Firefox

As a direct consequence of these control policies, all ISPs and ICPs in China must police themselves in order to operate. For example, the most politically active spaces online are online forums like bulletin boards and chat rooms. Because of the government regulations, all web hosting services must hire moderators in order to keep their sites’ content acceptable to the Internet police. In addition to human censors, all website hosting services have also installed keywords filtering software. Posts on politically sensitive topics, such as Falun Gong, human rights, democracy, and Taiwan independence are routinely filtered. A list recently obtained by the China Internet Project in Berkeley found that over 1000 words, including “dictatorship”, “truth”, and “riot police” are automatically banned in China’s online forums.

Although I wouldn’t call myself a website design guru, I know what works and what doesn’t in creating a successful website. I’m a super-fast learner, and I want to pass on my knowledge of website design to you, in only a few short paragraphs. Of course this isn’t meant to be a full-fledged course on website design — I hope to tell you the main things that you should be doing to design an effective website.

If you follow those five basic website design tips outlined above, designing your first website (or touching up an existing one) shouldn’t be such a horror! Read all of the website design articles that you can to get a good working knowledge of design.

Be advised that most of the things that we want to block are either unsolicited email offers like spam, viruses that get sent you through HTML email or as attachments, free offers that mask spyware which are programs that monitor your online activity and send this information to someone you don't know who will sell this information to the first company with a checkbook, popup blockers to kill off those annoying advertisements that clueless companies use to try to sell you products and services, suck up your time and attention. Notice that all of the things we want to block are almost all advertising of one sort or another.

It seems the rest of the world sees the greater advantage in adopting free software solutions. Governments from around the world are looking into low cost, flexible solutions that free software is afording the desktop these days…

Microsoft finally told Web developers what they've wanted to hear for years, promising support for graphics and style sheet standards.

In a blog entry posted Friday, a member of Microsoft's Internet Explorer development team said the company plans to support key elements of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendations Portable Network Graphics (PNG), an image format, and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), a Web page styling standard.

An unpatched flaw in some versions of the Netscape browser could let an attacker into vulnerable systems, security company Secunia has warned.

The vulnerability is "highly critical," according to an advisory released by the Danish company late Tuesday. Version 6.2.3 and 7.2 of Netscape are affected and other versions may also be susceptible, the company said.

I thought I would share some insights on the number of collections I have put together since I started using Onfolio, how many are the most oftenly used, and also some data on how big those collections are.

I started using Onfolio back in October of 2003 when I joined the team here. You could guess that we were pretty heavy users of Onfolio internally before it was released even while a lot of it was still being put together. Since that time I have accumulated about 18 collections that contain pretty much all of "my stuff." Inside of those 18 collections is a subset of about 7 collections that I use most often. Here is the collection names and a brief description of those:

I have the my homepage set to a wikipedia random page so I learn something new every time I start firefox (the url is “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randompage“). And today I got this wikipedia article amounts to not much more than an advert. It demonstrates some of the flaws of not running it through a gatekeeper I think, but given that I have been using wikipedia for ages and haven’t run into many problems like this, maybe their dispute resolution does work well. But I suspect more and more people working in PR/shills...

Now that Windows XP x64 has been released, we should decide when we will begin supporting it by providing official 64-bit builds of Firefox/Thunderbird. Plugins will probably be an issue, but since extensions are not compiled, they should have no problems running. Work has started on this front and is being tracked in bug 237202. Third party Windows x64 Firefox builds are already available.

Silicon Valley Watcher reckons that inspection of their website stats has revealed a scoop - a sighting of a Google Browser. Recent months has seen speculation from the BBC and hiring of key engineers from Microsoft and Firefox (Google Hires Firefox P... [Read More]

I just finished reading the above book, and wanted to write out some thoughts about it while it was still fresh in my head. I've been working on an article for Free Software Magazine about the art of computer programming, and this was one of the books I encountered in my research. The book seems to be trying to accomplish three goals: Provide an introduction to computer science, offer some enlightening history of programming, and describe programming aesthetics. It's actually a very interesting and well-written...

The International Open Source Network, an initiative of the United Nations Development Programme,has published a primer on free/open source software in education. It’s freely available under a Creative Commons license, and is a good general introduction to free software suitable for a wide audience, not just those in education.

an excellent site containing a ton of resources on how to customize firefox to your liking. they even have a list of useful firefox extensions, some of which i already use. if you don’t want to manually edit your settings, then check out firetune for firefox....

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 24th, 2005 at 4:31 pm and is filed under tips/tricks, firefox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS...

Thanks for the link to my Firefox tips site. Have you had good luck with Firetune? I haven’t added to the tips site yet because it seemed like it messed of my profile settings and other extensions.

A while ago, I started using Onfolio on my PC, which is a very nifty RSS reader/information organiser, that had one major flaw for me - it didn't sync with either NewsGator Online, or Bloglines - both of which I use to read feeds on my Mac. Now, thanks to Onfolio developer Joe Cheng, Onfolio can now sync with Bloglines. I'll give this a test spin later on.

As a web designer, you’d think I’d like HTTP. I don’t. Why? Look at it. Spyware, idiot flash intros, ads to get free iPods, retarded animated gifs, the list goes on! I think that everyone should go back to the good ol’ days of BBSing. I guess I’m the only one. Anyway, to show my love for a protocol that pwns, I started a gopherspace. It’s almost finished, so you should check it out and enjoy..

Well, the people at spreadfirefox.com is rather humorous. Someone created an ad to promote safe “browsing”.

i cant seem to get the coding right on here. its working in firefox, and as far as i know, on IE. this is an all-mac household though, so don’t take my word for it. my only concern is that there is a table reproduction issue in safari.. i’m sure its bad css.. i should probably run that css verification thing. hmm.

Yesterday morning I noticed a change to the JavaScript/DOM getSelection() behavior in the new Safari 1.3 (in 10.3.9) and the most recent version of Firefox 1.0.3.

What Safari and Firefox now seem to be doing is creating a DOM selection object from getSelection() instead of treating it as a simple string. The result is that getSelection() appear to be a string, but few of the string manipulation functions work without additional considerations.

