The internet owns me.

Bah, these kids and their techno-whatever.

So I was finally peer-pressured into setting up my own half-assed blip in the MySpace continuum. "Everybody has one," they said, so like a good doggie, I obeyed. It's been a decent time-waster, if nothing else. And sorting through the spam friend requests is pretty entertaining. I mean it was, until the sixth one in two days, after which I started filtering them.

I'm in a weird head-space about school this semester. The only course I'm taking that I have even the slightest interest in is the client-side JavaScript programming class, and it only meets once a week. The networking course would be interesting if it weren't so frustrating that it's three hours long and taught by a total dingbat. I just want to get down to the really fun, challenging stuff, but for now I'm slogging through the requirements. Meanwhile, Real Life is hammering on my door, I'm busy trying to find a job that will fit with my schedule, and school is suddenly more of a burden than an opportunity.

Whatever. I started looking into the recent news about Mozilla hiring some guys from something called Humanized, and found a beautiful bit of programming they've written called Enso. I installed Enso Launcher this afternoon and I'm already addicted to it. If you meet the minimum recommended nerd requirements, be sure to check it out.

Speaking of which, apparently I don't meet the requirements for xkcd. I mean, I get it. But I don't think it's funny. I think it's one of those things where you're supposed to love it if you have the dork-cred, because you can water-cooler how cool it is with your fellow techies. But honestly, do we really need an unfunny, stick-figure, hardcore-geek version of Penny Arcade? Anyone up for that? Thought not.

Living with Flock.

The pros and cons of early adoption.
by AC - permalink

So I've been using Flock as my go-to browser for about two weeks now, and I've run into a few... issues. No deal-killers, but some annoyances. Plug-in support has been iffy. As in Firefox, you will occasionally come across a page that requires a missing plug-in, and the built-in plug-in finding wizard will invariably fail to help you. I was an early adopter of Firefox, so I've managed to manually install most or all of the plug-ins I need over the years (there are less than a dozen), but I was having trouble with Flock. I came across an entry in Flock's online help that suggested finding Firefox's nested plug-ins folder and simply copying its contents into Flock's equivalent directory. This worked for some plug-ins, but not for all of them -- notably, the Windows Media Player 11 plug-in, which is pretty prevalent. For sites using WMP for embedded video, I've had to go back to Firefox.

That was an easy one, though. A few days ago I fired up Flock and all my RSS feeds were gone. I poked around and couldn't find them anywhere. I chalked it up to a growing pains bug and tried to resubscribe to my feeds, but Flock thought every link I fed it was "invalid XML." It also failed to display the little RSS icon in the address bar when going to any site with a feed, which suggested that the browser had completely lost the ability to recognize a valid feed. I couldn't find a solution in the online help (though I didn't look very hard) and decided to completely uninstall the program -- including profile data -- and reinstall it. That fixed the issue, although another bug showed up when Flock's installer failed to prompt me to import any data from Firefox. Now, after install, the import wizard still fails to recognize Firefox as a valid import source.

Later I found this help article which might have helped me with the vanishing feed problem, but not with issue subscribing to new ones, and this article that explains how one Mozilla-based app can't import data from another when the latter is running during the former's installation. I'm not going to blame the Flock developers for this one, because I did have Firefox running when I reinstalled Flock, and I did know better from experiences installing other Mozilla-based browsers (Netscape, K-Meleon, SeaMonkey, Mozilla Browser, etc.). Unfortunately, there's no real workaround.

Other than these problems, I've been pretty happy with Flock. There are some nit-picks, like having the option of opening a link in a background or foreground tab, which I get in Firefox with the Tab Mix Plus extension and in Opera by default. There are also the little details changed for the better in Firefox 2 which haven't been incorporated into the Firefox 1.5-based Flock, although one of the most noticable, built-in spell-checking, is included. Also, as far as I can tell there are no alternative themes available for Flock anywhere. Granted the default theme is no nice that it's being ported to virtually every other browser, but how about some reciprocation?

Overall, though, my revised opinion of Flock has to remain positive. It's still my default browser, with Firefox 2 as backup and IE7 on stand-by. I feel a little guilty about it, because Avant Browser, a former favorite of mine, and Opera, which I've always liked for no reason I can nail down, can't even make an appearance in my start menu's recent apps list anymore. But that's how it works I guess. Build a better browser, and we'll use it. I hope Flock's user base continues to grow, because not only will it get better, all the others will have to keep pace.

Blogged with Flock

Firefox finally finds an equal.

