March 2006 Entries

Two years ago I blogged about a similar subject. I discussed the advantages of Internet Explorer (IE) over Mozilla and other web browsers in a corporate environment. I concluded that IE is by far the better choice. Recently we deployed about 250 new computers and so I considered this question again. Now, Firefox is the main rival of IE. The decision was not so easy this time, but IE won again in the end. I am using Firefox myself for a quite while and I really like this web browser. However, when it comes to the question of switching to a new web browser in a corporate network, other arguments have to be considered.

Conclusion:
The advantages of the IE are mainly founded in its tight integration with Windows. Firefox has to run on other operating systems, too. Hence, all features should work on all systems not only on Windows boxes. That's why I'm not expecting too many improvements in this field in the near future. Although projects like Firefox ADM show that better integration is doable and that some Open Source programmers recognized this problem. All in all, I'm still a Firefox fan, but wouldn't recommend it for corporate use in larger networks. There are exceptions of course: If all your desktops use Linux or Mac OS. But if you have Windows desktops, the only reason I could think of, is that you really need a certain feature of Firefox which you is not available in IE.

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The Mozilla Foundation is planning to use some of its millions of dollars in revenues to fund active members of its developer community, the organization said Tuesday. The foundation made $5.8 million in 2004 and is thought to have made tens of millions of dollars last year, predominantly from partnerships with search companies, such as Google and Yahoo. Though much of its money has gone toward increasing its head count, some has been used to bulk up its reserve fund. Mitchell Baker, the chief executive of the Mozilla Corporation, the commercial subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, said Mozilla plans to put some of its excess revenues back into the community. "The Mozilla Group--the foundation and the corporation--has a set of employees that provide a critical mass where things can happen, but it is only a piece of the project. There are vast numbers of things that happen outside our employee base," she said. "We have a commitment that while we have funds beyond our operating levels, some of it should to go to community members. We want to do that in a way that promotes the community."

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A lot of people have asked for more information about Mozilla. Both developer information but also information about how the entire Mozilla thing works. Both in terms of products but also with decisions. A lot of interesting stuff and discussions are now happying at the newsgroups at news.mozilla.org

Some of the interesting stuff found there are amongst other Brett Wilson talking about changes to the URL autocomplete box that he like to make. Ben Goodger also made a lot of postings where he tries to explain where Firefox 2 and even Firefox 3 is going and most importantly why the changes are needed. Here you can get a lot of answers about the whole development of Mozilla Firefox. It's really interesting read.

There's also the mentioning of Microsummaries which are:
Microsummaries are regularly-updated succinct compilations of the most important information on web pages. They are compact enough to fit in the space available to a bookmark label, provide more useful information about pages than static page titles, are regularly updated as new information becomes available, and are linked to the pages they summarize.
Check it out and read more about it

Be sure to read/subscribe to both the general and firefox newsgroups. So head over to the newsgroups and start reading.

Hvad har Tintin, Band of Brothers og Godfather tilfælles? Ikke særligt meget skulle man tror. Men efter lidt opkøb på MovieZoo og CDON indgår de nu alle i min meget lille DVD samling. Den består ud over de nyindkøbte film af Ringenes Herre Filmtrilogien samt en masse DVD film som jeg har vundet.

Tintin DVD boxen indeholder alle de 21 klassiske Tintin film. Det giver ca. 15 timers Tintin tegnefilm. Det giver minder tilbage til hvor jeg så Troldspejlet hver gang. Nu får jeg det kun set meget sjældent.

Band of Brothers DVD'en kan man ikke komme udenom. Det er en helt og aldeles fantastisk TV serie. Med på 6 disc DVD'en er lidt bonus materiale såsom hvordan de optog serien samt en dokumentarfilm om den rigtige E-company gruppe. Hvis du ikke har denne DVD så skynd dig at købe den.

