Archive for Thursday, December 25, 2008

BYIR: July, August & September 2008

Posted: Thursday, December 25, 2008 by El Guru in Other, Year In Review
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July 2008Record

In early July came the official word The Firefox 3 Download Day set a world record with 8,002,530 downloads within the 24-hour period. On July 1st, Firefox 2.0.0.15 was released. In mid-July came the first update for Firefox 3, Firefox 3.0.1 which as is regular practice was also coordinated with the release of Firefox 2.0.0.16. At the end of July, Mozilla released the first Alpha of Firefox 3.1 (Shiretoko).

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

The Book of Mozilla is an ‘Easter Egg’ that will display a biblical like passage depending on which version of Firefox or other Gecko/Mozilla based browser you are using. The above passage describes, July 15, 2003, the day AOL shut-down Netscape browser division and the launch of the Mozilla Foundation and thus the rise of the Phoenix (predecessor of Firefox) browser.

Plenty of add-ons related posts in July. To start, a look at the 50 Add-ons…Change The Way You Surf The Web. Folks who upgrade to the Firefox 3.0.1 release were shocked to discover many of their add-ons were disabled. This massive headache was caused by a minor coding boo-boo by add-on developers.

Also took an in-depth look at these four add-ons:

  • BugMeNot – allows users to bypass web registration for some sites.
  • Control Tab – added to Firefox 3 the tab switching (via control tab) effect that was (has been removed based on user feedback) a feature in early Firefox 3.1 builds.
  • Undo Closed Tabs Button – in the 2+ years I’ve been reviewing add-ons this had to be the most disappointing. I found very few benefits to this add-on. As a result I ended up writing a quick post on much simpler ways to undo closed tabs.
  • oldbar – brought back some of the familiar and preferred behaviours of the Firefox 2 address bar. Further, when paired up with
    Tweak: Fx 3 Address Bar

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