Flock may have kicked its daddy off the top of the browser food chain.
by AC - permalink

I finally decided to give Flock a try after the release of version 0.7.11. Not because it was a particularly important release, just because I've tried everything else and nothing has really even come close to supplanting Firefox for me. Opera is very good, and getting better. But I've been spoiled by Firefox's extensibility, and the "killer-app" extension is AdBlock. Avant Browser, the best of the IE-based browsers, has native ad blocking, but is not as customizable overall, and still runs on IE's rendering engine. SeaMonkey and Netscape can use ad blocking extensions, but SeaMonkey is unwieldy and Netscape is a cluttered UI nightmare. K-Meleon is under-developed and relatively primitive compared to Firefox.

That pretty much just leaves Flock, which is currently based on Firefox 1.5. And to cut to the end of the story, it's become my default browser. It's as exstensible as Firefox, though with fewer certified extensions. But it has AdBlock, Download Manager Plus, All-in-One Sidebar, and a few others that I like. It looks great, has a ton of really nice included features, is highly customizable, doesn't eat up too much RAM, and it's well-supported. The search bar is limited to Yahoo!, but is feature-rich, fast, and surprisingly useful. I love the integrated blogging tools, and it seamlessly imported all of my history, passwords, bookmarks, etc. from Firefox. Startup time is slightly behind Firefox, but the installer package is a little above middle-of-the-pack (Flock's installer is 9MB vs. Firefox's 5.7MB, Opera's 6.2MB, Netscape's 18.3MB, and Avant Browser's 1.8MB). Flock also has a more than competent RSS viewer that equals the Sage extension I've been using in Firefox for quite a while now.

At first, I used Flock a few times, falling back to Firefox as my default browser, as I've used Opera or Netscape or whatever in the past. But eventually I realized that there was nothing I needed Firefox for that I hadn't been able to do with Flock. And not being hip to all the under-the-hood engineering differences between Firefox 2 and Flock 0.7, I decided that Flock might as well be my default choice.

So there you go. In my experience, Flock is basically Firefox 1.5 plus a bunch of social-network-type integrations like blogging, picture sharing, etc., with all of the same features and with almost equal extensibility, support, and customization. From and end-user perspective, it's an unqualified success.

Mozilla and Valve have been busy.

Unlike me.
by AC - permalink

Yesterday Firefox was updated to version 1.5.0.5. It's another incremental security/stability update, fixing several flaws rated critical. As always,

If you already have Firefox 1.5, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu within at any time.

And this morning, the corresponding update to Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 was released. The auto-upgrade patch for both apps is around 500K. All of my extensions carried over without any problems.

And speaking of Firefox extensions, if you happen to have one called "Numbered Links 0.9," you might want to look into better anti-virus software because it might be a trojan horse. This isn't an extension sneaking a virus into your system via Firefox. It's actually installed into the browser by Downloader-AXM as a delivery vehicle for a virus known as FormSpy or, to the cool kids, Troj/FireSpy-A. As far as I'm aware, this is the first time the extension system of Firefox (or Thunderbird, or Moz Suite) has been used to install malware. The doom squad has been predicting that this could be a problem since day one, and it's always been an inevitability. But this particular horse doesn't look to be much of an issue, and Firefox's extensibility is still nowhere near as vulnerable as, say, ActiveX.

Valve has been busy as well, churning out update after update for Steam games and Steam itself. There have been a total of four updates and four new Steam games released in the past week, plus the availability of the Sin Episodes: Emergence SDK. That last bit is good news for anyone who might like to try actually making an interesting Sin episode. Anyway, among the updates is a major content package for Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45. At the same time, it was announced that RO: Ostfront will be available for free via Steam for five days, beginning August 2nd.

I've thought about getting this game, after tinkering with the original RO mod for Unreal Tournament 2004. A major issue with that mod was the dimwitted bot AI, which makes playing it offline not much of an option. RO: Ostfront is supposed to have the same problem, and that makes it hard for me to put down the money. Making things worse, for some reason the game is $25 via Steam but $30 at retail, at least where I've seen it. I know that with Steam acting as download manager, I can actually incrementally download something the size of Ostfront, even with dial-up. I did manage to download Lost Coast and several demos and massive patches. And you can back up games purchased over Steam onto blank CDs or DVDs. But I just like buying games in boxes. The problem with Ostfront is, I don't want to pay five bucks for that box.

And I'm still having all kinds of problems with Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault. I left this game alone for a while, and now I remember why. It's just a massively unpolished release. Thanks again, EA. I'm still troubleshooting and figuring this shit out, and if I can get it going smoothly, I'll write a post on it. The game was just twenty bucks when I bought it, and so far it's hasn't been worth ten.

