Alt Browser Updates and Fx Extensions

For those of us who use IE shells from time to time, Maxthon has been updated to 1.3.3, with a few feature and security updates. I haven't tried a Maxthon build since ver. 1.1.120, when I decided that Avant Browser was the best IE shell browser. I might try this new release, but I'm comfortable with Avant now, in terms of its UI (which is closer to K-Meleon than IE), and Avant has clearer security controls (easy toggling of ActivX, Java, etc.). Of course, Avant is currently on its seventeenth build of version 10.1. Just call it 10.2, already.

Also, Mozilla Suite 1.7.11 has been released. It fixes a couple of regressions (extensions that stopped working) introduced by 1.7.10. I have just three extensions installed in Moz 1.7.10, and they all work, so the hell with it.

And speaking of extensions, I plugged Wizz RSS News Reader and SessionSaver into Firefox 1.0.6 this weekend, and I highly recommend both. Wizz RSS is a simple sidebar-based feed aggregator that nicely supplements Fx's native LiveBookmarks. It isn't all that intuitive, but there's a good amount of documentation online, with links built into the extension's UI. SessionSaver does just what you'd expect it to do, and does it pretty well. Give it a try.

In other news, things have kind of sucked lately. There's this huge, gnarly old tree standing in the far northwest corner of the back yard, it must be over a hundred years old, and last night just before 1:00 AM an enormous limb, bigger than most trees around here, fell off it with a huge shuddering crash. It's bisected the yard, reaching all the way to the gate at the southeast corner, and when it fell it nearly crushed Maggie, our rottweiler. Scared the bejeezus out of her. Fortunately, a couple of branches impaled the roof of the garage and lodged there, and a few shingles were sheared off the corner, so the homeowners' insurance will cover the removal of the whole mess, as well as repairs to the garage. But it's still a pain in the ass.

Fx, Sm, YQ, Op, and Saturn

The first non-beta release of the Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox was released this week. I'm not real sure who would need the features this thing has, but it's nice to see more third-party add-ons for Firefox anyway, especially from established names like Yahoo. Speaking of which, I forgot to mention the Y!Q Beta search plug-in for Fx I came across months ago. It's actually reasonably useful, though I still use the Wikipedia search plug-in a lot more.

The SeaMonkey Council (which has the best name for anything ever) is looking for better artwork for its namesake browser suite. Apparently the current logo sucks. I haven't tried a SeaMonkey nightly yet, because I know I'd have to uninstall Mozilla 1.7.10 first, and I don't wanna. Incidentally, installing a Deer Park alpha will screw with your current Fx install.

Opera 8.02 is out. I haven't lifted my self-imposed moratorium on installing new versions of Opera because of two features that are conspicuously absent from the changelog: "Overhauled ungodly UI" and "Removed $40 price tag." I actually felt kind of bad about cheap shots I've taken at Opera in the past, until I read this blog. It's not a bad blog either, probably much better than mine, but I wish they could promote Opera in a better way than pointing out every little problem the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit, has ever had.

Finally, if you've always wanted to know what the planet Saturn sounds like, and who hasn't really, here's your chance. Turns out Saturn sounds like the original score from a bad Vincent Price movie, run through a few dozen effects boxes and remixed by Portishead. Weird would be the adjective I'd go with.

Mo(dem)zilla

Finally got myself a nice shiny new name-brand modem to replace that old USRobotics POS I've been dealing with since I got this PC. Took three minutes to install and a couple more to update the default Windows drivers. Little things make me happy. Unlike the christening I have to go to tomorrow for my cousin's baby. The way I see it, if you didn't actually witness the birth, you shouldn't have to drive to another state to watch the kid get named and dropped into a dunk tank or whatever the hell Catholics do to their babies.

I'm writing this update in Mozilla 1.7.10, which was released yesterday. It's a security update to keep the suite in line with the 1.0.6 releases of Firefox and Thunderbird. Like last time, I only downloaded the browser component of the Mozilla Suite. It may be my imagination, but it seems faster and somehow more solid than the last few releases I tried. I'll replace it once the first relatively stable SeaMonkey it out. I like having as many browsers as possible, because there's always something I find works best in one browser or another (except for Opera, which I've sworn off forever because it's so bad at absolutely everything).

There's been a realignment of the Firefox official release numbering scheme. Firefox 1.1 has been pushed back a bit and renamed Firefox 1.5 to better reflect the magnitude of the update. The next major milestone after than will still be Fx 2.0.

More Mozilla Stuff and Potter 6

Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0.6 are out. These are quick-fix releases that correct some API changes in the 1.0.5 code that ended up breaking some extensions.

For the Mac people, Camino Browser 0.9 alpha 2 has been released. I've thought about buying a new Mac, maybe a Mini or iMac, just to be able to use Camino, but then I remember: I don't have a thousand dollars to blow. Oh well.

Asa pointed out a project at mozdev called Searchsidebar. It's a Firefox extension that creates a more advanced Mozilla Suite-style search in, obviously, the sidebar. I haven't tried it yet myself. Probably should have before writing about it. What if it's totally useless and breaks Firefox? Too late now.

Somebody at ZDNet UK really, really likes Firefox. Go read some Mozilla-flavored feature articles: Firefox: The alternative history, Mozilla: From obscurity to opportunity, Firefox: Doing it for love, and Behind the scenes at Mozilla HQ. Oh, and make sure Adblock is active. The whole site is just crawling with banners and flash ads.

I got hold of the new Harry Potter book just after it was released, and finished it within a day and a half (some minor spoilers are coming up here). I have to say that it depressed the hell out of me. The first third of the book is much funnier and lighter than book 5, Order of the Phoenix, but the plot is much less complex than any of the previous books, including the first one. We all knew someone was going to die in this one, and we already lost a major character in Phoenix, but this time it was just much more brutal. I can't imagine how little kids are going to deal with this. The last chapter in particular is one of the most beautiful pieces of fiction I've ever read, period. But, like I said, it's really rough on the long-time Potter fans, particularly the last few paragraphs. It almost makes me dread the next (and presumably last) book, but of course I'll have to read it.

T-Bird Times Two

Two new Thunderbird builds were released today. Thunderbird 1.0.5 is the latest official build. If you're wondering why T-Bird jumped directly from version 1.0.1 to 1.0.5, mozillaZine has the answer. There are no new GUI updates, but lots and lots of security fixes.

Also, release candidates for the second Thunderbird 1.1 alpha are now available to testers. If you want to test it, feel free. But I wouldn't recommend it unless you really know what you're doing. I didn't test the first alpha, so obviously I'm passing on an RC for the second.

I've been playing around with MenuX, a Firefox extension that gives you a bunch of new toolbar buttons with functions ranging from totally pointless (duplicate window controls, a second downloads button) to extremely useful (view source in tab, extension/theme manager buttons). I particularly like toggling off extraneous toolbars, including the menubar. This brings my total extension count to nine, ten if you count Delicious Delicacies.

The Probe dumped oil all over the driveway this afternoon. A mechanic friend of a neighbor discovered that the fuel pressure sensor was slowly disintegrating and letting out oil under high pressure, which explains why the pressure gauge on the dash never showed a problem even though it's likely been leaking for days. So I went and got a new sensor and new synth oil and a filter and it's good as new. Until the next part wears out. The Probe is now seven-and-a-half years old, about the time when modern cars just start to wear out.

Oh, and I've picked a new blog template again, obviously. I think this is the seventh or eighth one I've gone through in eleven months. I just get bored quickly.

MozMania

Lots to cover tonight. I'll start with the release of Firefox 1.0.5. Here are the release notes and the updated MoFo security advisories page. Fx 1.0.5 fixes fully a dozen vulnerabilities and improves stability. Once again, if you don't want to fuck up your extensions, you should uninstall Fx 1.0.4 via Add/Remove Programs, then run the installer immediately (Windows XP/98). Always works for me.

Less important, but still noteworthy, is the release of the second Deer Park Alpha. The official release notes show some interesting GUI changes over Firefox 1.0+, like dragable tabs and much faster cached Back/Forward functionality (both Opera features from a while back). Popup blocking is better now, as well. And of course Deer Park sports that much improved prefwindow. If you want to test it, take a long look at the known issues first, because this is pre-beta, after all, and it still isn't very stable. I managed to create some impressive crashes in no time at all.

