Keeping Your Firefox Updated

Firefox is ever changing, there are lots of updates to the browser itself and depending on which extensions you use those can have frequent updates as well. Firefox by default wants to install ALL these updates automatically for you. Not a good idea, I prefer to have some control and know what I am installing so if there is a problem I can have something to work with. First thing we will want to do is to disable the automatic installation of Firefox updates. To do this:

• From the Tools Menu, select ‘Options…’
• On top of the Options Window click the ‘Advanced’ Icon
• Click on the ‘Update’ tab
• In the section ‘When updates for Firefox are found:”, click the button for ‘Ask me what I want to do’
• Click ‘OK”

With this setting, Firefox will prompt you when there is an update for the browser itself and ask you if you want to install it. Now, if you decline the upgrade at first you can get the notification again by going to Help menu, ‘Check for Updates…’

Prior to version 1.5, Firefox had its own built-in extension update notifier. With Firefox 1.5, that went away in favor of automatic updates. However with the Update Notifier Extension, it will check (from ever 6 to 24 hours) for new versions of your extensions and themes. Just make sure once you have the extension installed you go into the settings and disable the install options.

Related Articles:

• Update Notifier For Firefox & Thunderbird 2.0
• Fx Year In Review

The Year of the Suns ~ Part 3

What one word could describe The Suns this year? How about ‘drama’! They pulled off a win on Monday against The Clippers in Game 7. Tonight, they lead the game…until the 3rd quarter then things started falling apart. Missed shot (especially 3-pointers) after shot by the Suns but the Mavericks kept scoring and took the lead. At one point the Mavericks had a 9 point lead. With minutes left the ‘drama’ unfolded… a couple 3-pointers including one from Nash, the Suns took the lead only to lose it again with 4.8 seconds remaining. At the last second, or more like 1/2 second Boris Diaw, scores the winning basket to give the Suns a 119 to 118 lead. But wait there’s more! As if the Mavericks weren’t already shocked that they had lost the game they managed to foul Thomas who tacked on 2 more points with free-throws. Final score 121 to 118. Sun’s lead the Western Conference Finals 1-0.

The drama doesn’t end here though, Raja Bell strained his left calf late in the 4th and was out for the rest of the game. Unknown if he will be back on Friday. Shawn Marion may have injured his left ankle also in the 4th quarter. But he plans on playing on Friday. Assistant Coach Marc Iavaroni, discovered being on the sidelines doesn’t mean you are safe. While trying to save a loose ball in the 3rd quarter, Leandro Barbosa ended up sending the ball into Marc Iavaroni face. Iavaroni shook it off an appeared to be unhurt.

The drama continues on Friday with Game 2 in Dallas. Even if Bell is unable to play, The Suns have demonstrated they can play and still win without him. There are plenty of other players on the team that can fill in and keep the team in gear. Unlike last year with San Antonio, they are not dependent on a couple key players to win a game.

Meanwhile in the Eastern Conference Finals, the Miami Heat currently lead the series against the Detroit Pistons. Game 2 is on Thursday. Early prediction for the finals, but why not The Suns & The Heat?

silicon.com Interview with Mitchell Baker

Mitchell Baker Talks to silicon.com About Mozilla in the Enterprise

silicon.com has an interview with Mitchell Baker, which focuses on the limited success of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird in the enterprise market to date. The Mozilla Corporation President attributes some of the lack of success to a reliance on proprietary technologies within some businesses. She singles out intranets that only work with Microsoft Internet Explorer as a particular problem. However, she claims that the fact that Firefox is open-source does not on its own hold back adoption in large organisations. [complete article]

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I have to say this quote describes the issue very well:

“Enterprises have intranets that only work with IE. We can’t fix their intranet” — Mitchell Baker, CEO Mozilla Corporation

I work for a large organization that is very reliant on IE. Everything from our online manual to our scheduling and main systems as well as the intranet are all IE based. I have limited to access to the company’s intranet from home, but I am unable to access directly via Firefox. In order to access the intranet I can still use Firefox but have to activate the IE Tab extension. This allows me to run IE in one tab on Firefox.