Further inconsistencies between Safari 1.3 and Firefox 1.0.3:

Fails silently in Safari, returns selected text in Firefox. Safari dumps this into the Console log:

I was using the length property to determine whether a selection was empty or not, then fetching the title of the window if that value was 0. Knowing that length no longer works in Firefox and Safari, isCollapsed can be used as a conditional switch.

Putting aside the discussion on whether the new version of IE will win back converts from Firefox and Opera, I find the most interesting aspect to be the new possibilities for CSS layouts. They are quite doable already, but with IE's enhanced support, even the most stubborn table-defenders are going to have to reconsider their position. With the bugs gone, CSS layouts will no longer be the tricky magic they've used to be. Rather, they'll hopefully be an everyday alternative for projects ranging from trivial to extremely complex.

To be clear, Opera's download is *tiny*, well under 4MB, about half that of Firefox. But really, now that dial-up is for chumps, I don't know how much of an advantage it can remain. I haven't done the math, but I'd think in terms of filled UI space at default install - that is where Opera's impression of bloat mostly comes from. The word Opera must learn to hate is clutter.

I think Opera is starting to think huge. They want the huge market of people who don't want much from their browser. As long as it has a back button - they're set. For these people, Speed, Security, Simplicity is a great reason to move over in reaction to bad press/bad spyware (deserved or not) for IE, or even Firefox.

Using Gmail as a Spam Filter. Tempted to try this.

putmarks is a lightweight solution for use with an XBEL bookmark synchronizing package such as the wonderful "Bookmarks Synchronizer" Firefox extension by Torisugari; both pieces of software I use for synchronizing my bookmarks between home and school everyday.

putmarks functions as the remote end for a book marks synchronizer in that it accepts HTTP GET and PUT requests, reads and writes an xbel.xml file, and also keeps a log of all transations. It is very light-weight and requires nothing more than a PHP-enabled web-server to operate.

Also, thanks to whoever it was that has a pending referral through Dreamhost for website hosting. I REALLY appreciate it. They really do offer a great deal at under $8 a month. I can’t say enough about how great their support is, or about how easy it has been to use all their one-click set ups for stuff like this blog and for my forums. They’re truly a SUPERIOR webhost provider. So thanks again. And if anyone else is thinking about finding a host for their site, or switching hosts……..then by all means, click on that...

In Jason’s roundup of the Adobe-Macromedia acquisition, he alludes to Tim Bray’s comment that Adobe may drop Flash, and proffers Ajax as an alternative for web developers — a bit of jumping the gun, if you ask me.

Last fall, Kevin Lynch, the Chief Architect of Macromedia, asked to meet with me regarding my work on the Gmail API, under the guise of hinting at potential employment opportunities in the Experience Design group *. Essentially, he and his associate, an ex-Microsoft guy they poached from the ASP.NET group, wanted to know how the Gmail Ajax system worked, and how it worked so quickly. We also covered their new Flex platform, their take on the Lazlo project (supportive, but would ultimately rather see all efforts focused on Flex), and uses of the XML socketing support that was introduced in Flash 5.

What was really fun (OK, not so fun) was sending out invites to all of the people who had requested them (sorry, I’m out of them so far – turns out you only get 100). I noted something interesting there – a preponderance of gmail.com addresses. So I counted and this is what I got: 22% of requesters had Gmail accounts, 18% had a Yahoo! email address, and 3% had hotmail.com domains. Interestingly, there was one person with a Yahoo! email and MSN Spaces personal Web site – I have a feeling he/she will be changing...

ozman.lasvegas@gmail.com

Sorry, I forgot to say that my email is smallsun@gmail.com

if you happen to have an extra invite, it would be rad if you sent it my way! matikonesta@gmail.com

Why? Well, after having some trouble with my laptop not wanting to go into sleep mode or shut down, I had to do a 'hard' shutdown (keeping the power button pressed down until it shuts off). After rebooting, all my Firefox bookmarks were gone! Not a trace left, no backup, no nothing...

It also seems I'm not the only one with this problem...

I've just looked at the download count for my Firefox theme (https://addons.update.mozilla.org/themes/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&category=Modern&numpg=10&id=370), and it has had over 1.2 million downloads.

I didn't think it was that good, and most of the comments support me on that, but it is the single most downloaded Firefox theme on the Mozilla Update website, so there can't be that much wrong with it.

Eventually we get to the download part proper, where a popup window opens and something should happen. Only thing is, the window opens, and then freezes. If I go to the download page it tells me to turn off popup blockers (which I don't use because I use Firefox). But there is a Start button, so I think , well, maybe it will work this time.

No. Enter the free runtimes movement. There are a body of open source/free software advocates and developers who have taken on this task, and they have made some quite impressive progress. Projects like Kaffe, GNU Classpath, SableVM, JamVM have taken up the gauntlet, and things are coming along nicely. I regularly compile against these virtual machines and runtime environments and I am...

"There is a strong case for free software (also known as open source or libre software) being deployed widely in developing countries. As argued in this note, the open source development community provides an environment of intensive interactive skills development at little explicit cost, which is particularly useful for local development of skills, especially in economically disadvantaged regions."

A pitch for Firefox security: The Mozilla Foundation passed on using a condom-themed poster to tout its Firefox browser, but volunteers want to revive the ad to emphasize the software's security features.

Credit: Spread Firefox

I have a Yahoo! account so I tried it out. I created a webmail account through the ‘New Account’ wizard and then Web Mail began downloading my messages. It stopped downloading after a while though with an error message saying it got ‘negative vibes’. I tried to log in from Firefox and was greeted with the following error message:

Unable to process request at this time — error 999

Declan (a workmate), googled the error message and referred me to this page that details the possible reasons for a 999. If the problem really is bandwidth related, then this extension is not much use if your Yahoo! account get lots of mail.

I wanted to evaluate Opera as compared to Firefox without seeing advertisements. If it turns out that the software suits my fancy, I’ll buy it. I won’t — and you certainly shouldn’t — use the following procedure to bypass advertising in the free version for any longer than is necessary for an evaluation. Opera needs to make money like any other company. Having choices...

Now that over 25 million copies of Firefox went over the pipes between the release of 1.0 and 1.0.1, and the slowdown has occured, the real test is going to be whether steady growth can continue after initial hype drove the biggest open-source/Free Software advocacy campaign in history. Let’s hope so — web standards are not a fad, web security is not a fad, and Firefox is more than an alternative (like its less successful predecessors such as the still ultra-fast Opera): it’s a killer browser with good security, impeccable standards...