Boredom post.

Here's something to read. Enjoy.
by AC - permalink

Just a few quick notes. Thought I'd mention that the first official beta of Firefox 2.0 has been released. I'm not so big on the betas myself, especially the really early ones, cause I'm way too hooked on my extensions, and odds are that none of them will work. Firefox 2, though, has a lot of new features that make several of my extensions obsolete. Anyway, give it a shot if you want.

Here's my new favorite web site of all time. They call it the Deep Sky Frontier, and basically what it is, is a single web page measuring 22 AU to a side. If you don't believe it, click and hold the scroll down button for six or seven decades, then get back to me. It's just all kinds of trippy and more than a little mindbending, and I love it.

And that reminds me, I read the last 150-or-so pages of Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos this morning while getting over a hellish headache and unable to get much else done. I already liked the book, and then Kilgore Trout showed up and I fell completely in love with it. Good as Gold is next up.

Edit: Changed my mind, I'm reading Vonnegut's Deadeye Dick next instead. Thought you should know. Because it's important. Yeah.

Work, sleep, and GTA

In that order.
by AC - permalink

So I haven't been able to put aside much time for the blog lately. Somehow all my conscious free time has been sucked into a black hole called Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I knew it was supposed to be good on the PS2, but nothing, not even GTA Vice City, prepared me for how all-consuming the PC version of San Andreas would be. It just pulls in your entire life and leaves your brain with nothing but spinning maps of Los Santos and Red County and San Fierro, etc. I got my first GTA: SA girlfriend up to 100%, while my real-life girlfriend -- let's pretend for a moment that I have one -- is left wondering why doing drive-by's is such a great third-date activity.

That 30fps problem was caused by the Frame Limiter in-game setting. It sounds like a vsync setting, but it actually caps the game at 30fps. Which is fucking insane. It's 2006, and I have 256MB of vidram, and I absolutely refuse to play any game at 30fps. Uncapping that, and hardware-forcing 4xAA and 16xAF still gives me over 60fps, so suck on that, Rockstar North. I mean, they're Scots and my people by blood, but come on. I want to kick 'em all in the neck for that shit.

Anyway. A developer-release alpha of Firefox 2.0 was released last week. Don't install it unless you're serious about beta testing and know that this bears virtually no resemblance to what 2.0 final will be. Similarly, don't use Internet Explorer 7.0 beta for any reason at all. It's feature-incomplete as well, but also sports some major security vulnerabilities and can break explorer. I tried to use it once, and it broke my ISP's proprietary dialer software. The latest word is that it won't integrate itself into explorer and will function like any other stand-alone browser (like Firefox or Opera). Frankly, I think that's a load of bullshit. Maybe I'm being too cynical, but I'm just going by Microsoft's track record.

I've dropped both Firefox and Opera on the POS box at work and started using Avant Browser. So far it's been flawless. Just to recap, it's an old IBM Pentium III rig with 64MB of RAM running Win98, and as far as I can tell, it's never been reformatted. Installing AB definitely helped extend it's useful life, and I mean that literally. Another couple weeks of forcing that fucking thing to run Firefox, or even IE, and I would have thrown it into the goddamn dumpster as hard as I could. You have no idea how close I've come to that, or how many times.

I don't really have any new DVD's or games on my radar at this point. Thinking about ordering System of a Down's Mezmerize and Hypnotize, but that's it. GTA III is just ten bucks, but I've got more than enough GTA than I can deal with as it is.

ATI, AMD, and the Doom 3 engine.

Finding the balance.
by AC - permalink

I think pretty soon I'll have to write up a detailed post on the performance I'm getting out of the Doom 3 engine on my box, and how I got there. I know it's the kind of thing that would have helped me a few weeks ago. I went ahead and picked up Quake IV Special Edition Tuesday morning, and I'm impressed with how well it's running. At the same detail settings in-game, and with nearly all the same config tweaks, Quake IV at 1152 is running as fast, maybe slightly faster than Doom 3 at 1280. I'll go into all the software and hardware details later.

I've run into two problems, though. Around 15 minutes in, the game started crashing to the desktop as soon as I tried to use the machine gun's secondary fire (zoom). It's still doing it, and I don't know why. It doesn't matter if it's bound to a key or a mouse button. Combing through the forums -- which I fucking hate doing, by the way -- it seems like others are having the same problem but I can't find a fix. Otherwise the game has run beautifully. It's snappy and responsive, though it's weird how it can be so smooth at 1152 and unplayable one step up at 1280.