I know our techs use Firefox as I saw the familiar Firefox logo on one of our techs’ desktop. When the main system (IE based) crashed he had remotely accessed his computer from my computer to check some settings. But I doubt it will ever be widely used especially since everything is design to run (or more commonly crash) on IE. The only way I could see thing changing would only be if the company the platform for our system suddenly decided to switch to Firefox, but that is highly unlikely given our organization’s reliance on IE.

The article also briefly (a couple sentences) discussed FF 2.0 (set for release 3rd quarter 2006) as well as, Mozilla giving back profits to the community.

The Year of the Suns ~ Part 2

The last couple nights have been ‘do-or-die’ for three of the match-ups in the NBA Conference Semi-Finals. Last night, the Detroit Pistons knocked out the Cleveland Cavilers to advance to the Conference Finals. This series with the Miami Heat will begin Tuesday in Detroit.

Meanwhile on the Western Conference there are two big games tonight, San Antonio Spurs and the Dallas Mavericks as well as the Los Angeles Clippers and our Phoenix Suns. Now recall last year the Suns made it to the conference finals after defeating the Mavericks in six games only to be stopped by the Spurs in five games. I had said prior if we can get past the Clippers, which I really thought was going to a lot easier than it has turned out to be, ideally we would like to matched up with the Mavericks. But since San Antonio is #1 and made a come-back starting in game 5 it looks as if we would have to play the Spurs in the conference finals.

In what could be described as an upset, the Mavericks manage to pull out a win 119 to 111 in overtime. The Spurs are out and the Mavericks move on to play against the winner of tonight’s Suns & Clippers game. So far the Suns have managed to hold on to a 4-6 point lead throughout the first quarter, but the key is going to be holding on to that lead for the rest of the game.

R.I.P. BlueFrog

Blue Frog/Security is no more. For your safety UNINSTALL the extension(s) as well as the application. An alert reader on Go Firefox!, posted me a link to this Wired News Article: Under Attack, Spam Fighter Folds. Also check out: BlueSecurity, BlueFrog & BlueFreaks That Love Them: Blue Security Surrenders… Spammers Win.

Firefox 2.0 Feature Preview: Inline Spellcheck

Robert Strong created the SpellBound Spellchecker for Firefox and Mozilla Suite (now known as Sea Monkey) extension which enabled users to have a web based spell checker. He also part of the development team for Firefox 2.0. When Firefox 1.5 came out Robert created a ‘developmental version’ of SpellBound which was an inline or spell as you type of spell checker. The inline spellcheck is suppose to be one of the new features in FF 2.0.

I’ve had an opportunity to try it out. Right now it is only working for pages that have a text-area fields such as Yahoo!Mail. However it does not work for pages using I-Frames for entering text. This includes the Firefox WYSIWYG Editor for Delphi Forums, the Blogger editor and most other WYSIWYG editors.

FF 2.0 Inline Spellcheck
Click Image For Larger View

The above screen shot was from Yahoo!Mail. Misspelled words are underlined in red. Right-clicking opens the context menu with a list of suggestions or to add the word to the dictionary. This is going to take some getting use to as I have become so accustomed to the CTRL+Left Click used in SpellBound. Heck I have problems in Thunderbird, I keep CTRL+Left Clicking on those misspelled words.

Again it is important to stress at this time FF 2.0 is still being developed and the Bon Echo Alpha 2 release is more testing and development. I am sure at some point like its predecessor this feature will support/check text entered into an I-Frame.

This was the last of the major new features of FF 2.0, I wanted to evaluate. Although, I may take a look at the RSS handling improvements.

Firefox 2.0 Feature Preview: Session Management

The next new feature for Firefox 2.0 is Session Management. First thing I noticed is this is NOT quite the same as the session management features available in Tab Mix Plus, Session Manager or SessionSaver. If anything it is more similar to Crash Recovery. So…what’s the difference? Well, Session Management like these above mentioned extensions will recover your browser (tabs & windows) session exactly as it was in the event the browser crashes. However, unlike the above (Crash Recovery excluded) it does not recover your browser if you accidentally (or intentionally) close it. That is what I liked about Session Saver, it would save everything exactly as it was when I closed the browser. This is very useful when switching between FF 1.5.0.3 and Bon Echo (since I can’t run both a the same time).

