Gadgetopia

Spread Firefox - Igniting the web: Firefox evangalism has a URL.

Merriam-Webster Online - Firefox downloads: Five great Firefox plugins from the folks at Merriam Webster. Never be confused again.

GSuggest: A Google Suggest Firefox plugin to allow Google to suggest search terms directly from the integrated Firefox search box.

Firefox popups: Great, great Firefox hack. This is driving me nuts. Like you, I love Firefox for many reasons, including popup blocking. So over the last few weeks I’ve been surprised to see occasional popups. It turns out that some clever people figured out that you could launch popups from ...

Mozilla Firefox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: The featured article at Wikipedia today is a huge, detailed piece on Mozilla Firefox, thus bringing together two of my favorite things. With Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation aims to develop a small, fast, simple, and highly extensible web browser (separate from the larger ...

Sites that make Firefox sad: Why would you want to make the Firefox sad? He s so cute. The following is a list of sites that actively block browsers other than Internet Explorer or have some serious problem that prevents the site from being usable in Firefox. Ignoring Firefox used to ...

Why I don't recommend Firefox: Adam doesn't think that Firefox is ready to be unleashed on all users just yet. He makes some good points. Firefox right now is very good for an experienced net user, but is not at all ready for the average person. If you plan on ...

Is Firefox the sign of long term problems at Microsoft?: Some interesting thoughts on how Firefox might really damage Microsoft. If Firefox can get its claws in somewhere, then it's the first bonafide "crack in the bubble" of the theory that having all Microsoft products in an enterprise makes life ...

How to set up multiple homepages in Firefox: Great Firefox tip from Lifehacker. Is this documented? If there's more than one site you always visit after starting up Firefox, you can set your homepage to open several tabs of different web sites at once automatically. From Firefox's Tools menu, Options, ...

Business Must Be Cautious With Firefox: Why ComputerWorld thinks you should not use Firefox. In the near term, many business users will be better served by keeping Internet Explorer and installing security updates as they're released. If they aren't dependent on Internet Explorer technology, however, some end users could use ...

Firefox and Thunderbird Garage: Another cool book on the Wonder Twins of the Web. I'm still waiting for the first one. Welcome to Firefox and Thunderbird Garage. This book will introduce you to the exciting world of safe and secure browsing and email using two great products: the Firefox browser ...

Firefox 3 to drop support for older Windows and Mac X 10.2: I think this is wise. There comes a point when you have to move upward and onward. Currently Firefox 3 is scheduled to be officially released in May 2007. When Firefox 3 is finally released it is expected ...

Forrester: Greasemonkey Primes Firefox For Embarrassment: Forrester has released a report that says Greasemonkey is a good reason to ditch plans for corporate Firefox rollouts. [...] IT managers beware: Greasemonkey will cause you nothing but headaches, and may even be a good reason to delay that Firefox pilot you're planning. ...

Firefox Hacks: Coming in March. I ache with anticipation. Firefox Hacks is ideal for power users who want to maximize the effectiveness of Firefox, the next-generation web browser that is quickly gaining in popularity. This highly-focused book offers all the valuable tips and tools you need to enjoy a superior ...

Portable Firefox 1.0 (USB Drive-Friendly): If anyone knows what you'd use this for, comment. Portable Firefox is a fully functional package of Firefox optimized for use on a USB key drive. It has some specially-selected optimizations to make it perform faster and extend the life of your USB key as ...

Will Mozilla Fly?: Very positive article on Firefox from a U.K. IT magazine. It took me a whole five minutes to decide to ditch Internet Explorer and switch to Firefox. Why? The learning curve is about 5 minutes at most. FireFox is simpler to use. Configuring it is easy ...

Microsoft's Worst Nightmare: Business 2.0 has a good article on the new front in the browser wars: rich client apps. Firefox has XUL, which is a language to create applications within the Firefox browser. This article explains why Microsoft should be worried about it. [...] Firefox's open platform gives it ...