One last bit of Mozilla news: Yahoo has added Thunderbird support to its Desktop Search beta (via mozillaZine). Does anyone out there use this? Or Google Desktop Search? I'm wondering if I'd have any use for an indexed search client. WinXP's native indexing service (disabled by default, naturally), is pretty awful, at least in terms of the UI. It doesn't seem to work particularly well, either.

Anyway. I replaced all my desktop icons with ObjectDock the other day. Not for any particular reason, I just think it looks nice. I don't have a ton of 2D memory, though, so windows get draggy when moved over the dock's operational area. But whatever. I haven't looked into any spiffy custom docklets or icons yet, other than a nifty gamepad icon I'm using as a shortcut to Dega, a Master System emulator I'm currently enamoured with. I'm finally getting to try all the crappy games I really wanted when I was eleven years old. Rastan and Psycho Fox and Zillion! Hooray!

Post Slacker

So obviously I've gotten a little lackadaisical with the updates lately. The only reason I can think of is that I've been a little preoccupied with how horribly out of shape I seem to have gotten. I've been putting in a good 30 to 60 minutes a day shooting around the basketball goal I screwed into the front of the garage last month, and after a week or so I pulled just about every muscle I have. I kept at it and finally seem to have beaten my body back into fighting form. And by "fighting form" I mean I've stopped walking with a severe limp and I can actually lift my right arm without wincing now.

TechSpot posted a Firefox Tweak Guide last week. There's little to nothing here that can't be found in the official Firefox Online Help guide, but I suppose it's the thought that counts.

The SeaMonkey project is finally official. So for the four or five people out there who were devastated when the Mozilla Application Suite was retired, put down those razor blades, you have a new reason to live. I've always rather liked the Mozilla Suite, as it valiantly attempted to carry on the spirit of Netscape Communicator, but Firefox and Thunderbird have made it essentially obsolete. Still, once an "official" build or two of SeaMonkey have been released, I'll take a look at it. It has to be better than the last couple Opera releases.

Thunderbird Gets Even Better

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned an app called FreePOPs that allows email clients like Thunderbird to access web-based email accounts. Well, forget about that. Yesterday I decided to take a look at Blogzilla, "a weblog about Mozilla," for the first time in several months to see if a new post had finally appeared (the last update was in early December). Sure enough, Jonathan had written back on April 10th about a Thunderbird extension imaginatively called Web-Mail that does the same thing as FreePOPs, only much faster and completely transparently. Plug in the Web-Mail extension along with an auxiliary extension for your web-based service (currently limited to Hotmail, Yahoo, Lycos, and Mail.com), and you can retrieve mail as easily as you can from any other POP3 service.

Now that I'm using Thunderbird for my Yahoo Mail accounts as well as my Gmail account, I've decided to remove my RSS feeds and go back to using Firefox's LiveBookmarks. So for quick browsing (without waiting for all the feeds to load), I'm reverting to K-Meleon 0.9 (Gecko-based) and Avant Browser 10.1 beta (IE-based).

By the way, I've finally started using a few Thunderbird extensions, aside from Web-Mail. The Delete Junk Context Menu is absolutely indespensible for me (faster and easier than having Thunderbird automatically move spam to the junk folder, then deleting them from there), and the Contacts Sidebar is a basic feature of Outlook Express that, for whatever reason, Thunderbird doesn't have.

Oh, one more thing. I noticed a few days ago that it's 2005, so I finally got an optical mouse. To avoid a potentially fatal shock to my nervous system, I did not buy the Logitech dual-laser gaming mouse glaring seductively at me from the top shelf. Instead, I went with a basic, but comfortable, IBM optical wheel-mouse. So now I'm faced with a new problem: what to do with my vast collection of ball-mice and mousepads.

Assorted Geekish Mutterings

Really tired right now. Stayed up too late yesterday finishing off The Sentinel by Arthur C. Clark. Earlier this month I read 2010: Odyssey Two and 2061: Odyssey Three. I'll probably go to a library this weekend looking for 3001.

Mac People have something to be excited about as Camino v0.9 alpha 1 was released tonight. You can read the absurdly long release notes here if you've got twenty or thirty minutes. And speaking of MoFo alphas, test builds of Firefox 1.0.5 are available for anyone brave enough to try it, according to the second post at the new Mozilla Quality Blog.

Over the past few days I've been playing around with DivX 6, Nero Recode 2, and ratDVD, looking for a high-quality and fast way to decode some of my movies to save HD space. DivX was just monstrously slow and produced a noticeably desaturated picture. Plus, in my experience anyway, it produced just a 35 to 40% compression rate. No thanks. ratDVD crashed almost right away the only time I've used it so far, and I haven't done much with Decode 2 yet. I'll let you know if anything blows me away.

My old bargain-basement keyboard that I found in front of an abandoned house stopped working last week, finally giving me the chance to go all-out on a new one. So I dropped nearly ten big-boys on a generic 112-keyer. That's right, you heard me. It's got "power," "sleep," and "wake" keys that don't do anything, and it didn't come with any software. It's only the most rad keyboard ever.

I have to go watch Aqua Teen Hunger Force now.

Webmail Without the Web

A nice little app called FreePOPs was listed on BetaNews yesterday. It's a freeware program that acts as a proxy for third-party email clients to access webmail services. I've managed to keep my Gmail account completely spam-free, but I have two Yahoo! Mail accounts that pull in a couple dozen spam messages a day. Thunderbird's junk filters are much better at filtering spam than Yahoo's, and now with FreePOPs I can bypass that horrible UI unless I want to send a message from a Yahoo address. Unfortunately, it also halves my connection speeds when active, so I don't recommend running it unless you only want to grab all your messages in one go.

A site called XPThemes.com has something I've been looking for for a while now: a frequently updated archive of WindowBlinds themes. One of my favorite WB themers from the old days, Essorant, has a ridiculously huge theme archive at XPThemes here.

And finally, an editorial by Joshua Micah Marshall called "Four More Years?" was published in last week's Memphis Flyer. I recommend you read it.

Internet Explorer Still Sucks

Microsoft triggered a massive blitz of idiotic, unintelligible forum posts this week by releasing an MSN toolbar that brings tabbed browsing to IE6+. Apparently the plan was to upgrade the worst web browser currently in existence by adding a simple UI feature invented roughly sixty years ago. Unfortunately, said toolbar is probably the worst browser patch ever created. Thanks to Asa for helping us keep the web right-side up.

Looks like a Simpsons movie is actually going to happen (via Slashdot). If I wasn't so sure that creative control of this film will be entirely in the hands of a labyrinthine hierarchy of Fox studio suits, I'd think this was long-overdue good news. But we all know that Fox can't let a potential money-maker like this one get out the door without shunting it through a few focus groups to make sure it properly plugs their prime-time lineup and shamelessly panders to the designated demographic. Again, I hope I'm proved wrong, because I love The Simpsons. But I won't be.

Our favorite mp3 player/playlist manager has been updated again. musikCube 0.92.5 can be downloaded here. All the bug fixes and UI changes are in the changelog

Thunderbird 1.1 and Virtual Firefox

A developers' pre-build of Thunderbird 1.1 has been released, and again, you shouldn't use it. I'm too possessive of my mail to try this one out, but the good news is that an improved UI is on the way, along with features like the ability to strip messages of attachments before opening them, in-line spell-checking, and Firefox's new pref window.

The Rumbling Edge has begun posting detailed changelogs for Thunderbird, starting with this one for 1.1 Alpha 1. A quick glance shows this will be the most significant Thunderbird update by far.

In Firefox news, this Slashdot article says that Second Life will be getting Firefox support soon. I'm not sure whether it will be Firefox-branded in-world web browsing or whether the Gecko rendering engine will actually be integrated with the game, but it's significant either way. I've never tried it myself, but I know that Second Life has a nice little subculture going. I suppose this is analogous to Pizza Hut's Everquest II deal, but less greasy and weird.