At least it will recover your browsing session in the even the browser crashes. I have already tested this by doing a force shut-down of Bon Echo. The browser treated this as a crash and it performed exactly like SessionSaver does in a browser crash. Also there is no ’snap-back tab/window’ option as in SessionSaver if you accidentally close a tab or window.

Click Image For Large View
This Session Recovery Pop-Up Box will appear when your restart Firefox after a simulated crash.

So the Session Management feature may not eliminate those above name extensions, but that could change. After all, this is only the Alpha 2 release. I’ll have do some digging around mozillaZine and the Bon Echo forums and see what I can find out about the future of this feature.

Well, this just leaves the ‘Inline spellcheck’ feature to preview.

Firefox 2.0 Feature Preview: New search engine infrastructure and UI

Continuing my previews of some the new features with FF 2.0, I will now take look at the ‘New search engine infrastructure and UI’. Firefox 2.0 will come preloaded with six popular search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Answers.com, Creative Commons and eBay). You can easily add more and remove search engines. Click the arrow next to the magnifying glass will display all the installed search engines and give you the option to ‘Manage Search Engines…’

Click Image For Larger View
New FF 2.0 Search Engine UI

The Manage Search Engine List allows you to re-order your search engines, add more AND remove search engines you don’t want. Previously you either needed to hunt for the search engine plug-in and delete it or install an extensions such as Search Engine Ordering to remove unwanted search engines.

New FF 2.0 Manage Search Engine UI

Still to come:

• Session Management
• Inline spellcheck

A New Milestone for FF 2.0

On May 13th Bon Echo Alpha 2 was released. Now I am sure you are asking “Oh humble Guru what the heck is Bon Echo?”. Bon Echo is the project name for FF 2.0, named after the park in Ontario, Canada. I have yet to play with this release yet but do look forward to doing so tomorrow. Some of the new features in this release include (click links below to see Blog entries):

• Links default to opening in new tabs, not new windows
• New user interface for Add-Ons (extensions & themes)
• Close buttons now appear on every tab, and the close behaviour is slightly different
• Inline spell checking in text boxes
• Automatic session restoration in the event of a crash
  
• New search (engine) plug-in manager for removing and re-ordering search engines
• Complete Listing

Now keep in mind FF 2.0 is not scheduled for final release until late summer or early fall. Further we are only in the Alpha releases at this moment. For those of you not familiar with the release progression:

• Alpha 1
• Alpha 2
• Alpha 3*
• Beta 1
• Beta 2*
• Release Candidate (RC) 1
• Release Candidate (RC) 2
• Release Candidate (RC) 3*

* If needed

Note: Release Candidates are nearly final releases. All the features have been completed, but there may be some bugs, security or other issues that still need to be fixed. The final Release Candidate becomes the live/production version.

Stay tuned for more details as I test and review this release.

Firefox 2.0 Feature Preview: Add-ons UI

On my May 1st entry: Excellent Move Mr. Schroepfer!, I listed some of new features for FF 2.0, including Extension/Themes UI (user interface) change. This new feature is part of the Bon Echo Alpha 2 milestone release. No more separate interfaces for extensions and themes. Instead there is a new Add-ons UI where the management of extensions and themes are integrated together into one simplified interface.

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New FF 2.0 Add-Ons UI

Some changes to this interface include listing installed extensions and themes in alphabetical order instead of the order they were installed in. Note: Adblock Filterset.G Updater is out of sequence as it was just added and is not yet ‘installed’. In addition, it is now possible to disable extensions without having to restart in safe mode. This is useful for problematic extensions or if you don’t want to use an extension but rather not uninstall it. You will still have to manually restart Firefox for the change to take effect. While on the subject of restarting…

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New FF 2.0 Add-Ons UI with Installation Tab

Whenever you install and extension or theme, the installation will appear in a new tab on the Add-Ons window. The ‘Installation’ tab will show extensions and/or themes that were just installed in this current browser session. A neat little feature is the ‘Restart Bon Echo’ (when FF 2.0 goes live it will be named ‘Restart Firefox’) button. When you are done installing click the button and the browser will close and automatically restart.

Some others features I am still checking out include:

• New search engine infrastructure and UI
• Session Management
• Inline spellcheck