worst security holes, but fundamentally it’s still the same IE. And fundamentally it is still the same Microsoft, with a security track record that is, shall we say, unparalleled.
• New UI. Now, okay, this is a subjective thing, so don’t just take my word for it. No menu bar, though? Refresh button hidden inside the Go button? And best of all, it’s not customisable! So you’re stuck with their bizarre design decisions.
• Oh yeah, doesn’t work on Win 2K. Which kindof a lot of people use, so IE6 is going to hang around for ages. Dammit.

Here’s an Internet Explorer 7 Review by CNET. While it’s generally positive, basically every paragraph ends with ” … but Firefox does it better.” Is there any reason to use IE7 apart from ignorance? Well… the toolbars are very shiny.

I feel very sorry for the IE team really. They were on a hiding to nothing. There wasn’t the time to really fix it, so they were tasked with taking what is quite possibly the most widely despised piece of software ever built and somehow patching it up to be as good as browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari, all of which are rocketing along the cutting edge at the moment. It was an impossible task, and they were going to be abused just for trying. You only need to read the comment thread on any of the IEBlog postings to get an idea of it – sometimes dozens, often hundreds of comments, the majority just outright dissing them, their product or Microsoft. It’s not cool.

Mind you, you get that when you peddle the corporate line on your blog. For example, we constantly asked for a way to run IE6 and 7 side-by-side on our PC – you know, so we could support their browser – and constantly got told to either buy another computer or get Virtual PC. Now, again, this was all they could do, so I’m not holding it against them. But what they consistently failed to do was finish it with ” … yes, this is shit, it’s the best we can do right now, we’ll try to do better in the future.” If they had just said that, people wouldn’t need to keep screaming at them about it all the time. The internet is full of angry, nasty people, but you know, if you don’t treat us like shit, we can actually be pretty cool once you get to know us. (By the way, you can get unofficial standalone IE builds.) So it was pleasing to see this, finally, in the latest chat transcript:

Q: Any word on supporting developers who need to run IE6 and 7 concurrently? I’m currently running the IE7 RC1 standalone hack.
Tony Chor [MS]: As we’ve mentioned before, we suggest users who need to run multiple versions of IE use virtualization technology like Microsoft Virtual PC (available for free download now!) or multiple machines. We know this is a pain point for everyone (including us!) and will focus on providing a good solution in a future versions.

From the same chat, this was my favourite bit. Sometimes, you only need one word:

Q: Will IE7 work with Windows 98?
Tony Chor [MS]: Sorry.

So yeah, if you want to get IE7, I guess you can download it from here or something.

Much like the Amish setting out on their carriages to roam the land for hedonistic delights, my modem and I have traversed the internets and now return with sweet, sweet video.

We begin with Firefox Flicks. In a nutshell, a few months ago the benevolent dictators who run that open source gig asked for 30-second ads promoting Firefox. All entries would get put up on the web, and there would be celebrity judges and big prizes for the winners. And I thought, yeah right. It’s one thing to put a link to getfirefox.com on your blog. But how many Firefox fans were going to front up with the talent and sheer volume of work required to produce a 30-second video?

Turns out, about 250. And many of them are surprisingly good – I was humbled by their awesomeness and my wrongness. 100 or so have been added to the site so far, and the winners have just been announced. I guess they are not the winners I would have picked, but then again, I would have given every single prize to Wheee!. I wouldn’t name my console that, mind, but that is one seriously funny ad. I also recommend Bask in the Smell (also not an especially inviting name) amongst many others. But why stop there – see them all! (And see also children impersonate the Wheee! ad.)

Now we move on to my other favourite topic, dissing Microsoft. Someone thought to ask what would have happened if Microsoft had designed the iPod? And I mean, yeah. It’s (very) funny because it’s true. What was even more interesting is that I later discovered the video had been made by Microsoft as a sort of internal kick-up-the-arse that someone had thoughtfully leaked to the web. It’s certainly promising to see they at least realise what they’re doing wrong. Apparently that’s the hard bit.

Perhaps you missed this April Fool’s parody of Ruby on Rails. Introducing – and I’m thilled about this – a screencast of SQL on Rails. Why learn more than one language to develop web apps!

And finally, a series of Nintendo DS Lite reviews by Cabel Sasser. Nintendo DS Lite First Look, Second Look and Third Look. If you tend to snort or otherwise embarrass yourself when you LOL, ensure you are alone when you watch these, because I’m warning you now, you will LOL.