Is the Firefox honeymoon over?: Apparently, the number of viruses and exploits coming out for Firefox is more than for IE lately. As you can see, the facade that Firefox is the cure to the Internet Explorer security blues is quickly fading. It just goes to prove that any popular ...

Firefox fortune hunters: This is really, really great news. Just because Firefox is free and open source doesn't mean developers aren't cashing in on the popularity of the Mozilla Foundation's new browser. On the contrary, new businesses are cropping up to provide organizations ranging from museums to software companies to ...

Firefox's biggest obstacle is lazy programming: Truer words have rarely been spoken. The biggest obstacle facing widespread adoption of the Firefox browser is lazy programming not from the Mozilla Foundation but from corporates that have not tested their applications with anything but IE.

Speed up Firefox: This hack has been floating around quite a bit in the last week I've read about it in four different places now. I did it, but didn't notice much of a speed increase. Anyone else? This tip will speed up your Firefox significantly, but will mainly ...

Get Firefox to do NTLM: This is very cool. Why wasn't this documented earlier? SharePoint pages look and work fine in Firefox, but I was having to reauthenticate on every single page, which really hindered my enjoyment of the experience. I finally figured out how to get Firefox to do ...

Why FireFox is Blocked: Someone is trying to start a trend of blocking Firefox because they don t like their ads getting removed. The Mozilla Foundation and its Commercial arm, the Mozilla Corporation, has allowed and endorsed Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites and also prevents ...

Sync your Firefox settings via Google: There are privacy issues galore here, but the fact remains I've been wishing for something like this for a long time. Google Labs releases the Google Sync Firefox extension, which saves your browser's cookies, passwords, bookmarks, history and current list of open tabs to ...

How to write Firefox extensions: A pretty stunning tutorial on how to write extensions for Firefox, greatest browser ever. This is exactly what a lot of people are looking for. Now if someone would write something this good for creating Movable Type extentions. Via Phil Ringnalda.

HOW TO: Using Performancing for Firefox: Performancing is a great blog with a really terrible name.  I mean...performancing?  What does that mean? No matter -- it's a top-notch piece of work.  It's a blog about blogging, and they have great content. And now they happen to have the most insanely ...

Firefox (Mozilla Corporation/Mozilla Foundation) made $72M last year?!: I wouldn't have predicted this in a million years. The best piece of information I got out of BarCampLA was that Firefox, which is produced by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, made $72M last year and is on target to have 120 employees ...

silverorange pitches in with Firefox: Two great tastes that taste better together. ...I’ve been working with a collection of designers from around the world (literally - we span at least five times zones) on the visual identity of the Mozilla projects. The first big project by the team was the ...

Mozilla Firefox has hit the big 1.0, and is available for download now. The update promises "Better Tabbed Browsing Controls" and "a horde of other bug fixes..." Free. For Mac OS X and others.

If you don't read the New York Times, you may not know that Firefox has a two-page ad in today's edition promoting itself. This got me thinking: with all the momentum behind Firefox, what is to become of Opera? If I was working for Opera, how would I feel about ...

Here's an exercise in the obvious, but it's something I just realized -- using Firefox is great on public computers because of its privacy management. I'm traveling right now, and the computer in the hotel where I'm staying has Firefox installed (I didn't install it, I swear -- the was ...

Bon Echo (aka Firefox 2) Alpha 2 Review : The alpha of Firefox 2 is out. Some neat stuff: Automatic search term suggestion for selected search engines, a la Google Suggest More control over tab behavior, including better placement of the tab close button Automatic formatting of raw RSS feeds ...

So, has anybody else installed the newest Flash plugin and now can't view any flash sites with Firefox anymore? How do I roll this back one version? I really hate going back to IE just to view flash sites.

It's floating around the blog-world today that Dell is shipping Firefox pre-installed on all its machines in the U.K. If so, that's deceptively huge news. Blake Ross from the Firefox group has confirmed this. Now if they would only make it the default browser.... Bill Gates must be seriously hating ...