Erin Joyce thinks Opera 8 is going to be a huge hit, but she fails to understand why Firefox has been so successful in the first place:

“Tabbed browsing? If you’re a Firefox fan – and their legions are growing because of this feature alone – you’ll find it even more appealing in Opera. After all, this crew helped promote the idea of tabbed browsing. The latest version offers tiles, cascades and panels, to name a few ways of keeping track of all the pages you’re running at once.”

My mom doesn’t want tiling. Or cascading. Or panels. She just wants a simple way to keep multiple sites open, and it’s because Firefox provides only that—without all the confusing bells and whistles—that she finds it so appealing.

Works in Firefox only but this is a pretty interesting use of the Greasemonkey script. Lickr - Flickr, without the Flash.

Google has definately been behind Yahoo when it comes to RSS integration and RSS feed reading with Yahoo adding an RSS feed aggregator to MyYahoo and implementing feeds into custom versions of the new Yahoo News layout. However, Google has taken a step into RSS feed reading with implementation of Google Web Clips into the GMail interface.

The San Francisco-based Macromedia claims the top spot in the market for website design, with about one-third of the market, followed by Microsoft. It also produces the Flash and Shockwave software used in many games and Internet applications.

Firefox updated to 1.0.3 and Mozilla to 1.7.7 on Friday, both updates essentially security fixes that plugged nine and six vulnerabilities, respectively. The most substantial vulnerability was a bug in the JavaScript engine's memory heap management, which was first reported earlier this month.

Finally, if you have ever surfed the Internet, you are aware of popup ads. Popup ads are the windows that open all across your computer screen and contain ads for products and services that you are likely not interested in or at least not interested in seeing at that particular moment. Popup blockers prevent these windows from opening and keep them from slowing your connection. Popup blockers are fairly inexpensive -- under $20 -- but many Internet Service Providers, including Yahoo, offer free popup blockers.

Microsoft fears GNU/Linux, and rightly so. GNU/Linux and the Open Source & Free Software movements arguably represent the greatest threat to Microsoft's way of life. Shot in cinemascope on 35mm film in Silicon Valley, REVOLUTION OS tracks down the key movers and shakers behind Linux, and finds out how and why Linux became such a potent threat.

The Mozilla Foundation has released new versions of the Firefox browser and Mozilla suite of programs to address several security vulnerabilities. ...

Three weeks after releasing version 1.0.2 of the Firefox web browser, the Mozilla Foundation have released a new version which fixes critical vulnerabilities ...

Nine vulnerabilities were identified in Mozilla Suite and Firefox, which may be exploited by malicious Websites to execute arbitrary commands or conduct Cross ...

Earlier this week, I was complaining via IM to MXV about Firefox repeatedly crashed on me after trying to load several pages of content from one particular website that's loaded with ad banners, both animated gif and Flash.

And because of the number of Flash banners on that website (especially the interactive ones), it maxes out my Mac's dual processors and crashes Firefox as a result. And even without those Flash banners, there's still a ridiculous number of ad bloat... scripts, cookies, and animated gif banners... that I have to sit through to get to the content that I want to read.

MXV mentioned AdBlock, and after installing and configuring it, I can't believe it took this long for me to use it! Coupled with FlashBlock, the load times for websites should be much less than before, plus Firefox won't crash on me anymore!

The Gmail account I run in Firefox with Greasemonkey running + Arantius' Gmail 'delete button' script + Persistent.info's 'persistent searches' for Gmail functions very weirdly. It won't open the Gmail Help window, for example, and in "email composition" mode it won't add hyper-links to text. Disable Greasemonkey, and therefore these two scripts, and all is fine again.

In IE, running Google's latest Google Toolbar, I can't now get beyond 'Loading' when opening a Gmail account. (I used to have no problem, but I guess Google is tweaking Gmail all the time.) Temporarily remove the Google Toolbar, and the Gmail account loads.

This is very quick, on-the-hoof feedback, but it would seem that messing around with browsers and web-services that run therein will create problems for end-users. If even Google isn't getting this right … A pity: I really like those two Firefox/Greasemonkey Gmail scripts.

Gmail has a Chinese interface now! Great! I'll recommend to my friends.

Any day now, we'll be offered a new version of Firefox from a startup called Round Two, drawn from members of the Mozilla Foundation.

It's also sponsoring development of other products, including FlashGot, which lets Firefox work with third-party download managers; Bandwidth Tester, which lets people determine their connection speed; and SwitchProxy, which lets people surf anonymously with Firefox by configuring Firefox to work with multiple Web proxy servers. Round Two is providing developers of these extensions with technical resources including Web servers, bandwidth, project management resources and some financial support.

The number of people visiting the Mozilla Foundation website where they can download the Firefox browser has more than doubled over the last nine months, a research firm said Wednesday.

In March, more than 2.6 million people visited the Firefox site, a 237 percent spike over June of 2004, when the site met the minimum reporting levels, Nielsen/Netratings said.

Over the last month various open source projects have replaced their Web home page with one that outlines the risk that the EU Directive on the Patentability of Computer Implemented Inventions, more commonly known as the Software Patent Directive, could pose to free software.

The government is mulling whether to use free software or Microsoft Windows in up to 1 million computers under its PC Conectado, or the Connected PC, “digital inclusion” program, and Microsoft has been actively lobbying for Brazil to buy its product.

I've been a Bloglines user for over a year now (recently bought by Ask Jeeves), and have been generally happy with the experience of a web based blog reading service. A new udpate by Onfolio, of Onfolio 2.0, caught my eye yesterday and so I downloaded the application after having tried version 1.0 over a year ago. It's got great new features, including the ability to save entire web sites, organize and annotate comments on things...

However, I wish there were a web-based version of this product, or at the very least the ability to share and sync my Onfolio with other Onfolio on secondary PCs. I tend to do my work across multiple desktops and laptops (both windows and Mac), so I tend to be partial to apps that are stored on the web. This way I can access the same stuff, with the latest updates, off any machine that I'm on.

I don’t normally look at this very often but I note today that I have 49 gmail invites to send out.

