Blog Vacation

I spent most of the last couple days research, compiling and posting the Blog Year in Review posts for the past 8 months. I am going to take a short ‘blog vacation’ this week. Unless something major happens in the Mozilla world, I won’t be posting anything new until next Sunday (January 7th). Once again Happy New Years from the Guru!

The Blog Year In Review: December 2006

December 2006, saw several blog design changes. I am happy to report that the Blog design changes are done (for now). There were new ways to “Spread Firefox” in December with the introduction of four Firefox Flicks TV commercials airing in select markets and several Firefox/Thunderbird wallpapers; Firefox 1.5.0.9, 2.0.0.1 & 3.0a1 along with Thunderbird 1.5.0.9 & 2.0b1 were all released; an update on the Firefox Password Manger vulnerability and what you can do to protect yourself; information about the “Improper Shut-Down” bug. In addition there were a couple posts for testers on migrating profiles and changing your update channel. On Christmas I took a look at Firefox during 2006 and even gave some predictions for 2007. Finally a couple ‘predictions’ articles for your reading pleasure.

• December began with some very heartbreaking news about the Kim Family. On Thanksgiving, CNet Editor James Kim and his family were traveling by car in Oregon to family but never arrived. That weekend a massive search began and by some miracle, his wife and two daughters were found alive nearly a week after they went missing. Sadly, the next day rescuers came upon the body of James Kim. CNet’s Greg Sandoval put together a Tribute to James Kim.
• Now for some lighter news, predictions for 2007. Open-Source Predictions for 2007 provides some enlightening insight about Linux and Windows Vista. Better yet are the Alt Predictions for 2007, including my favorite: Google acquires itself for an unprecedented $10.4 billion in stock.

• Four Firefox Flicks (try saying that three times fast), 30-second TV commercials which aired in Boston and San Francisco areas. These were created by Firefox users and brings new meaning to “Spread Firefox”

• While on the theme of Spreading Firefox, how about some wallpapers? Sonickydon has created several Firefox and Thunderbird themed wallpapers.
  
• Ever wondered what all is contained in your Firefox user-agent (build id)? After some extensive research I was able to decipher the Fx user agent.
• Part of being a Tester is having multiple profiles for different versions and builds of Firefox. If you have ever had to create a new profile you know it is painful. You are starting with a clean slate (no bookmarks, history, saved passwords, cookies, extensions, themes, etc.). Migrating your existing profile into a new one is not that difficult and makes the process of setting a new profile a little less painful.
• Our friend Ryan Wagner at CyberNet tried a little test of his own. He got this crazy idea to install 200 extensions on Firefox 2, just to see “what would happen”. The results may surprise you!
• The Update Channel Changer extension allows you to change the update channel, changing the type of updates (releases, betas, nightly, etc) you get. This is recommended for testers or if you need to get custom a Firefox build.
• Firefox 2.0.0.1 and both Firefox & Thunderbird 1.5.0.9 were released on December 19th. All of these had several bug fixes although the Firefox 2.0.0.1 release had the most bug fixes.
• However neither of these versions fixed the Firefox Password Manger vulnerability which was exposed last month. However, there are couple minor tweaks that can be done to protect you until this is fixed in the 1.5.0.10 & 2.0.0.2 builds due out in January.

• While on the topic of bugs and Firefox 2, WinXP users who don’t close their browser prior to shutting down Windows are experiencing what is being called the Improper Shutdown Bug. This is also slated to be fixed in the Firefox 2.0.0.2 release.
• 2006 was a great year for Firefox. After many hours of exhaustive research I put together The Fx Year In Review.

Happy New Years!!!

November

2006 Index

The Blog Year In Review: November 2006

November 2006, was an unusually quiet month for the blog. All the hype and anticipation associated with IE7 and Firefox 2 were over. However, Firefox and Thunderbird 1.5.0.8 were released. I added a couple minor tweaks for Firefox 2 which are not in the tweaks guide. Plus, a vulnerability in the Firefox Password Manager was exposed affecting 1.5 and 2.0 builds. All this plus some noteworthy Firefox/Mozilla news.

• Memory usage has been a hot topic issue with both Firefox 1.5 as well as Firefox 2. I found a couple methods to view your Firefox cache both disk and memory caches. You can either use Firefox’s built-in viewer or the extension which presents the same information in a GUI display plus displays the contents of the cached items.
• Another “tweak” I found allowed user to prevent Firefox from automatically resizing large images. Oddly enough this use to be a user settable option in the old Firefox 1.0.X builds, but for some odd reason they took aways this option starting in the 1.5.0.X builds. No word yet if it will come back in a later 2.0.0.X release or in 3.0.