Anyway, my other issue is with Quake II, which is half the reason I spent $40 for the DVD edition. I can't load savegames. Again, seems like virtually everyone has this problem with Quake II (and both the mission packs) under Windows XP. Apparetly this was just never fixed. The only answer seems to be using a source port. Great.

Gecko-based Mac browser Camino has reached version 1.0. It's a nice app, but I'm not sure who the target user is. Probably people like me who get bored using just Safari and Firefox. The again, I've gone back to using pretty much nothing but Opera on this old box here at work and Firefox at home. In fact, I've been using my old Duron PC exclusively for internet access for a while now; I don't think I've had my new rig online at all since finishing the Counter Strike: Source Steam update a few weeks ago. Partly that's because of laziness -- I have to physically move the line from one room to another. But mostly it's because I don't want to give Steam a chance to see that there might be a new update out there, so it can refuse to let me play CS or Half-Life 2 offline until I've finished some massive download via dial-up. I really hate that about Steam. If I don't want the patch, I shouldn't have to download the goddamn patch.

Hey, I wonder if that Quake II savegame thing will be a problem on my old PC. It's still running WinXP Pro SP2. My new one came with MCE. Bah, probably doesn't matter.

Opera Mini sort of works.

But do I really need the internet on my phone?
by AC - permalink

Just for the hell of it, I downloaded Opera Mini (mini.opera.com from your cell) onto my cheap little Nokia 3120 cell phone tonight. It pre-renders web pages on a remote server, lightening the load for resource-starved phones. It actually seems to work pretty well. I was able to access a couple of pages -- complete with graphics -- that my phone's standard browser couldn't due to RAM limitations. It cut this blog's front page into four slices, for example. Unfortunately, when I decided to jump to my bookmarks, the browser crashed without any explanation. I suppose I'll play around with it a little more. The software itself is just a 60k download, and it cuts up pages into chunks smaller than that, but I think I'm paying like 1 cent per kB for data, and I don't think it's really worth paying a buck or so to read a tiny, tiny web page. Maybe for occasional email access.

Firemonger 1.5 was released tonight. It contains Firefox 1.5 but still only Thunderbird 1.0.7. Worldwide testing of Tbird 1.5 RC2 is scheduled for today, so it seems like they could have waited for Tbird 1.5 final. Anyhow, FM 1.5 also lets you run Firefox from the CD before installing it, and features single-click theme and extension installation.

It's 1am now and I need to get myself some coffee.

Email post

...On the worst PC ever.
by AC - permalink

Imagine an old Celeron-based business PC with 64MB RAM running Win 98 for three straight years without a reformat, or even a disk defrag. If you're picturing random BSOD's and constant VM swapping, you're on the right track. Also, the C key barely works. In any case, I installed Firefox 1.5 last week, and the entire staff here switched over completely without any input from me at all.

By the way, I'm mail-posting because blogger.com is one of the very few sites blocked by this network. The list of things you can't do in a post-by-mail is short, but why hyperlinks have to be auto-created out of complete URLs I don't know. So I probably won't be linking anywhere tonight.

For some reason I thought Gmail had gone public, but I guess not. I generally use Thunderbird, but I'm composing with the webmail client and I just noticed a little box telling me I have a hundred Gmail invites. But doesn't everybody already have an account by now? Anyway, if anybody wants one, post a comment with your email address.

Just tried to switch tabs and got an instant reboot instead. Lovely.

Slashdot.org and CNet mention a guy named Myk Melez who's put a tab UI into Thunderbird nightlies. It's an interesting idea that I'm sure has been kicked around at Mozilla before. If he writes a tabbed, "single-window mode" extension for Tbird 1.5 I'd like to try it, but I'm not into the bleeding edge, latest trunk stuff.

Oh, and a security flaw in Fx 1.5 was made public today. Mozilla.org generally has patches available for current Fx branches within 72 hours, but in the meantime you can protect yourself by disabling the history.dat file. No, I don't know how to do that either.

I'm officially through hearing about how the NBA's Eastern Conference has caught up to the West this season. In Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday's games, the East lost 10 of the 12 inter-conference games, and the Atlantic division is still waiting for a team to break .500. That's quality basketball. Every time you hear a talking hairdo on ESPN or TNT ranting about how far the West has fallen, keep in mind that he's only talking about the former elites and the overrated (LA Lakers, Houston, Sacramento, Seattle). The West is still strong, but it will take some time for everyone to realize that the West's top teams are now - in addition to San Antonio and Dallas - from places like Memphis, Oakland, Phoenix, and LA. No, the other LA.

Update 10:00am: Doing a little formatting at home, but I'm not touching the content. Time for bed.

