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.