• On November 8th, about two weeks after the release of Firefox 2, the next release on the 1.5 builds came out. Firefox 1.5.0.8 included some security fixes along with this message: “All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 2. ” In addition users were reminded support for these builds would end on April 24th, 2007.
• Also released was Thunderbird 1.5.0.8 that same day. Don’t know much about this build since I am using version 2 beta 1 right now.
• The Firefox Kid (Blake Ross),was IEEE Spectrum Magazine’s cover story in November. Most the article serves as an introduction to Blake Ross & Joe Hewitt’s joint project, Parakey, but also include Blake’s childhood “as part of the first generation to grow up with the Internet.”, how Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox came about and an humorous account of a dinner with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team after Firefox became popular.
• In other Mozilla news, Corel announced forthcoming versions of its new consumer oriented office suite Corel WordPerfect Office X3 – Home Edition 2007 will bundle Mozilla Firefox. This will be the first time Firefox would be available through ‘retail’ channels.

• Google Maps has added the ‘Firefox Circle‘. The crop circle was created by a group students from Oregon State University Linux Group in an oat field near amity Oregon.
• Wrapping up is a YouTube video by PcPitStop demonstrating a (notebook) system that they created to purposely instigate a battery explosion.

October

2006 Index

December

The Blog Year In Review: October 2006

October 2006, the month of the browsers! The new IE7 was released, followed quickly by Firefox 2 (but not 1.5.0.8). Plus I looked at a couple of other browsers. Bunches of Firefox 2 tweaks plus a follow-up on the contest to name Mozilla Japan’s New Mascot along with Google & Microsoft news.

• I started off the month with a Browser Smörgåsbord, taking a look at the other browsers available for Windows. These included Netscape (also Mozilla), Opera, Flock (built on top of Firefox but NOT by Mozilla) as well as a couple developmental versions of Firefox.
• A quick follow up to what has become one my most popular posts, the contest to name Mozilla Japan’s new mascot. The contest has ended and the official name is Foxkeh. I’ve also included a collection of humorous comments about the mascot.
• In an unusual move, Mozilla announced Firefox 1.5.0.8 would not come out at the same time as Firefox 2. Normally, Mozilla releases all the updates for all the builds at the same time.
• Now I am wondering if people were taking bets as to which would come first: IE7 or Firefox 2?

• In early October there was rumor via e-mail going around Google was going to acquire YouTube. Later that day the news became more widespread. A couple days later it was official: YouTube sold to Google for $1.65 billion.
• Now that Google has YouTube, what else could they do? Take a look at GoogleTube for the possible future of Google’s homepage.
• While we’re on the subject of Google, their security (or lack of) for sensitive information has been called into question on numerous occasions. This as Google is pushing their “office strategy”, wanting businesses and individuals to use Google servers to store their documents. The there is that little mishap with a Google employee, Blogger and the official Google Blog. Not to mention information about GDrive code name Platypus, that keeps leaking out.
  

• October 18th was the rumored date for IE7 to be released. Oddly enough, it turned out to true as IE7 was released to most on October 18th.
• While the release of Firefox 2 was only a day or so away, the reviews had already started. Some good and some not so good.
• On October 24, nearly 2 months later than the planned, Firefox 2.0 was released!
• Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that Firefox 2 isn’t perfect. There were a few new “features” I didn’t care for. So with information I have gathered from various sources, I put together the Firefox 2.0 Tweaks Guide.
• Recall back in September, when the prices for Windows Vista were announced. One has to wonder why they are so expensive, besides the fact that it is a Microsoft product. Perhaps it is the packaging which when described by Vista Team Blog, sounds like it alone is worth hundreds of dollars.

September

2006 Index

November

The Blog Year In Review: September 2006

September 2006, was a big month for The Firefox Extension Guru’s Blog. We moved to our new home on WordPress, Microsoft released (more like leaked) the prices for Windows Vista/Office 2007 plus they try to compromisers on the Windows Vista Start-up sound. Mozilla hired a former Microsoft executive and releases Firefox 1.5.0.7, Thunderbird 1.5.0.7 as well as more updates to Firefox 2 Beta 2 and finally RC1. In September I tried out Yahoo Mail Beta again and found a cool extension for the regular Yahoo Mail. All this plus some unusual non-Mozilla related posts.

• In late August, news of Windows Vista and Office 2007 prices leaked out and made its way on to Amazon.com. The prices were removed a few days later when Microsoft formally announced the prices. However they only announced prices for Vista, not Office 2007. Windows Vista starts at around $100 for the upgrade Home Basic version and goes up to $400 for full version of the Ultimate Edition. As if those weren’t bad enough, Office 2007 prices ranged from $150 for the home/student version up to $680 for all the bells & whistles in the Ultimate. Just in case y’all were wondering I am not going to upgrade to Vista. First off, I’m not interested in Vista and the biggest reason is I would have to add more RAM, a bigger hard drive and A DVD drive to my system, before I could even try to install Vista.
• After four months on Blogger, I started looking for somewhere better to host my blog. On September 6th I moved the Blog over to WordPress. WordPress offered features (such as post categories and stats) which Blogger at that time didn’t offer. The move wasn’t too bad, but still nearly another 4 months later I am still coming across old posts which are formated and linked to the Blogger site. I do believe I have found and fixed all those rouge posts, but there may still be a couple lurking around out there.
• In mid September, Mozilla released Firefox 1.5.0.7 which was suppose to make the product more stable as well as address issues with memory leaks. However, if anything it became more unstable and the leaks got bigger. I didn’t use this build much since I took a giant leap and started using Firefox 2 Beta 2 as my default browser. Even in beta stage this was a lot more stable than 1.5.0.7 was.
• Thunderbird 1.5.0.7 was also released implementing the usual security updates and improvements in product stability. This was an upgrade from version 1.5.0.5 as there was not a Thunderbird 1.5.0.6.
• While on the subject of Thunderbird, I had finally download and started using Thunderbird 2.0a1 and was shocked at all the neat changes. It too got a new make-over or visual refresh and added some new features including an enhanced new mail alert as well as message tags.