My apologies for that brief intermission (at least I seem to be beating these guys). It turned out I really needed a break from blogging. And by God, it has been good. Don’t get me wrong, I love to write, it is just that much like people, or pretty much anything, it is killing me in the best possible way. Sometimes you need a break from that.

I recently came across a stark example of false resurrection and thought, could that happen to me? Well, I have no intention of this becoming a spam-infested wasteland. And I hope that is enough, because it’s all I’ve got.

New New New!

What, you thought I’ve just been spending the last month sitting on the couch watching Lost re-runs? You will pay for that accusation in blood. For your enjoyment, and 11 months behind schedule, db.rambleschmack.net now boasts photos. To be fair, many are imported, but there are brand new visual artefacts from New Years and Parachute.

Browsers

Speaking of which, I think I broke my site in IE again. Sorry to those of you affected by this. You know, I added one line of CSS and every page on the site moves off the screen. When I next get into the code I’ll add the appropriate hack. (And yes, I’ve also been alerted to the ‘invisible content’ bug. Man, who doesn’t love programming for IE.)

How convenient then that the Beta 2 Preview of IE has just been released. You know, I was beginning to believe, believe that Microsoft were really going to release a program that wasn’t going to hurt the internet or ordinary users. Well, there is good news for the internet, but it is not looking so good for the users. Looking at it you can’t help but wonder, what the fuck? Even more unbelievable is that the people making the worlds most widely used HTML/CSS renderer create its home page in Flash. I also wonder why on Earth it is not respecting the system settings (aren’t Microsoft the ones who make the system?), and why you must overwrite your IE6 install to use the IE7 preview. I was beginning to believe.

The Idiot Box

I recently discovered a very handy page for viewing today’s and tomorrow’s TV, which allows you to avoid the awful sites of the actual broadcasters.

It’s true that there is not a lot worth watching, but if I may suggest:

• Motorway Patrol (22:00 Tuesday, 2)
• Trailer Park Boys (23:30 Tuesday, 2)
• Fawlty Towers (19:00 Sunday, Prime)

Please offer your own picks in the comments. Prime often has some good documentaries; bizarrely, Prime appears to be catering to both the very lowest common denominator (seriously, Fox News?) and the high brow crowd at the same time. I think that really, you have to pick one of these niches.

Lighter Note

Have you had a good laugh today? Why, you ought to check out these Windows 1.01 screenshots. And in case you missed Dubya’s State of the Union address – beware the Human-Animal Hybrids! (They’ve already infiltrated the government!). I think it’s only fair to also warn you to beware the capitalists.

Every Post Needs an Image

So here’s my current cellphone wallpaper:

Firefox 1.1 was originally scheduled for release in March. In fact, they barely made November. That just sounds bad though, so in a cunning move it was renamed Firefox 1.5. That’s clever. This post? This is post 2.0. That’s why it’s a week late.

Seriously though, stuff got done in the last year. Highlights include inbuilt tab drag-and-drop (which comes as a great blessing, as MiniT was the Grim Reaper in my experience), incremental updates (so you no longer have to uninstall, download, and reinstall the whole program for every security patch) and bug-free XUL error pages (instead of those abominable dialogs). There’s plenty of other stuff, such as SVG support. One of my personal favourites is that on tabs with an image (instead of a webpage) the tab icon will be a tiny thumbnail of that image. How funky is that?

But that’s not all! Mozilla.org is dead (sort of), long live Mozilla.com! Oh yeah, and of course a new release of Gecko means cool new things for web developers to play with. How about some CSS column action?

So what I’m saying is, download now. And then hook yourself the fuck up with some Best Firefox Extensions. I’m hoping that link will bump up its PageRank because it is currently number 11 in Google: high enough to have required lots of work and months of waiting, low enough to never get any click-throughs. Let me know if any of the extensions/links are outdated. Or perhaps you know of exciting new ones to add. I’m all ears. Here’s a couple to get you started.

More links for your enjoyment and dismay.

• Ethics, Fox News style.
• Making fun of broadband price-gouging is funny.
• Get Opera! (For your mobile.)
• Explorer Destroyer and Kill Bill’s Browser. Their philosophy might be a tad strong but, nice sites. And they linked to…
• How funny would it be to see Bill Gates totally sconed in the face with a pie? It would be pretty damn funny.

Apparently the revolution is going well.