April 13, 2005 in Web/Tech | Permalink

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference GMail Invites.:

For what it's worth, all Gmail account holders now have 50 invites to send out, and they renew themselves to that preset level. ^^

1. Gmail Notifer : Sits in your taskbar and alerts you when you have Gmail.

7. Webmail Compose : Changes the default behavior of mailto links so that you can use yahoo mail, msn, or in my case, Gmail.

GGG-Gmail is an experiment in a new kind of webmail, built on the idea that you should never have to put up with any wack-ass shit in your inbox. Some of the hot GGG-Gmail features are:

I eventually found John Blade’s version of the Wordpress mail2blog script. I ended up editing it a bit, and along with some stunnel’ing and a new (secret!!) gmail account, I now have phone2blog functionality too… The pic of the bike was just a test, (Apparently it’s the first and only Ninja ZX-6R in the country at the moment…) and it’s standing right outside the offices where I work.

This makes me wonder how free software can compete. With such a complete tool box, why would anybody bother to learn anything else? Also, Microsoft actively markets this program. There are several flyers around campus. Free software generally has a good web presense, but lacks such marketing.

I’ve just started mucking around with GreaseMonkey, an extremely handy extension for Mozilla Firefox. It let’s you “fix the web", by allowing you to run your own custom Javascript on URLs you define.

I’ve been quiet since I wrote about Local Shared Object abuse on Tuesday, but that’s because I’ve been busy. Then, I said “while these new Flash cookies aren’t as easily eraseable as the ordinary variety yet, I’m sure someone will get right on it.” Well, I got right on it. I’m pleased to announce my first Firefox extension ever, Objection,...

Objection’s currently in a pretty rudimentary state - it only works for Windows, and it’s only translated into English - but I plan on building it out over time to have all the functionality and control Firefox users are used to having over plain old cookies. This will serve as a stop-gap solution until Macromedia and the Mozilla Foundation get together to release a permanent one, a solution that prevents Local Shared Objects from being used by unscrupulous (and ultimately counterproductive) marketers to subvert the wishes of everyday...

I’m hoping the people who first discussed Local Shared Objects and their threat to user privacy...

Pro: Uses Firefox’s Preferences UI.

Am I seeing the balance between this Firefox extension and the existing controls in the Macromedia Flash Player correctly here? or…?

A new extension for Firefox called Objection, has been

Someone has created a lightweight counterpart to the feature-rich Googlebar extension for Firefox and the Mozilla suite. Googlebar Lite strips out many of the rarely-used features of Googlebar in favor of a lean-and-mean approach to search.

I haven’t had a chance to try this yet, but I’m looking forward to giving it a shot. The full-fledged Googlebar seems to be a cause of frequent slow-downs and Firefox crashes on my home computer, though it runs just fine on my work PC (an Athlon-only problem?).

Google, Firefox, Mozilla, opensource,

Nielsen//NetRatings reported that escalating interest in the FireFox browser garnered a 237% spike in unique visitors to the Web site from nine months ago when the site first met Nielsen//NetRatings’ minimum reporting levels in June 2004. More than 2.6 mln people visited the FireFox site during March 2005 to download the browser and obtain more information.

Males, often the early adopters of technology and gadgets, dominated FireFox’s site composition during the month of March 2005. Men accounted for 71% or nearly 1.9 mln site visitors, compared to the women who comprised of 29% or the minority population who visited in March 2005.

Traffic to Mozilla.org, the site for the Mozilla Foundation credited with developing the FireFox browser, saw a 284% year-over-year growth to 4.1 mln unique visitors. When the latest version of FireFox launched in November 2004, Mozilla.org drew its second largest audience with 3.4 mln unique visitors.

via ZDNet

The FeedBurner Forum has an interesting post about how to splice your del.icio.us tags into the RSS feed for your site. So for example, I've enabled my Firefox tips feed to now include any link I add to del.icio.us and with the tag 'firefox'.

So I starting having some techincal problems while logged on yesterday morning. I thought it strange, but didn't give it much thought. Come on, I work for an internet company (very big named internet company) and I'd like to think I'm pretty knowledgable about this kind of stuff. I have pop up blockers and spam blockers and norton anti-virus so I didn't think it could be that big of a deal.

Google hasn't been just a search engine for a long time. In addition to Gmail (which I use), Orkut (friend of a friend software), Picasa (photo organization), and Froogle (online shopping index), they've been upgrading their Maps feature like crazy. Recently they've added the ability to view a map or a satellite view and opened the API (to help programmers) which resulted in at least one amazing hack.

After a couple months of having an active gmail account, I find that there's spam in there now. The strange thing is that I've almost exclusively used the account for receiving mail - particularly google news alerts.

Just saw this interesting bit when I logged into my Gmail account a few minutes ago. I don't think it's an April Fools Joke. Like this is.

Storage is an important part of email, but that doesn't mean you should have to worry about it. To celebrate our one-year birthday, we're giving everyone one more gigabyte. But why stop the party there? Our plan is to continue growing your storage beyond 2GBs by giving you more space as we are able. We know that email will only become more important in people's lives, and we want Gmail to keep up with our users and their needs. From Gmail, you can expect more.

Fonts, bullets and highlighting, oh my! Gmail now offers rich text formatting. And over 60 colors of the rainbow. Discover a land of more than just black and white.

As anyone who knows me well enough knows, I am a big fan of Free Software. I use Firefox as my web browser, Thunderbird as my mail client, Gaim as my IM application, and from time to time I use the Linux operating system (I'd switch for good but lots of the things I do require Windows applications that aren't available for Linux. Linux is

Canon U.S.A. Inc. announced Tuesday that a free Software Developers Kit (SDK) will be released this July to allow Mac OS X software developers to create custom applications to remotely control the Canon XL2 Mini-DV camcorder. A Windows XP-based SDK is available now. The SDK allows software to control all of the XL2's functions, such as switching frame rates, adjusting color gain and managing white balance controls.

And now it’s time for a commercial interruption. This blog has been sponsored by… Mozilla. Not seriously, but I do want to brag about them for a minute. I’ve never been a big fan the Explorer web browser. Besides the often serious security issues it just isn’t very flashy or creative. I love Safari on my Mac at work and when I was told that Mozilla had a web browser that was similar to Safari I thought I’d check it out. I downloaded Firefox and gave it a try. I only had to use it for a few minutes and I was hooked. Tabbed browsing is “da bomb” and I love the optional themes to make it look different every day if I want to.