Doom Still Kicks Ass

I was wandering around FilePlanet the other day when I stumbled upon Doomsday, a frontend for the jDoom Win32 port of Doom. This is the port I've been looking for. Unlike ZDoom and numerous others, the entire engine is re-rendered in full 3D in OpenGL, so mouselooking on the y-axis is no more warped than looking around on the x-plane. It also incorporates all manner of real-time lighting effects and can enhance any Doom .wad with 3D model packs. And the packaged launcher, Kickstart, is at least as good as the old Doom95. Absolutely the only way to play Ultimate Doom, Doom II, and Final Doom on a Win32 platform.

The entire classic Doom package can be had for ten bucks at any Walmart, and any of you kids who don't know what all the hoohah is about should pick it up. With a nice port like jDoom, the entire series is still a huge amount of fun and stands up to any shooter released in the last ten years.

Deer Park Alpha 1 was released tonight. This is the first developer preview for Firefox 1.1, and I don't recommend it for anyone but Firefox hackers and people who don't mind using a browser that doesn't actually work most of the time.

Deer Park and Netscape

Just a word of warning: the latest nightly builds of Deer Park (Firefox 1.1 alpha build candidates) are extremely unstable. Unless you're a developer, give 'em a pass until a release candidate appears.

Netscape Browser 8 is rubbish. Don't bother with it. I know it's getting decent reviews, but only in comparison tests with Internet Explorer, Opera 8, etc. Netscape 8 is a big, bloated, unwieldy mess of a user interface slapped on top of Firefox 1.0.3. It's sort of like Mozilla Suite, only with a lot less class and a lot more suck. It's much more stable than the Netscape Browser release candidate and follow-up beta, but it seems all those UI issues were actually "features." Thanks anyway, AOL.

I finally got around to renting The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Sideways last week. I really liked Aquatic, it's my favortite Wes Anderson film so far. Just the right amount of originality and accesibility (it's damned hard to get into The Royal Tenenbaums, however brilliant it might be). As for Sideways, I think I appreciated it more than I actually enjoyed watching it. Paul Giamatti is a genious and we all know it, but the movie just wasn't two tons of fun. On the other hand, the rest of the DVD was terrific. The ridiculously well-hidden easter eggs and the Giamatti/Thomas Haden Church commentary are hilarious, and suggest that making the movie was a lot more fun than sitting through it.

The Last Opera Headache

This morning I read about a third-party freeware app designed to block ad banners and pop-ups in Opera called OperaAdFilter. The inability to selectively blacklist ad banners is the No. 2 reason that I don't use Opera for daily web browsing (right behind No. 1, "awful user interface"), so I decided to give it a try.

The OperaAdFilter (or OAF) site says it works with all current versions of Opera including the version 8 betas. So I assumed it would work with the final version of Opera 8. And I was wrong. The OAF installation wizard tells you that you will need to find your Opera 7.5 opera.ini file. A browse window then appears, titled, "Locate your Opera 6 opera.ini." And the best part is that Opera 8 contains nothing even remotely resembling a file called opera.ini. I picked what looked like it could possibly be something like what OAF was asking me for, and finished the install. And then Opera refused to even attempt to resolve any URL whatsoever.

Obviously, it was the botched OAF install that fucked Opera 8 up, but I uninstalled them both anyway. Firefox has an extension called AdBlock that works flawlessly every time. I'm done with Opera. I tried, and tried, and tried, but version 8 is the last build any hard drive of mine will ever see.

News for Nerds

First, we have an InformationWeek article about whether Thunderbird is ready for prime-time. The short answer is "yes." It's super neat-o and you don't really need an integrated calander anyway.

Also, Firefox 1.0.4 has gone public. It's a quick fix for the JavaScript security hole that was discovered all of four days ago. If you're the paranoid type, download it. Otherwise, wait for the 1.1 betas like the rest of us.

Finally, Saturn's "wavemaker" moon has been found. Cassini snapped a nice candid of it on the 2nd. Somewhere, Asa Dotzler is doing a backflip.

musikCube Update and the End of The Simpsons

musikCube 0.92.3 was released tonight. It's another incremental update, bug fixes mostly. Here's the changelog, but you really should just go download it.

Tonight's episode of The Simpsons was just horrible. They long ago stopped making excuses for the gratuitous celebrity cameos, and in certain cases, like the trip-to-England episode featuring spot-work by Sir Ian McKellan, J.K. Rowling, and even Tony Blair, it worked. But tonight's show was a 22-minute commercial for Fox's American Idol, strategically aired at the low-point of the show's entire run. It even had what seemed like a six-and-a-half-hour solo by Fantasia Burrino. What the hell? Personally, I think the entire production team just gave up after Fox canceled Futurama, then gave two shows to arch-nemesis Seth McFarlane. Sure, they're still under contract, but that doesn't mean they have to give a shit anymore.

There's an article at Ars Technica this week called A History of the GUI. I'll just say this about it: Forget everything you think you know about Douglas Englebart, man, because you don't know jack shit.

America Online Thinks You're Stupid

A new "minor" update to AIM 5.9 comes bundled with AOL's anti-spyware app, SpyZapper, and a full install of a new AOL browser. No, it isn't the Firefox-based AOL Browser, it's a new product based on Internet Explorer, brilliantly named AOL Explorer. From this BetaNews article:

AOL Explorer does not automatically replace the user's default browser, but can be invoked independently through the Start Menu and adopted as the primary Web browsing application. Users are not given a choice to opt out of an installation while installing AIM...

AOL's SpyZapper anti-spyware security software is also turned on by default in the beta release. After AIM is invoked, two instances of AOLHostService.exe will run to load AOL Explorer and some other peripherals, increasing AIM's footprint on system resources.

This is absolutely the most cynical, insulting marketing tactic since xXx: State of the Union was greenlighted (thanks, Sony!). Apparently adding a function like "tear-off tags" is enough to justify forcing yet another AOL-branded edition of IE into unsuspecting users' systems (how many PC's came straight from the factory with AOL-specific versions of IE5 in the last five or six years?). And once AOL Browser goes final, countless AOL and AIM users will suddenly find themselves with at least three different browsers -- AOL Explorer, AOL Browser, and IE6 -- that they did not intentionally install.

This is why browsers like Firefox and Opera are rightfully proud of their distribution numbers (maybe a bit too proud in Opera's case). This point has been hammered on before, but users had to consciously choose to go out and find, download, and install these browsers, and the same can be said for a number of other small-market-share alternative browsers like K-Meleon and Camino. If you make a quality product, people will find it.

Giving Opera Another Shot

Okay, so I ran across a program called Ad Muncher at BetaNews about a week ago, and decided to try Opera 8 again using it in the background. While Ad Muncher creates some problems (specifically, using FilePlanet with K-Meleon), it works very well with Opera. But it's shareware with a 30-day timeout, and I don't think it's worth $25 when I can just use Firefox with the Adblock extension.

And that's a shame, because Opera 8 really is vastly improved over the six and seven branches. There are still issues with standards compliance; I'm writing this in Opera and the Blogger preview function doesn't work at all. But it's nice and fast and most of the interface weirdness is gone (or maybe I've just gotten used to it). I also like the download manager, which is integrated into a new tab, more than Firefox's and at least as much as I like K-Meleon's. Unfortunately, it's cluttered up more than ever thanks to feature creep, though the download size is still relatively small at about two-thirds the size of Firefox 1.0.3. They've also gone the Netscape route by planting links to Opera all over the UI. You get five Opera bookmarks, two Opera searches, an Opera home page, and of course those big Opera banners in the free version.

So basically, its the best Opera yet, but does that warrant spending $40 to register it when Firefox, K-Meleon, and Avant Browser are all freeware and can handle everything Opera has to offer except email? And Thunderbird is also OSS and therefore free as well. Sure, its 5.7MB, but its also the best freeware email client ever written.

I'll keep using Opera 8 until the Ad Muncher trial expires, but then I'm done.

Update, 11:00pm:

Almost forgot about this. I realize that the Opera people are excited about actually having a popular product for once, but really, what the hell is this?

Blogger Needs More Templates

Well, it's been a few months, so it's time for another template shift. Why? Because I bore easily, and I spend more time staring at this blog than any of you guys, whoever you are. This new template actually required very little modification. All I did was throw in my links.