• OpenOffice.org 2.0 released! The linked announcement by Ars suggests it is not too shabby. One of the big things is that it now natively supports the OpenDocument format, which… well, speaks for itself. Only problem is that Microsoft Office doesn’t. Pity about that. Anyway, I look forward to getting into this, although as a dial-up user it really is rather formidable.
• Nightly builds of Lightning available! This will be of particular interest to people like these guys. You have to be hardcore though: current releases still contain crashers and dataloss bugs. You gotta be cutting edge.
• Firefox 1.5 only weeks away! The first Release Candidate will emerge late this week. If no significant problems are found with it, it will become the final release. Coincidentally, you may recall 1.0 was released 9 November 2004.
• Not actually open source, but still part of the revolution: iTunes store opens in Australia. So NZ should get one by, what, 2015?

Meanwhile, Microsoft continue to release pretty screenshots of translucent toolbars. Man, that Longhorn. Easily worth the five year wait.

The other big news is that Firefox surpasses 100 million downloads! Naturally, celebrations are underway. The people who brought you Chalkfox now present: Firefox in Space!

I celebrated by making a button that shows the millions in bold! Crazy.

Others celebrated by taking photos of themselves. Surely, there is comic potential in that.

• He’s happy, OK?
• Making a statement
• Should we blame Intelligent Design or evolution?
• Are you planning for your retirement?
• This got pretty much more comments than all the other pics combined
• …except for this one
• Nice effect
• Speechless!
• Who?
• Who? II
• At last, World Peace
• Pretty handy with a crayon
• Simple but effective

Upload your own. Go on!

So I was attempting to look “hm” up in the dictionary (one ‘m’ or two?) and, via the front page of The Free Dictionary, ended up reading a lengthy, and very interesting, article about the Voynich manuscript. Funny how that happens, huh?

In related news, Firefox is switching its default dictionary as “Dictionary.com’s abusive policy towards users with respect to advertising and popups is inconsistent with Firefox’s goals. To make things worse, they not only show popup ads, they maliciously work around Firefox’s popup blocker, despite the fact that we are publicizing their service from our application.” Those bastards. Mozilla is following Google’s lead and going to Answers.com.

After many happy Dictionary.com Words of the Day I’m considering a transition to The Free Dictionary. This is after a personal recommendation by Todd who liked the quotation of the day (as well as a word of the day, all on the front page! Shit!). It seems they’re not so big on the etymology though. Cruel, cruel world.

By the way, I eventually found hm on Wikipedia. One m.

It would appear the forces of darkness are gathering; today I bring you links of ill-will.

• Peter Jackson to produce Halo Movie [Webfroot]. After the resounding success of the Wing Commander movie, who wouldn’t want to make movies about computer games? Gold! And involving none other than our favourite token kiwi, Peter Jackson. We look forward to three hours of overblown bullshit. I’m glad the first commenter on that post cut right to the heart of the matter.
• ARMY NATIONAL GUARD SWEEPS. Caoine tagged this “horrible,” and dear God, I just hope it is satire. At least the funeral music will be paid for.
• Spread Firefox Hacked Again [MozillaZine]. Well, it’s not as if they could have seen that coming. After all, everyone likes Firefox right?

There are many things to like about Firefox (and a few not to like) but the real killer feature for me is the power unleashed by its extension mechanism. In fact, I have a page where I link the best Firefox extensions. It is probably worthwhile for me to highlight some of the greats in my blog from time to time, in order to share the goodness.

Download Statusbar has always been one of my favourites. I think it is an extremely good solution to the unobtrusive-yet-informative download manager problem. A few days ago I got the latest version which solved my only gripe: visuals. The new look is very sharp, and very customisable. You can even set the colours to vary by download speed. Here are a few action shots:

Here we see my attempt to improve myself by downloading Dr. Phil’s book dip dangerously low, awash in a sea of pr0n.

In this second highly contrived screenshot, we see my first download has finished (and will automatically disappear in a few seconds) while the second download cranks it up to full speed – a massive 5 KB/s – denoted by the “warp factor blue” colouring. (I considered “lightning with smaller faster lightning around it yellow” but decided that was too similar to the medium-slow amber colouring.)

In the old days, downloading a file used to be a bit of a hassle. Now, all I have to do is Alt-click (the built-in Firefox shortcut) and everything else just happens. This is why I love using Firefox: highly evolved UI. Elegance. Get yourself some Download Statusbar today!