Having loved Firefox, I decided to give their other products a try. I’m now using Thunderbird exclusively for all my email on my laptop as well as Sunbird to keep myself organized. So far, there are no problems that I can see and I’ve been using them for a bit now. So if you are looking for a great email program, try Thunderbird. If you need a very cool (colorful and full of features) calendar give Sunbird a try. And if you aren’t using Firefox you don’t know what you’re missing! And did I mention - they are all free!...

after the friendster blogging service, now yahoo have it’s own all-in-one blogging and photoalbum service, called yahoo 360°. the service is still on beta stage, and it uses gmail scheme of spreading, by allocating 100 membership invitations for each member. i decided to make it my indonesian language blog. for you who also want to be invited, just drop me a line in the comment box.

In a post on January 26 I mentioned that I had just scored a Gmail address and was about to install that as the contact email for this blog.

This has worked well and although there has been some spam, Gmail has been very good indeed, so far, in intercepting the spam and corralling it into a spam folder for checking and deletion. Makes Outlook seem a very blunt instrument in comparison.

I could become quite a fan of Gmail!

Describing the Yahoo-Google face off, Havoc recently put it, “Google is trying to be Yahoo and Yahoo is trying to be Google”, in their race to be the one-stop shop for everything online. Although Yahoo did significantly better in regards operating profits and service reliability, Google is stealing all the limelight. Anything the company does, it rakes in oodles of publicity, for e.g. the latest integration of Google Maps with Keyhole technology that lets you view...

Jonathan Hernandez, a Mexican programmer, has figured out how to turn Google’s Gmail service into a blog.

Using Gmail messages as the blog comments, Gallina uses XML & XSLT to convert the emails into a blog.

Google may not be happy about the tool though, their terms of use for Gmail specify that screen scraping is not allowed. This type of technology is how Gallina functions.

After logging in to read my googleMail, I noticed that Google has given me 50 gmail invites this week.

This will probably mean that Google is expanding the webmail service in preparation for a full public rollout. Users of gmail so far, myself included, have found the service to be easy to use and offers plenty of storage. I personally do not use gmail as my primary email account though.

With their recent hiring of FireFox lead developer Ben Goodger, Google Inc is set to begin mapping out the future of web browsing. Google has already proven it’s ability to create interfaces that work well, google search is #1 and everyone loves the way gMail works, but perhaps more astonishing features for the web browser have yet to been seen.

Gmail gone public....I guess their social experiment is over

Link: Google Accounts.

Since we launched Gmail in April 2004, we've been focused on improving the service, relying on our users to spread the word and invite others to try it out. The response has been great, and now we're ready for some more Gmail users.

Great Windows Applications to make going back to school a little easier.

I've also just finished a few revisions to the free software DRM article that I've written. Without delving into the technical aspects of how to build a strong rights management system, my piece is more of a "think piece" asking whether a DRM system makes sense for free software users. I was unable to write a strong definitive piece as I would have liked, but the topic was likely too broad to write a declarative piece. I wish I had some more time to work on it, but I'm simultaneously grateful that I'll need to send it off in a few days and put it...

6) If you’re being illegally charged for free software. There are many programs available that are fun and free to add to your site, like shoutboxes and weather updates and blogging platforms. Find out if the program you’re requesting is free or if there’s a fee (Google for information on the program you’re interested in.) Your designer may charge you for installation and design of the program into your site, but shouldn’t charge you for the program itself if it’s available for free download.

Feedburner estimates, as of early January 2005, that Firefox and Thunderbird combined account for just under ten percent of all RSS feed readers which read the 800 most highly subscribed feeds that Feedburner manages. That’s a lot, and it’s growing.

Check to make sure that your feed is recognizable by both Firefox’ Live Bookmarks and Thunderbird. When you view your website with Firefox, there should be an orange cube with what looks like radiating radio waves in the lower right-hand corner of the browser bar at the bottom of the screen. Put your cursor on the orange cube to make sure that it then indicates the feeds which are available from your site. To verify that Thunderbird will work with your feed, enter your feed’s URL as I described a couple of days ago in the

Read my Mozilla vs Microsoft article if you skipped over it last month. When Microsoft finally integrates feed reading capability into its browser, it’ll have to be able to read (as-is) the same feeds that Firefox and all the other feed readers can read, at least for awhile.

And questa c’e’ pure per FireFox e anche questa poi me la installero’ anche a casa sull’iBook.

La cosa ormai piu’ seccante sul fronte Toolbar, e’ che la Google Toolbar resta sempre e comunque disponibile solo ed esclusivamente per Windows e Internet Explorer, mentre gli altri motori di ricerca stanno muovendo passi in direzione di chi usa FireFox, rendendo quindi le Toolbar compatibili con piu’ sistemi operativi.

I have been continuing to use Onfolio and liking it, but have come up with one snag - performance. At home I have been trying it on my AMD Athlon 64 computer with 1GB of RAM - no problem (well you would hope not with that machine spec!!).

However when I tried it on my computer at work I had to uninstall it, the machine just became too slow. Certainly too slow to leave Onfolio running in the background collecting feeds. My machine at work is a P4 with 512MB of RAM, a reasonable computer, average for a mid-range office machine.

I’m a developer at Onfolio- just wanted to check if you had tried the Preview release of Onfolio yet. We have had a lof of positive feedback about its performance compared to Beta 1, so if you haven’t checked it out yet, it may make performance on your home computer a lot more acceptable. If you’re already using it and its still not working for you performance wise, thats good for us to know as well- we’ll keep trying to make it faster!

Ars Technica has a great review of several desktop search software packages available currently. It really goes through good enough detail to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each software and matched my experience as well. The only ones here I haven't tested are Copernic and Ask Jeeves. But the winner is my choice as well: MSN Desktop Search. This has consistently stayed on my desktop and laptop and I use it several times a day....

Hmmm, are you sure your Onfolio collections are getting indexed by MSN? This isn't possible as far as I know (yet... but we're working on it).