I've decided to simplify. I've uninstalled Mozilla Suite and Opera, and I'm going to stop reviewing them. I know what works for me, and I'm sticking to it. I will continue to tell you what I think about significant new releases of Firefox, K-Meleon, Thunderbird, and Avant, as well as anything else that works for me. I'm still focusing on open-source software, because, let's face it, that's where the bleeding-edge software comes from.

And speaking of, as soon as I can trick my ISP into letting me download the gargantuan OpenOffice ISO, I'll tell you whether you should uninstall MS Office and throw the CD into the microwave to watch the pretty colors.

More Opera News, and Also Aliens

Before I get around to the new Opera release, there's something more pressing I need to talk about.

Martians!

Maybe. But kinda likely, possibly. The details are technical and boring, but still, friggin' Martians! I really hope conclusive evidence of life on Mars is found, and the sooner the better. There's the whole staggering development in the way we view life itself on a cosmic scale thing, but there's also the prospect of watching a very vocal group of American creationists squirm while trying to explain why there's nothing in the Bible about life on another planet. Little green men! Suck on that!

Anyway, yeah, Opera 8 has gone final. Since one or two Mozilla people have mentioned this as being a pretty important release, I figured I'd take a look. So far, I haven't seen any significant changes between Opera 8 final and the first Opera 8 beta, and I wasn't too thrilled with that. It's pretty and all, but I agree with Asa: the UI is just not intuitive at all, and there needs to be a free version without that goddamn ad banner. Take away features, make it nagware, whatever. Just drop those ads. And how hard is it to make the status bar active by default?

Firefox 1.0.3, OSS, and Me

Final builds of Firefox 1.0.3 and Mozilla Suite 1.7.7 were released late last week. These are literally the state-of-the-art browsers now, incorporating fixes for recently discovered JavaScript security holes and a new class of pop-ups, as well as the stability upgrades you get with every MoFo software update. And speaking of, the new Mozilla Update site has gone live. No major UI changes; it just works now.

I've managed to get around most of my modem crash issues by browsing the problem sites with K-Meleon, my second-favorite browser, with images turned off. One of K-Meleon's default toolbars is something called a "Privacy Bar" (disabled by default) that allows you to disable or enable cookies, images, Java, Javascript, Pop-ups, or Flash with one click. Between Firefox, K-Meleon, Thunderbird, Avant Browser (for sites that render best in IE), and musikCube (for its flawless freedb integration), I probably have the most complete internet suite I've ever used. Every one of those apps is freeware, and all but Avant are open-source. OSS is the cutting edge now, there's just no questioning it anymore. If you don't believe me, just take a look at TheOpenCD.org.

And that reminds me, I need to download a new GTK environment.

Update: While I'm watching this GTK update slowly heave itself onto my backup hard drive, I thought I'd mention that I've finally gotten some speakers for my PC. I was at Walmart the other day and I dropped a fat 25 bucks for an Altec Lansing 2.1 set. The satellites have virtually no high-end, but musikCube's 18-band EQ compensates for that. The little subwoofer, though, is surprisingly powerful. The whole setup carries very well throughout the house, but only when I'm using Cube or PowerDVD, which also has excellent inherent audio. I don't think I'll ever switch from a good set of headphones for gaming, though. I also bought my mom a mid-grade Logitech optical mouse. All she does is email and Pogo, but she needed it.

Hitachi Needs Counseling

This Get Perpendicular flash movie is absolutely the most bizarre thing I've seen all year (and yes, I saw the "dolphin-man" episode of South Park). The fact that it was made by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies makes it even more painful. There's just no reason for this to exist. Why explain some new data-storage method in a Schoolhouse Rock-style cartoon, complete with disco music? Why? Now my brain hurts.

Anyway, some former Mozilla employees have left to form a startup called Round Two, which seems to be a reorganization of the MozSource project. Hard to say right now if they will only be developing Firefox extensions, or if they will be releasing a custom version of the browser at some point. Nice looking site, though.

Finally, I ran across a German-made variant of the open-source musikCube called wxMusik. Looks like it functions exactly like Cube, but with tons and tons of superlative content added. Some people might call that "feature-creep" or "bloatware." Not me. But some people.

Firefox and musikCube Extensions

Those two Cube plugins I mentioned earlier, miniPlayer and Playlist Import/Export, work very well. Mini in particular is a must-have if you use Cube as your primary mp3 player (like I do), and the playlist importer is convenient if you've already saved some complicated playlists as .m3u's.

And I figured I'd put up a list of the Firefox extensions I use, because everyone else seems to be doing that, and I've never been one to stray far from the herd. And also because everybody loves lists, right? Of course they do.

Adblock
Download Manager Tweak
Image Zoom
LiveBookmark This
Show Image
Save Image in Folder
Tab Mix

I'm not currently using any Thunderbird extensions at all, but I just started using it as my primary RSS feed viewer (in addition to email) and I'll be looking around for a way to improve how it handles those subscriptions. I switched from using Firefox's LiveBoomarks because I was tired of waiting for them all to load every time I opened the browser.

Incremental musikCube Update

musikCube 0.92.2.1 was released today. No major changes, but the long list of minor ones can be found at BetaNews here. Also, the musikWiki launched yesterday. Along with the usual OSS developer info, you can find a nice help page there. I grabbed a couple of plugins from the official site today, but haven't installed them (or even unzipped them) yet. Perhaps I should have before writing this update. Oh well.

Last week I installed WindowBlinds for the first time in years and years. Surprisingly, there seems to be twice as many Win98 WB themes as WinXP themes out there. I would have thought WB would have gotten more popular over the years, given XP's lack of native themes. In any case, WB 4.5 is much more stable than I remember the older versions being, and the UI is an order of magnitude better. But there's still a noticable performance hit, on my machine anyway.

Opera is Confusing

Last time I used the Opera 8 beta I set the home page to a blank page. But that was stupid because when I opened it the other day I didn't know what the hell was going on. It turns out that Opera ties the navigation controls, address bar, tab bar, search bar, and just about everything else into the currently selected tab, so if you have no open tabs, it's literally impossible to do anything or go anywhere without selecting a link from the bookmarks context menu (or, I suppose, using that "Panels" toolbar thing).

The same day, I downloaded the browser/composer-only version of Mozilla Application Suite 1.8 beta. I don't really have a reason for that. Version 1.7.6 (and the forthcoming 1.7.7) are much more stable, and 1.8 is never going final, as it's just a Gecko test bed for future Firefox and Thunderbird releases.

My new favorite application is a WinXP/2000 mp3/ogg player called musikCube. I used this app for five minutes and swore off Winamp forever. If you take the time to maintain the id3 tags in your mp3's (specifically artist and album info), Cube is just brilliant. A totally bare-bones, elegant player with awesome playback quality and, if you want it, an 18-band equalizer. I would pay good money for this player, but, incredibly, it's open-source. Here's a screenshot.

Oh, and I finally broke down and ordered Quake III Arena from id Software. I'm expecting it tomorrow or Monday.

April Idiots

I'd forgotten how much I hate the internet on the first of April. Slashdot was completely useless today, spammed to hell with fake stories. Stories so stupid one look at the RSS feed was enough to keep me away. All day long, the only bearable prank story came, not surprisingly, from a comment posted at Asa's mozillaZine blog. Somewhat more surprisingly, it comes from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. Finally, conclusive evidence of water on Mars.

Anyway. The Mozilla Application Suite will officially remain at 1.7.6 and receive only security updates from now on. But the project will apparently continue, under a new name to be announced in the future, and not supported by Mofo. I still don't understand why anyone would want to continue to develop what is essentially a better version of Netscape 6, but then again, I don't understand why Ashlee Simpson is famous, and she's got a multi-million-dollar home and her own TV show.

Bad PR

In a Cnet News.com article about Mozilla's Bug Bounty Program, a Microsoft representative actually said, "We don't pay people to fix bugs." Whoops. That does explain a few things about Windows and Internet Explorer, though. He went on to say, "But there are other ways we try to fix security as much as possible." As much as possible? You try? Windows XP costs up to several hundred dollars and is used by most of the world. Just fix the damn bugs and stop making excuses. If Linspire and Mark Shuttleworth can fund Mozilla's bug hunt, I'll assume Microsoft can afford to fix their own security and stability issues.