• I have always been an avid user of the Yahoo! web portal for e-mail, news, TV, movies, etc. However, Yahoo has been moving towards using Flash content on their services and also overloading the pages with ads. While Flash does allow for many new options it can sometimes slow Firefox to a crawl or worse yet crash Firefox. A family member sent me a link to MyWay, a highly customizable web portal which offers the same services and more as Yahoo. Even better these services are ad free. They even offer a free @myway.com e-mail, but I’ve had issues with their e-mail.

• While I had some issues with MyWay e-mail, they were nothing compared to those I experienced when I switch to Yahoo Mail Beta when it was released to all. The Beta version is Flash based and is to offer a similar layout as you would find with an e-mail client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.). The main selling point was the ability to preview your messages in the Inbox without having to go into each message. Being it was Flashed based the site took some time to load but wasn’t so bad once it did load. However if left open for a period of time would cause Firefox to start leaking memory big time.
• While I was searching for a different extensions, I came across the AJAX Yahoo! Mail Extension, which allows regular Yahoo Mail users to preview the message in your Inbox or other folders via AJAX technology.

Window Snyder

• Microsoft made it into my blog quite a bit during the month of September:

If you still have any money left after upgrading to Vista & Office 2007 you could also purchase the Microsoft Entertainment Wireless Desktop 8000.

In Microsoft personnel news, former Microsoft security strategist, Window Snyder joined Mozilla and Brian Valentine, senior VP of Windows development joined Amazon.com.

Presentations never go as planned, especially when your equipment doesn’t work as planned. This happens to everyone, including Microsoft.

Melitta ME1MSB Smart Mill & Brew 10-Cup Programmable Coffeemaker

How about a cup of coffee and your weather? With the Melitta ME1MSB Smart Mill & Brew 10-Cup Programmable Coffeemaker, not only do you get a great tasting cup coffee, but also region specific weather info thanks to MSN Direct via an FM signal. But one has to wonder what else could Microsoft do with the FM signal?

Microsoft already has had enough legal troubles with Windows Vista, especially in the EU. While this has been highly publicized there were some other lesser known lawsuits pending as well.

Last but not least, the Windows Vista start-up sound. In late September, Microsoft compromised in build version 5728 by adding a new option in the Sound Control Panel. There is a check box that says “Play Windows Startup Sound”

160 Megapixel Seitz 6×17 Digital Camera

• While most electronics products have become smaller and lighter over the past few years, a couple have gone the opposite direction. Take for example the Seitz Digital Camera with these impressive dimensions – Camera Body: 19.5″ w x 6.9″ h x 3.75″ d @ 6.2 lbs. The there is Dell’s M2010 ‘Mobile’ Computer, a mammoth sized laptop weighing in at 18 pounds with its 20.1 inch display!

Dell’s M2010 ‘Mobile’ Computer on the subway

• On the last Tuesday in September, Mozilla released Firefox 2 RC1 as scheduled (sort of). This was the first “test” release and also contained a minor update to the new default Firefox 2 theme.
• In other Mozilla news, the newer products were suppose to be equipped with Airbag, a new and improved crash reporting application to replace the similar but rather out-dated ‘Talkback’ feature. Not sure what happened to this, it was not in Firefox 2, nor in the upcoming Thunderbird 2 and for that matter I still see references to Talkback on mozillaZine when testers crash Minefield.

• Finally, The Arizona Cardinals and their new University of Phoenix Stadium. The first sponsorship offer was from Las Vegas based Pink Taco, but the stadium owners took it more as a joke than an offer. Doesn’t matter what you called the stadium, it didn’t do any good for the Cardinals this year. After all the hype and the ‘promises’ the team made that they would do better in their own (use to play at ASU’s Sun Devil Stadium) stadium, they ended their season on New Year’s Eve with a lousy (but traditional) 5-11 record. This was the second year in a row they ended with a 5-11 record and third losing season (0-3) for their head coach Dennis Green. Green was fired yesterday, wish the same could be said for the team. In lighter news, the stadium host tonight’s Fiesta Bowl game.
• But wait, I’m not done yet! How could we forget the contest to name Mozilla Japan’s New Mascot?

August

2006 Index

October