Archive for December, 2005

A New Standard

Saturday, December 24th, 2005

Firefox has changed the web again, this time it comes in the form of a new standard.
A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 7 will use Firefox’s feed icon to indicate the presence of feeds. Followed by this announcement, the Outlook 12 team announced they’d be doing the same and now there’s a movement to make the icon the standard for describing and making feeds more visible in web pages and applications.
Hopefully changes like these will become common place as Firefox development continues. It’s been a long five years since IE6 was released and in the meantime the web has grown old and tired. Changes like these show the influence Firefox has had thus far on reaching ‘Web 2.0‘ and this sure won’t be the last – the web’s on fire whether you like it or not ;)

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Almost There…

Monday, December 19th, 2005

In 48 hours I’ll be getting up and preparing for my 6am flight back to D.C. :) It’s been a long time since I’ve been home and I’m really looking forward to it. All I’ve got left is an easy little 2-page paper and an mildly difficult exam. I’ve spent the weekend studying and preparing some Christmas gifts to bring with me. Unfortunately with all the running around I’ve done this weekend, I’ve somehow managed to lose my student ID (which also serves as our debit card) so I’ve had to suspend that until I either find it or go and get a new one. Buying food from the dining halls has really sucked since I now have to use cash and cash customers get their food prices marked up by 60% :P
*sigh*
Just 48 more hours…

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XULRunner Rocks

Friday, December 9th, 2005

For the past few weeks I’ve been using XULRunner to create an easy (no need to constantly reinstall) environment to develop extensions under. But I haven’t really used it to run anything useful up until now, tonight I just packaged ChatZilla and I must say I’m really liking the abiltiy to run my favorite extensions without a browser open. ChatZilla also seems to be quite a bit more stable under XULRunner (under Firefox, CPU usage would skyrocket).

Once XULRunner is officially released, I think it’ll become a great platform for creating various applications (XUL and XPCOM can be used greatly reducing development time). For the time being, if you want to run a great IRC client without having to run Firefox or Mozilla in the background, give XULRunner+ChatZilla a try.

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Frozen

Friday, December 9th, 2005

Lake Mendota froze last night. It’s not really a surprise considering it’s been about -2 for a week. On top of being really cold this week, we just got another 4 inches of snow. In some places it’s almost 2ft. deep due to previous snowfall and the high winds we’ve been having.
I can’t wait until I’m back home in the relatively warm weather.

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Cold…

Monday, December 5th, 2005

Cold

:P

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Blog Redux

Friday, December 2nd, 2005

I’ve noticed quite a few Google searches come in looking for things like ‘firefox errors myspace’ and other keywords lately that aren’t necessarily pointed at useful information. So here’s a little recap with some additional information.

Firefox crashes or hangs on Myspace
(keyphrase: running myspace in firefox, firefox randomly closes)
If Firefox crashes/hangs on Myspace or any other site, most of the time it’s simply due to poor code or an incomatible plugin on the page. But there are a few things you can do to remedy the problem:

  • Upgrade to Firefox 1.5. A lot of changes have been made since the 1.0.x branch to make Firefox more stable when encountering poor code.
  • Report the problem. If Firefox still crashes after installing 1.5 and you want to lend us a hand, just follow these steps:
    1. Make sure Talkback is installed
    2. Reproduce the crash and copy down the Talkback ID
    3. Report the problem to Bugzilla providing the Talkback ID and as much information as possible.

Details about the Internet Explorer 0-day Exploit
(keyphrase: internet explorer exploit)
Like the last entry, there’s still no patch available. Disabling JavaScript will effectively block this exploit, but will severely limit your browsing experience. Using a different browser is a great way to maintain functionality while keeping safe.

Firefox 1.5 Build Identifier
(keyphrase: build identifier firefox 1.5)
Firefox 1.5 and 1.5RC3 are the same build. So if you’re running RC3, there’s no need to upgrade.
These are 1.5’s user agent strings:

Windows
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Mac OS X
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Linux
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

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