I Hate My Modem

I am so tired of my modem crapping out on me and having to reboot to get back online. My favorite part is when Windows asks me to send an error report about it. Every time. Yes, let's connect to the internet to send a report about how my modem has stopped working. That's fucking brilliant.

Anyway, read this article at InformationWeek. They have the numbers to back up what we all knew already: people who know what they're doing use Firefox.

A few days ago, PC news site Ars Technica reported that Firefox had become the No. 1 browser among its readers with 40% market share. Internet Explorer, which stood at 38% last September, has dropped to 30% today.

In addition, between 20% and 40% of visitors to most of the popular blogs are using a Mozilla-based browser, including 36% of the people viewing something called Boing Boing. I have no idea what Boing Boing is, I just know that I'm not clicking on any link to anything called "Boing Boing."

T-Bird Developer and Will Ferrell

Asa has posted another Q&A with a Mozilla developer; this time it's Scott MacGregor, the lead programmer for Thunderbird, the best email client since VAX Mail. It isn't especially compelling, but read it anyway. Bitches.

Meanwhile, I've been watching Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy over and over. At one point, PowerDVD flaked out on me and stopped working. I thought it was trying to tell me to watch another fucking movie, but it turns out I just had to turn off hardware acceleration. That's OK, though. I've gone through all the extra features and heard the director's commentary (if you wanna call it that). I'm ready to move on to obsessing about another movie, like Team America: World Police, if it would ever be released on fucking DVD. I refuse to keep track of this online, but I assume the delay has to do with Parker and Stone having to rush to produce new South Park's. Tonight's new episode was about the Sony PSP and Terri Schiavo, so SP is clearly what they've been concentrating on lately. Oh well. We can wait.

Oh, and my neighbors' PC had a separate partition for system restores, and running one didn't fix it. On boot, there's an error in post that says the "Atapi IDE CD-ROM device driver" is missing. I have no idea what that driver's filename is, or where the hell I can find it, or how I can load it without a CD-ROM drive. So I guess that box is screwed, because I can't format the HD and reinstall Win98 SE: it's a Compaq. When you live in Frayser, it's important that your neighbors like you, but I just don't see how I can get this to work.

Pixar and More Camino

I've seen The Incredibles four times now, and it just doesn't get old. I'm definitely enjoying it more from my computer than from the 32-inch TV; this movie was mastered for high-res from the source material, and you can only take advantage of it with a computer monitor or a high-def TV. As for other DVD's, all I really want right now is Shaun of the Dead, which I haven't found used yet, and Team America: World Police. We're all still waiting for that release.

Josh Aas (Boom Swagger Boom) has an interesting post on the speed advantage of Camino over Firefox. So I guess there is a reason to use Camino if you have a Mac.

I've got my neighbors' old Compaq sitting next to me right now. I've been trying to install their new CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive for them, but this POS won't take it. Haven't figured out why yet, but I'll get there. I'm starting to suspect that the motherboard's IDE controller is fucked. It's a used PC, circa 2000, and has never had a Windows reinstall, but it's a Compaq and it probably will only take a system restore, not a clean Win98 SE installation, so I'm hesitant to format it. I guess I'd be more into this if they were paying me.

Camino, Zips, and Cake

A beautiful new site has been launched dedicated to spreading Camino, the Mozilla Foundation's Gecko-based Mac-only web browser. Think of it as a more Apple-centric edition of the cross-platform Firefox.

MoFo's Chase Phillips has provided an explanation for why new final releases of Firefox and Thunderbird are no longer being posted as zip files as well as self-installers. It's mildly technical, but it breaks down like this: using the executables is easier and causes fewer headaches when upgrading, so stop using the zips.

I was digging through a pile of old CDs the other day and came across the soundtrack from The Matrix, which I didn't even know I had. So I've finally found a new CD for my car stereo. I've been playing Cake's latest album, Pressure Chief, every time I got in my truck since I bought it the day it was released.

Update: Screw The Matrix, I also found my copy of "The Elephant Riders" by Clutch. Now that's drivin' around music.

Thunderbird Security Update

Thunderbird 1.0.2 was released yesterday. It's a "background" update from 1.0, with the Gecko security fixes and stability upgrades in Firefox 1.0.1 and Mozilla Suite 1.7.6, which also went public yesterday. If you're not using Thunderbird as your primary email app, you should be. If you already are, here's the easiest way to upgrade in Windows:

1. Download Thunderbird 1.0.2
2. Uninstall Thunderbird 1.0 (using Add/Remove Programs) and do not remove the program folder, usually c:/Program Files/Mozilla Thunderbird/
3. Run the 1.0.2 installer

That's it. Your accounts, messages, folders, settings, themes, and extensions will be automatically maintained.

In frontline news from the browser wars, News.com as a lengthy and detailed article on why Firefox is making such a dent in Internet Explorer's market share, and whether the Mozilla Foundation can keep this up.

Previous open-source products had a high geek factor: You had to be a geek to run them. Firefox is the first time consumers really chose an open source product.

In other words, Firefox is in the perfect situation for an underdog: It's a great application, and it's competing against a bloated, out-dated, and dangerously vulnerable browser in Internet Explorer.

Firefox Wallpaper

I finally posted an original Firefox wallpaper on deviantART today. You can find it alongside my four (so far) Memphis Grizzlies wallpapers under my profile. I made it from scratch for my own use, but I liked it so much I adapted it for 1280x1024 and posted it. Look for more Firefox and Mozilla wallpapers soon.

Installed the latest Opera beta (Opera 8 beta 3), and aside from the usual adjustment phase, I like it. The interface is significantly different from a Gecko or Internet Explorer-based browser, and can be confusing for a few minutes. But soon enough it's humming along nicely. But again, unless you're willing to spend $39 to register and get rid of the ad banners, just go with Firefox or Avant Browser.

I borrowed my neighbors' rental of Collateral, and I love it. Just a fantastic, riveting movie. Very reminiscent of the first time I saw Heat, Michael Mann's most comparable film, in that I immediately thought, "I have to watch this again." At first it was the novelty of Tom Cruise as the bad guy, but you forget about that very quickly because his performance is just so convincing. Definitely my recommended rental of the year, edging out Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Of course, I haven't gotten my hands on The Incredibles yet...

The Death of Seamonkey

As I posted on my Memphis Grizzlies fanblog, I've started posting Griz wallpapers at deviantART. What I'm going for in these wallpapers is simplicity and usability, and I've ended up with some .xcf templates that I can easily adapt for Mozilla wallpapers, so look for those soon. Everything I've posted can be found at shiftedblue.deviantart.com.

The Mozilla Foundation has finally made it official: Seamonkey, the codebase for the Mozilla Application Suite, will no longer be developed. As it turns out, the 1.8 alpha and beta releases of Mozilla Suite were essentially testbeds for the Gecko branch underlying Firefox 1.0.1 and Thunderbird 1.0.1.

There's already a movement to keep Seamonkey alive, as I predicted in a previous post. I think this is good for Mozilla in the end, and is certainly the whole point of open-source software. But really, focusing on Firefox and Thunderbird is the right thing to do. As a combo, they just out-class the Mozilla Suite in every category.

Interstates and Insecurities

I drove down to Olive Branch today for something about a shower or my cousin, or, my grandparents were there... I don't really know, I wasn't paying attention. I just know all the women on my mom's side of the family went somewhere, while I and my cousin and uncle and granddad sat at the house to watch golf and NCAA basketball. But somehow I'm going to have to go to Greenville, MS, for my cousin's wedding in August. I don't even know where Greenville is, or if it's a real place, I just know I have to buy a fucking suit or something, and I hope to God I'm not going to be involved in the whole wedding process. I was an usher at a Catholic wedding once, and it was hell.