SeaMonkey has a face.

Brine shrimp are neat.
by AC - permalink

The SeaMonkey logo design contest announced at the end of July has finally ended. The new logo and artwork is now official, and it looks pretty good. Now we just need a solid browser to back it up. The early SeaMonkey alpha I tested was an improvement on the Mozilla Suite it was based on, but still too bulky and too buggy. The most confusing and frustrating aspect of MozSuite for me was the fact that it was extensible, but had no extension UI. It was easy enough to install an extension, but a pain in the ass to uninstall one that no longer works with an updated build of the browser. I hope the SM developers can do something about that.

I installed Firefox 1.5 on an old Celeron-based computer at work a few days ago. Friday night I went in for a few hours and found my boss using it, and repeatedly wondering out loud how it could be so much faster than IE6. I'll let him digest it for a while before showing him how to use Adblock and Tab Mix Plus.

PCWorld.com tagged Mozilla Firefox the Product of the Year in their list of the 100 Best Products of 2005, just ahead of Gmail and Mac OS X Tiger. Thunderbird ranked 28th, behind Sony's PSP (19th) but ahead of Photoshop CS2 (32nd), iTunes (34th), and Half-Life 2 (38th). Opera 8 shows up 88th, which seems a little low to me. It falls behind Trillian at 61st and the Mac Mini (75th), which was pretty much a flop.

And on a final, selfish note, the Memphis Grizzlies, after three straight 20+ point wins, suddenly have the third-best record in the NBA, thanks to the league's best defense (86.2 ppg allowed) and what might be the best backcourt around. Only Detroit and San Antonio, last year's NBA championship finalists, have a better record after the first full month of the season. And nobody's talking about Memphis. Anywhere. This happened two years ago, when the Griz snuck up on teams all year and walked away with fifty wins and a playoff berth. Well, they aren't paying attention this season, either, and this team is better than the 2004 squad. If one or two execution/coaching issues I've noticed get cleared up, and barring significant injuries, Memphis could, potentially, have one of the league's elite teams this year. We'll see.

Firefox 1.5 is officially official.

Even better, they've finally killed UMO.
by AC - permalink

So Firefox 1.5 has been sealed up and finalized. As expected, 1.5 RC3 is 1.5 final. If you've been using a 1.5 beta, you'll get a small update patch soon. If you're still running Fx 1.0.7, you can get the new version at the new Mozilla.com via the redesigned Mozilla.org. AMO has also been totally overhauled, and is featuring the new official del.icio.us extension. It's convenient, but nowhere near as cool as the new ESPN BottomLine extension. Essentially, it's a Flash-based interactive, customizable version of the ticker on ESPNews that sits above Firefox's status bar. Just the best extension since the return of delicious delicacies.

There's more Mozilla and OSS stuff to talk about, but I just started the night shift today tonight last night, and I feel a lot like the guy with the Electro album stuck in his face in Shaun of the Dead right now. I'm gonna go have a beer and crash, and hopefully wake up in time to see the Griz beat the hell out of Toronto before heading back to work again.

Firefox earns some bragging rights.

Also, I just spilled some coffee on my desk.
by AC - permalink

A third release candidate for Firefox 1.5 appeared this morning. RC2 was so stable that there shouldn't be much of anything in RC3 testing to keep it from becoming the final build. As a lot of Opera people like to point out, Firefox is still a 4.9MB download, a third larger than Opera 8.5's 3.6MB. But 1.5 has had software auto-updating since some of the earliest branch nightlies, and the RC2 to RC3 update was a massive 218k. So you can now update Firefox roughly sixteen times faster than you can update Opera.

Also this morning OneStat reports that Firefox's usage share is now at 11.5% globally and 14.1% in the U.S. Netscape Browser is now at 0.26% worldwide, which honestly is just way too high. Opera is still under one percent after a big jump in downloads after 8.5 was released as freeware. I'm not sure why. There's no way average users have all tried Firefox with Adblock - or IE shells Avant Browser or Maxthon, which both have native adblocking - and couldn't go back to the new awful, flashing world the web has turned into. Then again, just about every non-IE user is a power user and knows all about adblocking.

Speaking of Maxthon, I tried it out for a couple of weeks and ultimately went back to Avant Browser. It's a little easier on the system resources than Avant, which is nice if you're tight on RAM. But the UI is bland and less thoughtfully laid-out, and the tab interface is less powerful and much buggier than Avant's. I was actually using Opera and K-Meleon both more than Maxthon, which is a quick ticket to uninstallation.

I heart OSS.