Posted by: Joe Cheng | April 5, 2005 07:39 PM

Well, it's not ideal, but they are indexed. I'm using Onfolio Publisher to publish my collection to a local directory. Since this is essentially an HTML file, it's indexed completely. When I search in MSN, I get index.htm (Main Collection) as a result, thus I know it's in Onfolio. That's the best I have so far.

Ideally, you should have an iFilter for .cfs files. Then, MSN will automatically search and index them. Although, I'll still get a Main Collection.cfs as a result that opens up in Onfolio.

hey can u pass one of those gggggmail invites?

The feed for Firefox tips can be found at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/FirefoxHelpTipsAndTricks

Firefox tips

oooh, I can’t believe I’ve never come across this before!

Why have I not discovered the scrolling problem before? Because I only ever deal with my site using Firefox on Linux and Safari or Firefox on OS X. Oh, by the way, Safari seems to have a CSS bug, too. It can’t display the line-through text decoration on a span element in a paragraph. Maybe line-through is a problem for all elements in Safari’s CSS rendering. I don’t know. I’ll look into that, too… eventually.

Maxthon also incorporates 2 POPUP blockers (Auto POPUP blocker & a POPUP blocker list filter) and a Content Filter. The Content filter can be used to filter offensive pictures on a web page,

A Program for teaching kids how to be security- and privacy-aware while online, based completely on license-free software. Teaching certification and everything.

So you’ve learned how to write your own extension. This tutorial will show you how to keep your users up to date with your latest version automatically.

We are very happy to announce TorrentBox, the BitTorrent tracker site is back online after being off for several days. admins of TorrentBox worked hard for several days to bring the torrent site back online. It doesn't seem to have affected TorrentBox's "for Sale" notice and the auction seems to be continuing.

Onfolio- I use Onfolio all day long and my data and RSS feeds are important to backup. The data "collections" are stored under the My Documents tree by default so as long as you haven't changed that you will be OK by simply backing up the My Documents tree. The RSS feeds are another matter, and unfortunately Onfolio chooses to store them in another hidden folder by default. If you don't back up the correct folder specifically you lose all your feeds and history information, which for me numbers in the hundreds. Be sure and back up your feed information in the following default folder (after making it visible in the properties):

C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Application Data\Onfolio

I’ve become totally smitten with Onfolio 2.0 as my news aggregator. I used to use Bloglines, and still recommend it to anyone new to the world of Blogs and RSS, but the ability to download my aggregated feeds and read them offline (a la FeedDemon) combined with the ability to clip and save entire websites has really changed my browsing habits. Best of all, for now it’s...

For instance, Google, with their Gmail product, is attempting to redefine how we access our e-mail, how we store it and where we store it. The idea being that we should have virtually limitless e-mail storage, on a centralized server, available from anywhere, able to be accessed through any browser or client, with threaded or context based views of topics and that we should not have to file it into folders because it is able to be searched by sender, subject and content so therefore retrieved very quickly....

You really have nothing to lose. Download the free software, encourage friends and family to do the same, and then talk with each other as if you're all located at the same place. Lockergnome

Blogs on Skype Today in Stories...

Hey the spell checker for FireFox doesn’t barf on profanity and I didn’t even have to train it.

OK, that’s ehm, well… that sounds nice in theory, but does it have much practical applications? It appears that it has, and when I saw it, it blew me away. Some guy succeeded in adding persistent searches to Gmail. Nearly every normal mail client has those these days, sometimes they’re called smart folders or vFolders; what they do is the same: create a “folder” that contains all the mail matching certain criteria. For example all the mail you received...

After installing Greasemonkey in Firefox and installing the user script this what it looks like when you visit your Gmail mailbox:

The searches are performed instantly and can be updated by pressing the little refresh button at the top-right of the box. When you click one of the persistent searches it will show the result in the usual search-result fashion. You can also add new persistent searches. Only drawback is that the searches are stored in a cookie, so they’re not there if you login to Gmail with another computer.

Secunia, a security research firm, found a bug in the Firefox Web Browser which could be used by malicious people in obtaining personal and sensitive information.

Secunia released an online test that permits Firefox and Mozilla users to determine if they are affected by the bug. The test showed that users are indeed affected and the way to prevent this is to disable JavaScript support. The result came six weeks after the Mozilla Foundation released a security update to the Firefox Browser, which includes several fixes that guard against spoofing and arbitrary code execution.

Web vulnerabilities are not a new thing in the system, there will always be flaws because flaws exist, said Joe Wilcox, an analyst from Jupiter Research. He also added that the focus was on how they will handle the problem and find a solution. This is the part wherein Microsoft has the advantage over Firefox: the former has a team working to eliminate vulnerabilities, while the latter has limited resources.

If you select “Force links that open new windows to open in: a new tab", Firefox diverts links with target="_blank". It also diverts JavaScript window.open() calls, but only calls that don’t specify window features (e.g. size and which toolbars are displayed). Most calls to window.open() specify the size of the window. You can change this by setting the browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction pref in about:config.

Either way, if you’re using Firefox with the wonderful AdBlock extension, chances are you’re not seeing any ads anyway, on this site, nor any other. And you’re probably just as smug about it as I am.

Thanks to the the GNU Project and the Free Software philosophy, there is a program that can do almost everything that can be done in Photoshop. That program is The Gimp. GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is freely available for Linux/Unix, Mac...

The Gimp only works with RGB so it is not suitable for publishing. However, most users will not need it for that function. Do yourself a favor and learn more about the Free Software movement and get a copy of The Gimp.

Anyway, one of the many things that makes Firefox so great is the use of extensions, which essentially are add-ons for your web browsing experience. Basically it is tiny pieces of code, readily available on Mozilla's site, that offer enhanced functionality not natively included in Firefox itself that you may find useful. I have around twenty extensions loaded in my installation of Firefox that I use on a daily, almost hourly basis. In some cases even more often than that. Some of them have become so ingrained in how I surf the web, and subsequently use my browser, that I couldn't imagine doing so without them again. Which is why I have historically been slow to adopt newer versions of the app. Like anything else in the world of software newer version of an app require updated revisions of 3rd party add-ons. Since most extensions are written by users of Firefox who recognize a need and respond to it by putting together a solution out of the goodness of their hearts, with little or no compensation at all, it takes some time for all those extensions I use to be updated to work with the latest and greatest.