Mike Connor raises some disturbing red flags on future Firefox development in a blog post yesterday. Seems he's not at all confident in the current state of Mozilla Foundation's Firefox hacker check-ins, and thinks 1.5 could be pushed back to next year. This is the first serious whiff of internal dissent we've had from MoFo (though Mike is not on MoFo's payroll). We don't know if this a real sign of future issues. I expect either Mitchell Baker or Blake Ross to respond shortly.

As an outside observer, Mike has been a significant contributor to the success of Firefox, and I hope his self-imposed boycott of Firefox hacker check-ins is short-lived. If there's one thing Mozilla doesn't need now that Microsoft has realized the threat they pose, it's affiliated programmers or hackers jumping ship for political reasons.

Firefox for Dummies

How Stuff Works has posted a sort of beginners' introduction to Firefox and browsers in general, called, aptly, How Firefox Works. Definitely a recommended link for anyone you may be attempting to convince to switch to Firefox (or any other Gecko-based browser) full-time.

Firefox co-creator Blake Ross is -- let's just say "irritated" -- by the latest Netscape Browser release. He has some very pointed and fair criticisms directed primarily towards whoever AOL has contracted to do their software development for them and for the marketing boardroom-types who seem to have been major influences in how the 8.0 beta turned out.

I'm trying to get this post typed out as quickly as possible, before my internet connection suddenly craps out and I have to reboot to get back online. I've narrowed it down to either my modem itself (and old USR pre-v2-standards 56K), or the Win2K/XP drivers for it. It's most likely the drivers, as I seem to lose connectivity when loading a page that pulls from multiple servers simultanously, like a Google image search or an RSS aggregation source. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find XP-specific drivers for this modem, and I'm hesitant to start arbitrarily installing alternative "maybe it'll work, but probably not" candidates. Oh well. Who needs to search the web anyway?

Netscape Browser 8.0 Beta

I'm using the new Netscape Browser beta that was released this morning. While it's vastly improved over the release candidate circulated last November, it's still essentially a mucked-up Firefox 1.0. This isn't all that bad, since this makes for the best Netscape release ever (even in beta form), but it's a very convoluted and complex browser, and in no way is this recommended for computer newbies of any kind. It's difficult to configure and awkwardly designed.

First, there's the toolbars. It took me a moment to realized that the Stop and Reload button had been combined. I suppose this makes sense, but what's the point, really? There's an integrated search bar to the left of the location bar, but it's set to Netscape's search engine, and cannot be changed. Ignoring the browser's Passcard functionality, which combines form filling with a password manager and which I have no interest in using, we come to what Netscape calls the Multibar.

There are five default trays that can be toggled in the browser-width multibar via tiny numbered tabs under the navigation controls: 1. a weather drop-down menu, a webmail tab (set to Netscape webmail, of course), a business ticker, a "Shopping" link, and a link for beta feedback; 2. Three separate news tickers; 3. a "Local" tray with more weather, a maps pull-down, and a Yellow Pages link; 4. your imported bookmarks; and 5. "Blank." Got all that? Seem needlessly complicated? It is.

This is further confused by the Customize Toolbar dialog, which, like Firefox's, allows drag-and-drop, but now has four tabs to categorize the scores of buttons and several drop-down menus for individual toolbar settings (remember, there are six now). The Options window is even worse. There are seven catagories with a total of fourteen pages of obscure, badly documented checkboxes, blanks, and pull-downs. Keep in mind that Netscape Browser has maybe two or three major features over Firefox (not counting common Firefox extensions), yet there are three times as many things to worry about in the options and preferences windows. People, I've been doing this for ten years, and at first I was a bit bewildered by this thing.

But the good news is that very little actually needs to be changed from default. It imported my Firefox 1.0.1 bookmarks, cookies, home page, history, etc., and I simply set the multibar to my bookmarks and left it there. The default theme is tad too far on the teal side, but it's clean and certainly unique. The 8.0 beta has also retained Firefox's Live Bookmarks, one of the premier features of the browser, and the primary reason I stick with Firefox day-to-day over Mozilla, Opera, K-Meleon, etc.

On the beta issues side, there seems to be an issue with the rendering engine that keeps certain pages (like the Google front page) from being drawn until the entire page has been cached, if at all, a problem exacerbated by the combination of the Stop and Reload buttons. 8.0 beta also does not incorporate the Gecko branch updates in Firefox 1.0.1, which includes some major security fixes. So this browser is not yet ready for full-time use, but it looks promising, at least as promising as the new Opera 6 beta 2.

Still, unless you really need various news, stock, and weather tickers and don't want to fool with installing Firefox extensions (which, I have to point out, is easier to do than configuring the tickers already integrated into Netscape), Netscape Browser remains obsolete in the face of Firefox 1.0.1. It's a nice try, but re-branded browsers are just rarely worth the effort. I'll stick with it for a while, and I'll let you know if I change my mind.

Random Browsing

A few updates unrelated to anything in particular...

In pictures: How the world is changing at BBC News, courtesy of Cake. The scary thing about these comparative images is how little time has passed between them. The world from your high school geography textbooks is going away.

The Superficial has unexpectedly posted the best Academy Awards observations you're going to find online. In the process, they mentioned this archive of Charlie Kaufman scripts, which includes Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, my favorite film of last year.

And in me-news, in an attempt to make some sort of use of my second, otherwise unused 30GB hard drive, I've been ripping just about every song from just about every CD I own. The result has been a very eclectic random Winamp playlist. When you jump from "Piggy" by Nine Inch Nails to "Feathers" by 12 Rounds to "I Be the Prophet" by Tricky to Tchaikovsky's Symphony No.4, movement 3, you know you're having fun.

1.0.1 Nightlies... and Bikinis

Keep your eyes on the nightly Firefox builds and mozillaZine, as the final, bugfixed preference window update should be posted shortly. Ben Goodger (Inside Firefox) has been working on the new prefwindow for quite a while now, but it wasn't quite ready for the 1.0.1 release.

In "God, that makes me feel old" news, there's a Slashdot blurb about the tenth anniversaries of Yahoo!, Apache, eBay, Amazon, and Netscape. I started using the internet at the insistence of my friends (including Garrett) in late 1995, so while I didn't get in on the ground floor, I was there at the emergence of the Web as an entity unto itself. At that point, Netscape 1 was still the dominant browser, and Mosaic and LYNX were still useful. I can remember frequently checking how my own website looked in LYNX and doing a ton of chatting via a VAX app called Talk.

I saw the February issue of Wired Magazine tonight, the one with Blake Ross on the cover and the feature article on Firefox, but I didn't buy it. I picked it up, flipped through it for a couple minutes, and realized that there wasn't anything remotely interesting in there, other than the Firefox article, which I've already read online. And it was five bucks. So I reached up to put it back into its slot in the magazine rack, and as I did so, I noticed the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue not a foot away. It was six bucks. I bought that instead. And I didn't even open it.

Full Impluse, Mr. Sulu

I've been spending way too much time lately playing with Celestia, the open-source, multi-OS, interactive planetarium app. Essentially, it allows you to glide easily across our galaxy, tracking any and every moving chunk of matter within literally 800 light years (and beyond) from any angle. It's just way fucking cool. I already have some very nifty screenshots of the inner solar system as seen from several hundred meters above the surface of the asteroid Iocaste. Download it here or get it as a part of The Open CD.

As you know, Firefox version 1.0.1 has landed. Highly recommended that anyone you know using Firefox 1.0 should upgrade ASAP. There's nothing flashy about 1.0.1, just loads of security updates and bugfixes. I uninstalled 1.0 before installing the new version (a measley 4.7MB download) and all my themes, extensions, bookmarks, cookies, and even toolbar configurations were automatically and flawlessly maintained.

Slashdot put up a post about the first image ever posted on the web, and guess what? It's chicks! Hot, geeky, rock band chicks singing about "colliders, quarks, microwaves, antiprotons, and the Internet." Nothing screams "sexy" quite like Mosaic Browser and girls in weird, ill-fitting prom dresses.

Odd Stuff is Goin' Down

Weird news from just about every corner of the web this week. First there was this article at The Inquirer claiming that sources inside Microsoft say the official name of MS's new OS, code-named Longhorn, will be "Microsoft Windows e-XPedition." It's just so stupid it can't possibly be made up.