OSS means Open-Source Software. Learning is fun!
by AC - permalink

Lots of OSS news to get to this morning. First, after something like fifty-seven years of beta testing, OpenOffice 2.0 was released, uh, four days ago. Not sure how I missed that exactly. I still haven't even tried it though, because it's a 75MB installer for Windows, and my dial-up ISP won't let me finish a download like that without an executive order signed and sealed by President Nixon. And he's been dead for years.

Slashdot reports that a new OSS operating system called MINIX 3 is out. It uses an insanely tiny kernel, divides the user-mode into modules, and is just generally awesome:

...each device driver runs as a separate user-mode process so a bug in a driver (by far the biggest source of bugs in any operating system), cannot bring down the entire OS. In fact, most of the time when a driver crashes it is automatically replaced without requiring any user intervention, without requiring rebooting, and without affecting running programs.

MINIX 3 is available for download as a compressed CD image, and can be run directly from the CD-ROM. If you want to install it, you need a partition no larger than a Gigabyte. It's only 10 to 13MB, so give it a shot.

musikCube has jumped past the anticipated 0.93 version to a release candidate for 1.0. If you still haven't tried it, musikCube is an OSS mp3 player/collator with a simple, powerful interface, fantastic playback quality, plug-in support, and an infinitely customizable playlist generator. Yes, it's yet another mp3 player, but in only in the way that the sun is yet another star in the sky.

Finally, any minute now we should see the code freeze for Firefox 1.5 RC1. My last few holdout extensions auto-updated themselves yesterday and now work in Fx 1.5 beta 2, which is a good sign in itself. I think the really beautiful thing about 1.5 is that you can't immediately tell that it's any different from 1.0.7, but as you come across the changes, they're universally good. It works from a technical and end-user standpoint, something it seems like you never see in non-OSS software updates.

Lots of Firefox, with a little Netscape and Opera.

Just like in real life.
by AC - permalink

Spread Firefox is back online, just in time to pick up a nice little award for best marketing campaign from the UK Linux and Open Source Awards 2005. Gervase Markham even has a picture of it. The entire SFx site was taken down and rewritten from scratch following another hack. Oh, those crazy hackers and their crazy schemes.

Firefox hit the 100 million download mark just after SFx went back up, prompting an immediate forum blitz from the "it's popular so it sucks" crowd, who seem to think Mozilla is claiming a hundred million unique users for Firefox, which they aren't, and claiming that the numbers are misleading because they have personally downloaded Firefox seventeen times, which they haven't. You gotta love the fanboys. God only knows what they're actually fans of, but they're always crystal clear on what they're not fans of.

Netscape Browser has been updated to 8.0.4, incorporating the Firefox 1.0.7 security and stability fixes. For the record, Fx 1.0.7 was released a month ago. Way to stay on top of things, guys.

And a new Opera beta has surfaced at BetaNews. It seems to consist entirely of UI tweaks, so I don't know why the version number is being bumped from 8.5 to 9, but there it is. Unlike Netscape, which took a great browser in Firefox and turned it into a horrible mess, Opera just keeps getting better, and downloads have increased by a factor of four since the transition from adware to freeware. Good times.

I just realized that Firefox can do multiple-undo's. That's awesome.

Portable Mozilla and Fiona's third LP.

Extraordinary Machine was worth the wait.
by AC - permalink

Asa brings to our attention tonight a 2GB Memorex USB stick that comes preloaded with Thunderbird. It's meant to be a travel companion and includes Tbird as an easy way to access third-party email on the road. Remember, the more people exposed to Thunderbird, the more people will begin to realize that Outlook is a load of shit.

For whatever reason, Slashdot ran a post/link for the Firemonger Project today. This isn't a bad thing, of course. Firemonger is a sort of unofficial guerilla marketing campaign for Firefox and Thunderbird, and the more exposure it gets, the better. Firemonger is essentially a burnable CD image consisting of Firefox 1.0.7, Thunderbird 1.0.7, and a long list of plug-ins, extensions, and themes, along with documentation to help new users make the switch from IE and Outlook.

I've been preoccupied with Fiona Apple's new album Extraordinary Machine lately, and haven't thought about much else lately besides, of course, Ghost Recon, which I'm also obsessed with. I read Josh Modell's review of Machine at the AV Club, and within five minutes my copy was on order from Amazon along with a copy of Fiona's first album, Tidal, a CD I used to have two of, but somehow over the years I ended up with none of. Machine is clearly Fiona's and Fiona's alone, meaning there's just no way to categorize it, except to place it alongside Tidal and When the Pawn... My copy came as a dual-disc. The DVD side has live performances of a few songs from the new record and two from When the Pawn..., plus the video for Not About Love, which is as funny as it is awesome. It also has the DVD-audio version of the album, and it sounds so ridiculously good that there's just no reason whatsoever to flip the disc over to the CD side.