Geeky heads-up for those who use Movable Type with Firefox: there's a Firefox extension called Spellbound that acts as a spell checker for any HTML entry box. The Movable Type "Entry Body" area is of course just another HTML entry box, so Spellbound provides a semi-integrated spell checker for your Movable Type posts! I'm sure many of you have noticed all the typos all over Electrolicious, and this should help the situation.

You may have noticed that the browser will make one request to a web page at a time, as do most web browsers currently on the internet. This is due to Firefox’s configuration for the pipelines, which you can take advantage of that by making some simple modifications to its configuration file.

You can also get RSS feeds without an aggregator if you use Firefox as your internet browser. Firefox is a free browser application that has both Windows and Macintosh versions. It is a much superior browser compared to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for many reasons including security. It’s also a nice addition to Safari for Mac users and is very handy on those rare occasions when Safari doesn’t handle a site correctly.

Firefox calls its RSS aggregating feature Live Bookmarks and an excellent explanation of how to create them is available here.

Using Firefox, here’s how you’d add a live bookmark to get the Seattle Times’ political news.

So, what’s better - setting up feeds in Firefox or using a news aggregator? The benefits of the Firefox solution include the RSS links being right in front of you. The benefits of using an aggregator may include a more attractive interface - especially if you use NewsFire - and the ability to read quickly read a summary of the article.

One of my biggest pet peeves is having to view ads when I’m surfing. They are garish and can be quite disruptive. I’ve discovered ways to block on-page ads in the two browsers I find myself using the most, Safari and Firefox (If you haven’t found a way to block pop-ups yet, you’re not even trying).

For you windows users out there, there’s a handy-dandy Firefox plugin called Adblock that will get the job done. It can be downloaded and installed here. Once installed, you can right-click on ads that you see and click either ‘Adblock Image’ or ‘Adblock iFrame’. This will prevent the image or frame from being displayed. If you’re really savvy you can use wildcards (*’s)...

Yahoo on Tuesday night plans to unveil an updated toolbar for the Mozilla Foundation's open-source Firefox browser that offers the company's Anti-Spy adware and spyware removal software for computers running Microsoft's Windows operating system. Yahoo, which recently backtracked on a pledge to make all its software compatible with Firefox, also will make its basic Firefox toolbar, without Anti-Spy, available for use with Linux and Apple Computer's Macintosh operating systems. The toolbars and Anti-Spy software are free.

Active and I couldn’t live without them:
SessionSaver .2 0.2.1.027 - “SessionSaver will auto-track and restore your browser exactly as you left it – every startup, every time. Not even a crash can faze it…” - this is my #1 extension and absolutely essential. Never browse without it. On a fresh install, this is my first download. Get it now.
Adblock 0.5.2.039 - does what it says. Pretty cool.
Download Manager Tweak 0.6.3 - makes it easier to control your downloads.
Add Bookmark Here 0.5.2 - Makes filing bookmarks easier.
FLST 0.7 - Brings focus to the last selected tab when closing the active tab.

I've been using Firefox for several months - ever since my new computer was laden with viruses and adware. It took me a while to download the web developer extension, and I'm only learning its power now. I have been using its "view CSS" feature for a while, but the real power is in the "edit CSS" option. With this feature, you can view any web page employing CSS, and yes, as the name indicates, edit it on the fly. The page will immediately alter its appearance accordingly. If you are doing page design, this is incredibly useful, whether you are troubleshooting or simply trying out different looks (e.g. you can change the colour of the page). Download the extension and use it. You'll find it's a time-saver.

I noticed some additional information about concerns regarding firefox prefetch. It happens that Google recently enabled prefetch on the first links of their search results pages, and this, in combination with the default settings of Firefox (actually all recent Mozilla browsers, I believe), is causing additional cookies to be set. The original quote is from Google & Firefox == Evil & Annoying.

I recently did a search at google for "radio shack". To my surprise, I received a cookie setting request from radio shack.com. This had never happened before- and radio shack also happened to be a sponsored link. I did other searches, such as "ford", "sony", and even "girl scouts"- and each time, the top link requested a cookie to be set. Since Girl Scouts did not have a sponsored link- I realised it must only be the top link that sets a cookie. It turned out that Mozilla browsers (that includes firefox) and Google have both enabled prefetch- although it would seem that Google only recently enabled it- as this is a new occurrence.

The popular open-source browser already contains a pop-up blocker by default, but this does not handle pop-ups launched by plug-ins such as Flash and Java. Mozilla employee Asa Dotzler wrote in his blog last week that Mozilla developers are responding to the increasing number of advertisers that are using plug-ins to launch pop-up ads. "A lot of people have been reporting a new breed of pop-ups on the Web," Dotzler said. "This increasing menace is rooted in the pop-up capabilities of plug-ins like Flash and Java. If you're seeing pop-ups and pop-unders, you're probably visiting sites that have Flash or other plug-ins and those plug-ins are being exploited by advertisers to abuse you with annoying pop-ups and pop-unders."

A lot of people have been reporting a new breed of pop-ups on the web. This increasing menace is rooted in the pop-up capabilities of plug-ins like flash and Java. If you're seeing pop-ups and pop-unders, you're probably visiting sites that have flash or other plug-ins and those plug-ins are being exploited by advertisers to abuse you with annoying pop-ups and pop-unders.

Firefox has the capability to disable these pop-ups but it wasn't enabled by default in Firefox 1.0 because we had concerns about websites that rely on plug-in triggered pop-ups for legitimate functionality.

Give that these pop-ups and pop-unders have really started to spread on the web, we're testing a quick patch that enables the Firefox pref to block them. I blogged about this earlier this month and included manual steps to disable these nasty pop-ups and pop-unders. In addition to this fix, the good news is that for sites where you need these pop-ups, you can just whitelist them like you do other "wanted" pop-ups. This looks (at this stage) like a reasonable trade off.

Onfolio recently released its Onfolio 2.0 Release Candidate. For new news aggregator users, this is my second recommendation after Bloglines. Bloglines is easier, but Onfolio is much more powerful and, because it stores everything on your hard drive, opens up new scenarios (like you can read and search your feeds even when on a plane unconnected from the Internet).