Then there was the report that scientists at Cardiff Univ. have discovered a dark matter galaxy. If you're thinking, "Oh, I remember that from Star Trek," you're probably right.

Finally, there's the guy who actually read a EULA (I've tried, but it seemed impossible) and won himself a thousand goddamn dollars. The outfit who awarded the money, PC Pitstop, did so to make a point, which seems a little pretentious, but they've written an extremely enlightening article on just how dangerous EULAs can be. Definitely recommended for any computer newbies you'd like to scare the shit out of.

Microsoft Almost Gets It Right

Because Windows XP's auto-update downloader is a pain in the ass if you use a dial-up ISP, and because I don't even want to think about how long it would take me to download Service Pack 2, I ordered a free SP2 CD from Microsoft. I was told to wait the standard 6 to 8 weeks for arrival, but it got here in four days. So far, this has all been very nice and easy.

So I installed SP2 in about an hour, spent a little longer configuring the firewall and running a scan/defrag of my primary drive. But there's a problem. I can't stay online for more than five minutes without arbitrarily losing all downstream data. No error, no disconnect. Just no data. And the dialer stops responding and I have to reboot to get back online for five more minutes of quality internet time. Oh boy, this is fun.

So I uninstalled and reinstalled my ISP's autodialer software, started using a different (significantly slower) local access number, and disabled the fucking firewall entirely, and it seems to be working again. I'm hoping it was the firewall and not the number.

Oh, and after installing SP2, my computer abruptly reset itself in the middle of a game of Half-Life. First time I've had a sudden crash since switching to WinXP Pro. Interesting timing...

Seamonkeys and Robot Chickens

In a recent post, Asa brought up the limited lifetime of Seamonkey and a fairly hysterical forum blitz followed. Basically, the Mozilla Foundation has been planning on phasing out development of Seamonkey, the basis of the Mozilla Application Suite, and a lot of people seem to think this means the end of Mozilla Suite forever. Mike Connor has eloquently summed up the situation on his blog. I don't really see the need for future Seamonkey development myself. If you combine Firefox and Thunderbird, and throw in an IRC client and an HTML editor of questionable usefulness, you've got the Mozilla Suite. Or, put another way, it's Netscape Communicator with 2005 compliance standards and a number of bug fixes. Do we really need that? In any case, it's open-source software, so even if the Mozilla Foundation stops development on Seamonkey, the project can (and probably will) live on for years.

And speaking of Thunderbird, I found the minimize to systray extension I'd been looking for at The Extensions Mirror. It's sort of an unofficial database for Firefox, Thunderbird, and Mozilla Suite extensions. Why these extensions aren't posted to Mozilla Update, where they would go through extensive testing and bug-checking, I have no idea.

I saw the premier of Robot Chicken on [adult swim] tonight, and it was funnier and stupider than I'd hoped. I have no idea why stop-motion animation action figures falling down is funny, but somehow, it's really fucking funny.

I discovered that my beautiful (if used) Philips 107P monitor supports 1360x1024, so that's what I'm running now. It also supports 1600x1200, but I'm nearsighted enough.

More Old New Hardware

So I went to Rite-Aid this morning to by paper towels and light bulbs and dog food (of course) and that sort of shit, and I picked up a rather crappy five-button "4D Internet Wheel Scroll Mouse," made by something called Sakar International under the brand "iConcepts." The two thumb buttons are positioned so far forward that they're almost useless. The hastily-written software came on a floppy disk and the mouse isn't even optical. So why did I buy it? Because it was three dollars, that's why. Cheaper than the light bulbs. I really don't know why, but I have three or four ball-mice now and not one optical mouse. I think it was worth buying this one just to not have to clean out one of the others again.

The NBA All-Star Game is on right now, and I'm not even watching it. Look, I'm a huge NBA fan, but the Skills Challenge last night was horrible. All-Star weekend just keeps getting worse every year, as it gets more and more commercialized, and as the league tightens its grip upon the whole thing to push its more marketable teams and brands. Let's just get back to basketball already.

Oh, and one more thing. PimpZilla, bitches.

Pimped

Is PimpZilla the best Firefox theme ever? Yes. Yes it is. Go download it right now.

Took a look at both the Opera 8 beta and that Netscape Browser prerelease that came out a while back. To be honest I can't tell much difference between the Opera beta and Opera 7.54u2, the most recent full release. It's nice and fast and all, but without adblocking I just have no use for it. When I want to fire up a browser for a minute without loading all my Firefox LiveBookmarks, I use K-Meleon 0.9.

The Netscape prerelease is clearly an alpha, whatever they may have called it. I ran into two bugs almost immediately: it stopped responding to keyboard input entirely, and if you close the browser window while a download is in progress, you have to create a new profile (or stop the download) to get it to open up again. Early bugs aside, the interface is just odd looking. It's very green and very busy. By default, there are two scrolling news tickers and a stock ticker on the "personal toolbar." It also opens two huge, obnoxious Netscape-hosted home pages. But that can be changed. It's based on Firefox 1.0, so the rendering engine is literally as good as it gets, but really, what's the point of Netscape Browser? If I'm not mistaken, Firefox 1.0 is also based on Firefox 1.0.

Gates on Firefox

From Asa at mozillaZine, via Slashdot, comes a meandering interview with Bill Gates at ABC News. Said Billy:

The browser space that we are in we have about 90 percent. Sure Firefox has come along and the press love the idea of that. Our commitment is to keep our browser that competes with Firefox to be the best browser — best in security, best in features. In fact, we just announced that we'll have a new version of the browser so we're innovating very rapidly there and it's our commitment to have the best.

Cute. Clearly the directive to announce an IE7 beta the day that Firefox 1.0 hit 25 million downloads did indeed come from high in the Microsoft food chain. Peter Jennings asked, somewhat indirectly, whether IE7 was being rushed because of what The Mozilla Foundation is doing to IE6's market share, but Gates, as usual, ducked the question.

I may have found the reason for the somewhat unsettling performance increase I got switching from Win98SE to XP Pro. According to the AMD Duron product brief, they were invlolved in the development of XP, and made sure it was optimized for Duron (and Athlon) architecture. On the other hand, I also found the marketing schlock for the AMD K6-III 3D, and it says pretty much the same thing. I know from using that processor in an old Compaq that it's breathtakingly underwhelming, even at 500MHz. In certain situations, my old Pentium 133 could out-perform it. The Duron, on the other hand, has been fast and flawless.

XP Pro and 25 Thousand Thousand

I have to thank Garrett for hooking me up with WinXP Professional (perfectly legitimately, of course) this weekend. Surprisingly, I manged to format, install, and configure it in less than a day on this second-hand Duron box. Had some problems on install with XP freaking out about the second HD, but I sorted it out by trial and error. There's still a PCI conflict that I can't seem to get rid of, but it doesn't affect anything. And the OS has managed to resurrect the onboard audio, which I thought was dead, and is using that instead of the Herc sound board, despite the fact that the Herc is installed and properly configured with up-to-date drivers. Doesn't really matter though. With just 128MB of PC100 RAM, I thought I would run into memory errors and slow performance, but it actually seems to be a bit faster than 98SE was. I think the Duron 800MHz gets the credit.

Firefox 1.0 broke the 25 million downloads mark yesterday. SpreadFirefox.com is planning a special update for later today. In related news, there's been a lot of yapping about Microsoft's pseudo-low-key announcement that an Internet Explorer 7 beta will be released this summer, and even more yapping about posting this information in an IE team blog, where the tech-types will see it first, on the same day that Firefox reached a landmark download number. I personally don't think there was anything particularly insidious about this (by MS standards). Blake Ross pointed out the most important line in this announcement:

I think of today’s announcement as a clear statement back to our customers: “Hey, Microsoft heard you. We’re committing.”

There has been a massive migration away from Internet Explorer since November. Firefox has become the most successful open-source application in history, and MS has to realize that they created this situation by allowing their software to stagnate for literally years, something you just cannot do when you have a monopoly.