AdBlock for Firefox is back.

Or at least, I've found a build that works.
by AC - permalink

Finally stumbled across an old build of Adblock (0.5.2 build 050) that seems to work in Firefox 1.5 beta 1. You can find the download in this old post (July 29th). The AdBlock at UMO won't install properly in 1.5b1, and AdBlock Plus hasn't been updated since the first of August, so I guess this is what we'll be using for now. Unless, of course, you're using Firefox 1.0.7 and not testing the new branch. In that case, um, nevermind.

This brings my working extension list in 1.5b1 back up to eleven, with four not yet updated (I've added several since my extension round-up a few weeks ago). I'm not sure what the second 1.5 beta's numerical designation will be, and whether all these extensions will have to up their max version tags again (1.5b1 is designated "1.4"). I wouldn't think so. But they will have to be updated for the final 1.5 release. Hopefully, though, the new versions will all be added to UMO, so that Firefox's built-in update tool, which will be significantly more robust than that in the current branch, will automatically catch and update them all.

I've been using this new Windowblinds theme called Iyin Vista obsessively since it was posted last week. It's built on the theme that, so far, most accurately emulates Windows Vista, only the Iyin version hs figured out how to cheat the transparent window borders. It's not a perfect effect, and it's not the most polished theme, but I love how it looks.

SeaMonkey has landed (sort of).

Not the best browser, but clearly it has the best name.
by AC - permalink

The first ever SeaMonkey alpha was released, um, two days ago. Guess I missed it. The changelog shows some nice feature additions and a ton of bug fixes over the Mozilla Suite it's based on. Once a beta is released, I'll have to give it a try. I'm using MozSuite less and less, so I might as well replace it with SeaMonkey (I think SM overwrites an existing Suite installation in the same way Firefox 1.5 beta replaces Fx 1.0.x).

And speaking of Firefox, a guy named Scott Berkun has posted his reasons for switching from IE to Firefox. This is notable because he was one of the head UI guys for IE1 through IE5. His reasons range from Fx's smooth and unobtrusive handling of security to "IE is a ghetto." He also does a little nitpicking of the Fx UI: I agree that the "Go" menu should either be nested or done away with entirely, but I don't know what he's talking about here:

With multiple tabs (I find) the back/forward behavior becomes complex and hard to predict. Strict UI logic would put the tab UI above the toolbars, not below, but that creates other problems.

Yes, like confusing the hell out of the average user. Opera does just what he's describing in his post, and it's my least favorite aspect of the browser. That, and the way it mysteriously axes nearly all of Blogger's Create Post features. I don't know what the hell that's about.

Anyway, I'm reading Berkun's post, and see that he was still working on IE through the release of IE5, and I'm thinking, "Well, he must have left pretty recently, right? I mean, IE is only on ver. 6 now." Wrong. He left Microsoft in 1999. I just love the numbers here. Internet Explorer, likely the most widely-used internet app on planet Earth, has seen only one major update in six years (no, I'm not counting IE5.5; it was a patch, at best). Wow.

Yahoo trumps Google. Wait, what?

And MS acknowledges Opera. What the hell is happening today?
by AC - permalink

If you haven't heard yet, Yahoo! has begun an invite-only beta test for a completely revamped Yahoo! Mail service. From the early reviews, it seems to be the first web-based email client that actually gives you as much control as a desktop client. As you can see in this monstrous pile of screenshots courtesy of Zilla Smash! (no more !'s in this post), the new Yahoo Mail gives you a standard 3-pane UI, like Outlook Express or, more accurately, Thunderbird.

And it makes Gmail look charmingly antiquated. Not all new features have been integrated into the beta, so final judgement is withheld. It would be nice if Yahoo finally started offering free POP3 access. There are ways around it, of course, but they should be unnecessary.

But here's the really interesting bit (to me, anyways): the new service works in all major browsers within Windows and, I believe, Linux. But according to Macworld, it's only supported on the Mac in Firefox. This may be a peculiarity of the beta, or more likely an inaccurate report, because Safari is actually more standards-compliant than Firefox, and if it works in Firefox, it should also, in theory, work in Camino.

Google, meanwhile, has launched a beta Blog Search tool. Not surprisingly, there are already search forms all over Blogger.com. I noticed a few days ago that we're now at least partially indexed by Google, and we show up in Blog Search as well. However, posts older that this past June have not been indexed. I'll stick with the Yahoo site search form for now.