Turn Firefox into a web writer: Here's a great article over at Lifehacker on how to hot-rod Firefox into being a really nice place to write text. We've probably covered all these extensions at one time or another, but it's really handy to have all this one place. You can ...

Sounds like something the parents may get installed this weekend: Internet services company Netcraft has released a version of its toolbar for Firefox. The plug-in can help users of the Web browser avoid phishing scams, the company said. Via ZDNet.

Mozilla FireFox has been awarded "Best In Show" at the LinuxWorld conference, which is taking place this week at the Moscone Center in 'Frisco. "The winners of the LinuxWorld Product Excellence Awards represent the best that open source has to offer,"� said Warwick Davies, group vice president, IDG World Expo. ...

If you're addicted to checking your AdSense revenue, this Firefox plugin is a Godsend. There are a lot of commercial alternatives, but they do things far above just answering the single question most of us want to know: how am I doing today?

All sorts of FireFox news this weekend: The Fedora Core blog has posted a short preview of features expected in FireFox 1.1. Among them are instant rendering on the back button, instant application of settings changes, and enhanced tab navigation. I'm very sad to report that The 'Fox got it's ...

I was looking over some stats for Gadgetopia this morning, and I stumbled across this: In January, 41% of user agents were from Internet Explorer, and 21% were from Firefox. So far in February, it's 39% and 23%. And both months had 2% for Netscape.

Icons: It's still orange: IE7 is going to use the Firefox icon for RSS. This may seem like a small thing, but was when the last time Microsoft (and the IE group in particular) ever said, "Hey, there's a good standard already out there. Let's embrace it." I'm frankly amazed ...

GMailCompose: If you have a GMail account and use Mozilla or Firefox, this extension is right up your alley. Makes mailto: links load a google mail compose window and adds a GMailCompose link to the context menu. Apparently Google has created a URL spec for doing just this. Good for ...

Viamatic foXpose - All Releases: This alone would be worth the upgrade to 1.5. It's Expose for Firefox. Click on the icon in the status bar to view all the browser windows with a single click. Via Lifehacker, via has a good screenshot of the extension in action. Anyone with ...

We talked before about the new API extensions, but that pales in comparison to the single great thing about Firefox 1.5. Here it is -- You can now punch the monkey without fear of commitment. Since they improved pop-up blocking, including pop-ups spawned from Flash and Java, you can now ...

Mozilla Bon Echo Alpha 1 Release Notes: The first alpha release of Firefox 2.0 is out. Some thoughts on it -- There are not a lot of new customer-facing features. There are two reasons for this, in my mind: Open-source projects are often more developer-friendly than customer/user-friendly. Spolsky has talked ...

Firefox3: Web Apps Game changer: This is obviously significant, but I'm curious as to how this will actually work. I'm assuming this isn't just a "Firefox makes it work" scenario, and that there will be modifications necessary to the underlying app. So, this leaves me asking, what does "support" mean ...

implement site-specific preference service: It will be interesting to see how this manifests itself, but it looks like Firefox 3 will add support for something I ve wanted for a long time. Implement a site-specific preference service that lets callers get and set arbitrary preferences on a site-specific basis. I complained ...

say goodbye (again) to pop-ups!: Here's why a lot of sites have managed to get around Firefox's pop-up blocking lately. A lot of people have been reporting a new breed of pop-ups on the web. This increasing menace is rooted in the pop-up capabilities of plug-ins like flash and Java. ...

Blake Ross, one of the folks who started FireFox, posted a funny story about his grandfather's browser evangelism: So when I returned from the airport bathroom two weeks ago, I was hardly surprised to find him [...] engaging the head Rabbi of Israel in a delightful conversation about Firefox. We ...

Internet Explorer Takes Another Market-Share Hit: It's small, sure, but it's perceptible. Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer lost nearly a percentage point in market share in the past seven weeks and is nearing a loss of 3 percentage points since its decline first began in early June, [...] Internet Explorer dropped ...

