December 2005 Entries

Firefox users wrote to us detailing their problems with the browser, and we asked Mozilla for some answers. Before we get too far down that path, however, let's put things in perspective. More than 60 percent of the people who responded to our request for personal experiences with Firefox 1.5 reported they had no problems whatsoever with the browser software. And there is absolutely no statistically valid way to draw any hard conclusions about how many people are having stability issues with Firefox 1.5 based on this small sample size. At a rough guess, the number of people experiencing serious problems is probably well under 10 percent of all the people who have downloaded and installed Firefox 1.5.
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Yesterday Google released 2 new Firefox extensions.

Google Safe Browsing
Google Safe Browsing is an extension to Firefox that alerts you if a web page that you visit appears to be asking for your personal or financial information under false pretences. This type of attack, known as phishing or spoofing, is becoming more sophisticated, widespread and dangerous. That's why it's important to browse safely with Google Safe Browsing. By combining advanced algorithms with reports about misleading pages from a number of sources, Safe Browsing is often able to automatically warn you when you encounter a page that's trying to trick you into disclosing personal information.

It seems that Google Safe Browsing for Firefox is only available for download for users within the US.. But that can be fixed.

Blogger Web Comments
Blogger Web Comments for Firefox is an extension that makes it easy to see what bloggers are saying about a page you're viewing in Firefox and even make your own blog post about it, all without leaving the page you're on.

I have heard rumors of a possible acquisition of Opera by a bigger company. Now again I hear (and read) rumors of a possible deal between Google and Opera which would see the search engine giant taking over the Opera Web Browser company. This makes sense. Google has been lending a helping hand to Firefox. However, it does not control how Firefox is developed. They can of course launch their own Google Browser (or the GBrowser) on the Mozilla's rendering engine, but they have not till now. Opera of course makes a lot of sense considering it is a small company and is very heavily under development.
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Update: Rumors come and go. Google is not buying Opera

Den amerikanske rejsejournalist Howard Hillman mener, at der i hele verden findes ca. 100.000 seværdigheder, som er værd at nævne. Ud af disse har han valgt 1.000 seværdigheder, hvoraf 100 har fået tildelt en guldmedalje som ekstraordinære attraktioner. Jeg har markeret de steder jeg har besøgt og erkendt at der er meget langt til toppen!

Top 10:

• Pyramidene i Egypt
• Den kinesiske mur, Kina
• Taj Mahal, India
• Serengeti nasjonalpark, Kenya og Tanzania
• Galapagosøyene, Ecuador
• Grand Canyon, USA
• Machu Picchu, Peru
• Iguacu Falls, Argentina og Brasil
• Bali, Indonesia
• Regnskoven i Amazonas, Brasil og Peru

Resten af attraktionerne:

SmartFox will enable users, with a single click, to grab a citation to a book, journal article, archival document, or museum object and store it in their browser. The Center for History and New Media is building an open-source package of tools for libraries and museums that will work right in the web browser, where most research is now done. We are calling the project SmartFox: The Scholar's Web Browser, and it will enable the rich use of library and museum web collections with no cost - either in dollars, or probably more importantly, in secondary technical costs related to their web servers--to institutions. This set of tools will be downloadable and installable on any of the major open-source browsers related to the increasingly popular Firefox web browser: Firefox itself, Mozilla, and the latest versions of Netscape and the AOL browser (all based on the Firefox code base).
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The new artwork centers around an abstract figure resembling a "Sea Monkey", colored in a light, cyan/blue color, standing out from a dark blue circle with a wave pattern in the middle. This design, created by Alex Butin, not only looks professional and polished, but also fits perfectly as an icon on a modern computer desktop and is easily recognizable even in small sizes. Additionally, the look matches the rest of the mozilla.org family (Firefox, Thunderbird, Camino, Sunbird) quite well. And while the soft shapes and color shades create a very polished impression, the waves and the figure make people feel the new dynamic the internet suite application has gained through the new project.

The SeaMonkey project is a community effort to deliver production-quality releases of code derived from the application formerly known as "Mozilla Application Suite".

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In China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, the default homepage and search engine in Mozilla's Firefox browser will be provided by Yahoo instead of Google.
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