Godfather DVD'en faldt jeg over mens jeg shoppede de andre. Den indeholder selvfølgelig alle 3 Godfather film samt en bonus disk med 3 timers ekstra materiale. Jeg har ikke set den endnu så jeg aner ikke om bonus materialet er noget værd, mens filmene jo er rigtigt gode. Så måske en regnfuld dag i sommerhuset kommer jeg igennem dem.

From the now removed PowerPoint file of the Google Analyst Day:

Store 100% of User Data. With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc). We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today. For example: Firefox team is working on server side stored state but they want to store only URLs rather than complete web pages for storage reasons. This theme will help us make the client less important (thin client, thick server model) which suits our strength vis-a-vis Microsoft and is also of great value to the user. As we move toward the "Store 100%" reality, the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache. An important implication of this theme is that we can make your online copy more secure than it would be on your own machine. Another important implication of this theme is that storing 100% of a user's data makes each piece of data more valuable because it can be access across applications.

So apparently Google is working on some kind extension that will make it possible to store bookmarks on the server side. Neat!

You can read the comments from the removed PPT file here

Så fik jeg endeligt købt et fladskærms TV. Det er ikke mit primære TV, men "blot" et ekstra. En beslutning om sådan et køb kan godt tage lidt tid hos mig. Jeg overvejede jo både om man skulle gå "the Thomas Kenne way" og overgive sig og købe Medion, eller måske købe det online i en eller anden forretning for at spare lidt. Jeg valgte dog i sidste ende at suse forbi Fona og købe TV'et der. Hvis der er problemer er det noget nemmere at aflevere tilbage i butikken, end at skulle sende et TV med posten. Og trust me, jeg har prøver det. TV'et i sommerhuset er jo fra Medion købt i Aldi (argh!) og det har været sendt retur 2 gange nu (ganske gratis skal det lige tilføjes). Sidste gang blev det helt udskiftet og jeg fik et nyt, større og bedre tilbage. Så Aldi's kundeservice skal man ikke klage over. Problemet har været lige at finde en tom TV kasse at skulle sende det retur i. At cykle hjem med en tom papkasse til et Sony 32" TV i blæsevejr kan være en udfordring!

Nå men det blev altså et Samsung LE23T51 som er et 23" LCD TV. Det er et 16:9 widescreen-fjernsyn, HDTV Ready, kontrast på 2000 mod 1, en opløsning på 1366 x 768 pixel og 16,7 millioner farver. Og prisen var kr. 4.999,-. Og i stedet for et købe et hammer dyrt (kr. 699,-) Vogels beslag til at hænge TV'et op på væggen med, smuttede jeg over i Silvan og købte et til kr. 99,-

Darin Fisher just landed the data collection service on the trunk of the Mozilla code.

The data collection service is used to gather browser metrics. This provides a way to learn more about how users use the Mozilla Firefox browser. Often times, we end up making guesses about usage patterns or typical system constraints. The data collection service can collect data from live instances of Firefox and analyze that to improve the product. This service is disabled by default in release builds. Users will be given the choice to enable this feature "to help make Firefox better" or something along those lines. The collected data is uploaded a collection server periodically and local copy flushed.

Read more about Browser Metrics at the wiki or in the bug report.

Googles Safe Browsing anti-phishing extension released by Google on labs.google.com in December 2005, is going to be landed on the trunk Mozilla code for consideration as the base for an anti-phishing feature in Firefox. It'll be a global extension, off by default.

This is just one of the many results from the Mozilla people working at Google and it shows Google's interest in making Mozilla Firefox the best and most secure browser available.

Read more about Safe Browsning and the design documentation. You can also check out the bug report itself.

The default chrome of Firefox has not been altered since the launch of Firefox 1.0. It would be presumptuous to assume that the way in which users interact with their browsers has gone unchanged between that time and our planned 3Q2006 release date for Fx2, and even more presumptuous for us to assume that we got things 100% right with Firefox 1.0. Ben's been thinking about this for a while, and he and Joe and I got together today to take a good hard look at the browser window with the following goals:
- remove UI elements that aren't useful to majority of users
- increase usability of elements that are useful
- increase focus on web content

Read the thread at groups.google.com