Going back for a moment to wider acceptance of alternative browsers, BetaNews, among others, reported yesterday that Microsoft has finally opened up its download center (MSDN) to Firefox and Opera. Just those two for now, but it's a start. Of course, Windows Update is still off limits unless you're willing to open up Internet Explorer. God help you.

And finally, if you're hesitant to install Firefox 1.5 beta 1 for fear of it being incompatible with your extensions, you can follow Bugzilla Bug 307381. In the comments, active extension authors are reporting when their respective extensions have been updated to comply with the new branch. All it generally involves is changing the maxversion tag to 1.4 (I know, it's confusing), and crossing one's fingers that something in the new Fx code doesn't break it. In any case, it's a safe bet that these guys will also make sure their stuff will then work with the final build of 1.5.

I'm not testing that.

Know what you're getting yourself into.
by AC - permalink

As much as I like to help out the Mozilla Foundation by beta-testing their new releases, I've just had too many problems with Deer Park to install Firefox 1.5 beta 1. More than 5,000 bugs have already been squashed in this branch, and it looks like there are still some impressive ones hanging around. Thunderbird 1.5 beta 1 hasn't had as many problems, and I'll probably test the second beta.

I worry sometimes about the distribution of pre-final Firefox builds. I noticed that the candidate builds for 1.5 beta 1 were posted at the BetaNews FileForum. Unless you're actively involved in bug-squashing for Mozilla, keep in mind that you should steer clear of anything called a release candidate, a pre-beta, or an alpha. Mozilla final releases are as thoroughly vetted and tested as any software anywhere, and you should stick with those unless you're aware of the risks inherent to beta-testing.

Anyway. I finally got around to picking up a copy of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon this weekend. I've never actually owned my own copy, and I've been meaning to finally get one since seeing them on perform for Live 8 from London. They were as good as they've ever been, which is astonishing. I also grabbed a two-disc compilation of Pearl Jam b-sides called Lost Dogs. All I really wanted was "Last Kiss" and "Hard to Imagine," and now I've got those plus 28 other slightly obscure, somewhat esoteric songs. "Bee Girl" is just plain weird. And "Sweet Lew" is about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. If you're wondering why Pearl Jam recorded a song about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, so am I. Can't imagine why it never made it onto an album.

Microsoft doesn't like you.

But Blake does. And so does The Onion.
by AC - permalink

In an interview with Tom's Hardware posted yesterday, Firefox co-creator Blake Ross was asked what he thinks is the biggest difference between Firefox and Internet Explorer:

Microsoft is here to win. That's great if you're a shareholder, but how many users appreciated that attitude when spyware and pop-ups filled their screens four years ago, and Microsoft, having crushed Netscape, abandoned the market? The company is back now that competition has arisen, but where will it be in four more years?

The Mozilla Foundation isn't fighting a war on competition; it's fighting a war on complexity. Our users are our shareholders, and as long as the Internet is frustrating, we'll be here.

Ross also mentioned something interesting that I hadn't heard before. Seems the growing market share of all the standards-compliant web browsers (i.e. everything but IE) is starting to put a dent in the Explorer-only internet and intranet applications market:

We used to have a full evangelism team that worked with IE-only companies to support Web standards. Fortunately, we've reached the tipping point in terms of market share where companies are now forced to open up or risk losing 10% of their clientele. So while we still make evangelism efforts, these kinds of problems are beginning to disappear naturally.

The rest of the short interview isn't all that interesting, but may be worth a look.

Turning from Tom's Hardware to My Hardware, I installed a new hard drive in my PC this weekend. (Do not question my segueing abilities!) The 10GB Quantum HD in my mom's old Compaq started making nasty clicking noises, which pretty much means it's dead and gone forever. So I formatted the 30GB Western Digital I use as a backup from NTFS to FAT32 and stuck it in her PC, and installed Win98 SE on it. Then I replaced it in my box with a shiny, new (but cheap) Maxtor 100GB, 7800 RPM drive. I still only have a total of 140GB of storage here, but it's still more than I need. I don't even have a DVD burner or broadband, and it took me six months to effectively fill up the 70GB I had before.

Something else I've been meaning to post for a while now: The Onion has completely opened up its news archives. This is probably the biggest source of comedy on the damned web now, and I've been trolling through it for a few days. This goes along with a redesign of the front page and a total overhaul of The A.V. Club. Good times.

Oh, and I added Blogger's image/word verification feature to the comments. Hopefully this will stop the comment spambots that started to pop up here this week.