3) Built in the browser. OnFolio 2.0 adds onto IE or Firefox. Optimal Access adds onto IE. The Mozilla team offers Sage for Firefox users. Pluck adds onto any browser. My favorite here is OnFolio. Pluck is pretty good too.

On a happier note, I use Onfolio every single day! I am still very much in love with this program.

We are very happy to announce that the Release Candidate (Beta 3) of Onfolio 2.0 is available for immediate download. To read about some of the changes that have gone into Onfolio 2.0 since the Preview Release and Beta 1, please look through the Relea

We are very happy to announce that the Release Candidate (Beta 3) of Onfolio 2.0 is available for immediate download. To read about some of the changes that have gone into Onfolio 2.0 since the Preview Release and Beta 1, please look through the Relea

I LOVE Onfolio and immediately downloaded the latest release.

I LOVE Onfolio and immediately downloaded the latest release.

Gmail is amazing - and now offering TWO GB of email storage. That's good news since I was at 83% already ;) more stories here

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Google is now giving me 2GB of Gmail:

Someone at CNet thinks that Google is trying to render the desktop irrelevant. For the past few months they have been hiring away a bunch of Microsoft's talent. The author speculates that this is to create a thin desktop client and make the standard...

Ringo is an interesting new service from Monster Worldwide, Inc. It is essentially little more than an online address book, but what makes it note worthy, is the comprehensive import features it has, which allow you to import contacts from MSN, Hotmail, GMail and AOL. Once it’s grabbed the addresses from you accounts it compares them to existing Ringo members, and if people aren’t already a member it allows you to send out an invite to them, so they can enter their own information. This is a nice touch,...

The new Mozilla Firefox 1.0 browser seems to be a bit pickier about displaying incorrect coding (HTML or CSS) than other current browsers – that is, you might get a bit of a shock on some pages. While this sounds like a problem, I welcome a browser that immediately displays any coding issues. One note: from my initial tests, Firefox 1.0 seems to suffer from the same type of caching problem as IE — once you've visited a page, then updated and uploaded the page and revisited it, FF1.0 does not give you the updated version. How annoying is that? Lots of manual clearing of the cache is in order.

As the race between MovableType and WordPress for leadership of the DIY blogware market continues, there is any number other alternatives in the marketplace that offer similar services in a range of programming languages. Looking for something different, or always wanted to know what else was available, well heres a list of ten DIY Blog platforms you may not have not have visited, or even heard of, and in the coming weeks, time permitting, we’ll even review them one by one so you know what to expect.

I think the larger issue that people are having with this is that WordPress is supposedly a free and open project that isn't out to make money. You can donate money to it and assume that the money goes to the person toiling away on the project. But if the person is making money on the side from the popularity of the project - this irks some people - especially those who are into the whole free software way of life.

I have tried not to put anything tech related on this site since this site is not about tech, but I am a bit of a tech junkie so I think I may add a few tech bits. I have decided that since RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds have changed the way I use the internet that I would just give a quick rundown about them. With an RSS reader on your computer you can be notified automatically of site updates. I use Firefox as my web browser (like most people should unless you like pop ups and spyware) instead of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer so I use a plugin for Firefox called Sage as my feed reader. What this does is add a side window to my browser, that I can turn on and off, and lists all the site’s feeds that I have subscribed to. It also shows which feeds have been updated almost like an email program lets you see what email has been read and what is unread. There are many different types of RSS readers available depending on your operating system or needs, just do a search on google for “RSS readers". Of course this will only work if your favourite sites have RSS feeds. I have two RSS feeds, one is for my main blog page (the blog is what you are reading now) here, and one for the gallery here. These links are to be read by RSS readers so clicking on them will just display the code. In order to subscribe to these feeds copy and paste the links into your feed reader. I had more on this (maybe I will add it later if there is interest) but this is already pretty long. If there are any questions email me or post a comment.

If you like trying out new toys and have an interest in the annotated web, webbed footnotes wants you. Part of an MSc project at MIT, webbed footnotes is a firefox plugin that allows users to post annotations to web pages, as well as read and rate the annotations of others. It's very news-focused, at least at the moment - testers are only able to try it out with NY Times stories. There are, of course, similar projects floating around. One of my favourites is stumbleupon,...

Internet Explorer really does suck. Everything always works the way you want it to in Firefox, but IE likes to add frustration to your life. (Ask anybody I work with.) The latest example is that anything using Flash on my site scrolls on-top of my header and footer. So my picture viewer and an object from a previous post show up on top of everything when you scroll this page. Well guess what… I’m not going to waste my time figuring out why. Enjoy the new stuff. I have some picture up for you enjoyment.

2) Gator (GAIN): Adware program that may display banner advertisements based on user Web surfing habits. Gator is usually bundled with numerous free software programs, including the popular file-sharing program Kazaa.

did anyone happen to see google yesterday (april fool’s day)? it was funny. they were advertising a new google product - a drink. the frequently asked questions about it were just ripping google and gmail off (as in google ripping itself off). some of the slashdot posts were kinda funny too. especially how the u.n. is banning apple computers cos the apple symbol isn’t based on the apple-growing region in the south of france.

Une flopée d'outils pour customizer et exploiter au maximum GMail

Voici les sites qui parlent de Tout pour GMail:

Gmail has recently rolled out a new feature; they plan on giving “Infinity + 1” storage to all their users. Their reasoning is that as technology and the internet improves, people will need more and more storage. With the increase in storage space, larger attachment sizes should follow as well. Less known, but just as impressive is the addition of rich text formatting. Not only does the script work in Netscape type browsers such as Mozilla and Firefox, but also brings it up to...

I still have Gmail invites, though most people that want one already have one.

Looks like Gmail is rolling out an upgrade on 1st of April. It is now increasing the mail storage space by the second according to their infinity + 1 plan. Check out its progress at the Gmail homepage. If you are already logged in, you can log out to see the increasing counter and then log in to see the total amount of storage space you have at the bottom of the page. Pretty niffty.

Directly from GMail: “Storage is an important part of email, but that doesn’t mean you should have to worry about it. To celebrate our one-year birthday, we’re giving everyone one more gigabyte. But why stop the party there? Our plan is to continue growing your storage beyond 2GBs by giving you more space as we are able. We know that email will only become more important in people’s lives, and we want Gmail to keep up with our users and their needs. From Gmail, you can expect more.”