So the question presents itself: Is it too late for Internet Explorer 7? I think so. By the time IE7 final is released, Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 will be too widely distributed. When the mass conversion to Longhorn begins (and it will), users will have to choose a browser; MS won't be allowed to prepackage their own again. So why get IE7 when Firefox is just as good and just as free, and by then, will have equal (or better) name-recognition? How will Microsoft focus their ad campaign? "Remember how much you loved us in 1999?"

Madrid is Burning

A freakin' skyscraper almost burned to the ground in Madrid yesterday, and now they're worried about it collapsing entirely. Take a look at the really eerie AP photos that BBC News posted.

This AlphaGrip controller is just freaky. I can't imagine ever getting comfortable using that thing. Maybe if it didn't have a tiny plastic trackball for mouse control. Hey guys, how about an analog stick? They're not expensive.

It looks like Mozilla Update is finally working again. For whatever reason, it wasn't updated from December 24th until late last week. And speaking of Mozilla, we're roughly a week away from passing 25 million Firefox 1.0 downloads, having passed 24 million today. Firefox users unofficially outnumber AOL subscribers now, as Asa noted last week that AOL has dropped to 22.2 million paid subscriptions.

I Heart Duron

So I picked up the spare parts I needed to get that Duron box running, along with a 128MB stick of PC100 RAM, which turns out to be more than I need. It runs Quake 3 Arena at 1024x768, with every conceivable graphic detail maxed out, at a solid 70fps. Half-Life at the same rez at 100fps. That's the good news. Unfortunately, the USR 56k is pre-v2 standards, and is slow as all hell. While that's not a big deal since I'm rarely putting this box online, there's a more serious problem. It resets, and shuts off, for no reason. At first, I thought it was caused by the Herc Muse XL sound board, but now I have no idea. Add an mp3 to a Winamp playlist, and it resets. Open cdplayer.exe while a browser applet is playing sfx or music, it shuts down and won't restart. Hell, today I checked a random dialog checkbox totally unrelated to the audio subsystem and it rebooted immediately. This is on a clean Win98SE install, after a scandisk/defrag. Anyway, it games flawlessly. I'm just wondering what's going to happen after I install the GIMP and do some RAM-heavy photo editing.

Finally got around to seeing Napoleon Dynamite this afternoon. Nice little flick. After the commercial blitz the studio unleashed, there's no reason to think of this as an indie film anymore, and as a mainstream comedy, it works very well, but only if you have the right sense of humor. Kind of like Monty Python and the Meaning of Life. There are a ton of tiny little touches in Dynamite that almost knocked me off the couch, but I can see how a broad audience wouldn't get it. There's a definite Wes Anderson feel to it, and I'd say it's more entertaining than Bottle Rocket, if not as ambitious. I hear that the commentary is quite good, but I didn't have time to get into it. In any case, in terms of 2004's major comedies, it's no Anchorman, but it's worth a rent.

PC Salvage

I temporarily pulled the 64MB PC100 DIM out of this Compaq PC today, along with the Philips CD-RW, and managed to boot that junked PC I got last week. Turns out the CPU is an AMD Duron 800MHz, which would have been my last guess. Still, it's better than I expected. The Duron is a vastly underappreciated processor. The primary, 40GB hard drive had Win98 installed, along with a huge amount of useless garbage. The system tray had 13 icons in it before I started ending tasks. I couldn't access the second hard drive, but later I realized it was because its previous owners had connected the secondary IDE cable connector to the master drive. The second drive is 30GB, and I think I might just wipe it before I get around to seeing what's on there. This box is in serious need of a clean format/reinstall of Windows.

All I need to make this machine usable is a power cable, an internal audio cord to connect the PCI sound board to the CD drive -- both of which I know I have somewhere -- and a stick of RAM, which I'll be buying this week. The only snag is that while I know this machine can use PC66/100/133 RAM, I have no idea if the motherboard supports DDR RAM, which would mean I could get a 256MB PC3200 stick for cheaper than a 128MB PC100 stick. Hopefully, the random PC guy at Office Depot will know...

In any case, I'm looking forward to using it as a primarily offline time-killing machine, as it ran Half-Life very nicely at 1024 in my short test, despite some awful texture tearing. That should be resolved by the Radeon 7200 drivers I'm running on this box, as well as the huge RAM upgrade. I think I'll also leave the CD burner in this Compaq and put the DVD-ROM in the junker, as it should have significantly better DVD-playback capabilities.

Gmail, AOL, and Frame Rates

Thanks to David Tenser for the Gmail invite. He and Asa at Spread Firefox are giving out a ton of invites they've suddenly been given. Looks to me like Google's viral marketing deal is winding down. I set up my account in Thunderbird 1.0, which is still the best free mail client I've ever used on a consistent basis, and I actually managed to send a test message, as well as recieve one. I hadn't been able to do that with any POP/SMTP mail account using any client while using PeoplePC. I think PPC blocks the default SMTP port. Gmail uses a different one.

Speaking of Asa, he raised an interesting question yesterday: Do Firefox users already outrank AOL subscribers? With 23 million downloads and counting, it looks that way. If not, there clearly will be before Firefox 1.1 (final) is released on June 1. And speaking of AOL, in an article at CNet News about the upcoming Netscape Browser's phishing counter-measures, I saw this:

Netscape claims to be the No. 2 browser company--after Microsoft--but sources close to the company say that Firefox is gaining "really fast."

"Firefox is moving the needle," said one source close to Netscape who asked not to be named. "They are gaining very rapidly."

That's just bizarre. Firefox is known to have over 5% of the browser market already, with IE just below 90%. That means Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, and god knows what else are sharing the remaining 5%. So what the hell is AOL talking about?

Anyway, turns out that Half-Life maps with low r-speeds, like the entire hazard course and Opposing Force's boot camp, run quick enough with this Rage 6 that I get a frame rate between 45 and 60fps even at 1024x768. And Quake II, which was released before my video card was made, holds a rock solid 60fps at that res. That surprised me a bit, as id Software built the Quake games with 3Dfx chipsets primarily in mind. Hell, GLQuake requires 3Dfx drivers. Anyhow I installed the Quake 3 Arena demo, and it runs decently enough, but to get a halfway decent frame rate I had to tweak it 'til it looks like complete crap. I cut my teeth on this game on a borrowed box I had for six months, and I'm too used to playing at 800x600 with all the graphical goodies turned up high to actually go out and buy a copy now. At least, not until I can see what this junker box I got last week can do. There's a gigantic heat sink sealed onto the CPU that I can't seem to get loose, so I don't even know whether I'm dealing with an AMD or Intel chipset yet.

Spare Parts

First, the non-me news: Ars Technica has posted that the groovy new Sony PSP will be released in North America on March 24. The minutes of the most recent Mozilla staff meeting are online. And Avant Browser 10 build 121 is available for download. If you haven't tried Avant and still use Internet Explorer for any reason at all, go get Avant as a backup to Firefox right now. You do have Firefox, don't you?

I picked up a stripped-down old computer the other day for nearly nothing, along with a very nice used Philips 17" flat-screen CRT to replace the 15" Compaq-branded .28dp monitor I've been using. The PC has no RAM and no optical drives at all. But it did have an old ATI 32MB Rage 6 PCI, which I immediately installed in this old Compaq. So now, along with the new monitor, I'm browsing at 1280x1024 (32-bit), instead of 1024x768, and I'm playing Half-Life (and Blue Shift and Opposing Force) at 800x600 in OpenGL mode at 60fps, as opposed to 320x240, software rendered at 30fps. But I don't want to strip down this old box entirely just yet, because it has two hard drives, a 30GB and a 40GB WD, and I'd like to see what's on 'em first.

Our former neighbors, who are moving to Kentucky after their house was foreclosed upon, finally agreed that we should keep their adopted former-stray rottweiler Maggie. We've been taking care of her for so long that nothing will really change. She'll continue to sleep in our yard (or house, when it's below 35 or above 85 at night), play with our other dog (Lucy the Jack Russell/mini pinscher mix), chew up our stuff (shoes, towels, furniture, etc.), and eat the food we've been buying for her (mostly Pedigree, with Alpo thrown in for variety). But it'll be nice to have the added insurance of a rott in the backyard to keep an eye on the place, assuming she hasn't managed to force her way through the fence into someone else's yard yet again.