Extension Room :: Popup ALT Attributes: Interesting little flamewar going on over at the Mozilla Extension Room. First, here's something I didn't know: The ALT tag for images is NOT supposed to produce a little tooltip when you mouseover an image, according to the HTML spec. This is supposed to ...

If you haven't upgraded to Firefox 1.5, then you may still be dealing with those horrible dialog boxes when there's an HTTP or DNS error. The new version has nicely formatted standard pages, like the sample above. I always hated those dialogs, because when a domain wasn't found or something, ...

Aardvark Firefox Extension: It's a good week for me and aardvarks. First I watch the movie, and now I find the Firefox extension. Ever wanted to print a page, but it was all crapped up? There's stuff everywhere, and the text goes halfway off the page when it's printed, and ...

FirePHP - Firefox Extension for PHP Development: This is a really interesting project. It's a PHP extension that will let you send information along with the response from your PHP script which is only viewable using the awesome Firebug Firefox extension. So it's like printing debugging stuff to the screen ...

Top 10 products: The top ten products in CNet's history. Coolness: Firefox is number five. [...] Firefox 1.0 brought the open-source browser into the mainstream. Some never thought Mozilla could make it as anything more than a geek badge of pride. The light, secure, and efficient Firefox is legitimately challenging ...

I'm setting up a new machine, and tonight I was getting Firefox all pimped out with extensions. I've installed five of them, which are -- without a doubt -- crucial to me (even though two of them are new for 1.5). Here are my top five: Web Developer Once you ...

Yargh! The salty sea dogs at the Mozilla Foundation have provided ye with a fine booty in the Mozilla 1.0 pre-release. Slashdot reports that they hoped that a million land lubbers might raid their download site within ten days of the release, but the scallywags reached that in only four ...

ErrorZilla Firefox extension: What a great plugin. Firefox extension ErrorZilla turns Firefox's less-than-useful default "Server not found" page into a much more practical and useful tool. Rather than the lone "Try again" button, ErrorZilla adds buttons to the error page that allow you to do things like view the Google ...

In the comments on Deane's latest bit of Spolsky-worship, I had postulated that, given the idea that thick clients for the web can provide a better experience, and Firefox's increasing market share, 2006 could become the year of XUL. There was a great link posted on digg this morning that ...

Extension Room :: URIid: I found this via Joe's post on skinning GMail. Very cool extension. Let's you fix little formatting problems with sites you visit frequently. Well thought-out. The URIid extension makes it possible to create CSS rules based on the site you are visiting. This is useful when ...

I'm curious these days about actual browser saturation statistics. Everyone has a different story. Boing Boing reported this week that almost half of their visitors are coming in on a Mozilla-based browser. OneStat.com is reporting IE has dipped under 90% for the first time in many, many years. WebSideStory says ...

Spread Firefox Downtimex: Talk about a high-profile hack among geeks It appears that a part of Spread Firefox was hacked in an attempt to use it to send out spam. It doesn't look like the attacker accessed any personal data on the site, but to be safe, we're encouraging all ...

Here's what I'd like to see for upcoming browsers: customized browser settings on a URL-by-URL basis. I think it's time to admit that different sites sometimes require vastly different browser settings to work optimally. For instance, I visit some sites that scroll horizontally. To see them completely, I need to ...

In a surprise twist, a security flaw has been found in IE's impenetrable armor that allows a trojan to install its payload and monitor for passwords sent over https connections. Your account number? Now it's everyone's account number! Thanks for sharing. A "Browser Helper Object" is a DLL that allows ...

The Mozilla Foundation has released the 0.8 release of my favorite browser. However, perhaps in order to escape withering criticism from owen ;-), they have yet again changed the name of the browser to Firefox. The new release marks a significant milestone on the development roadmap towards the highly anticipated ...

Want to know how Abe Vigoda is doing? Then this is your Firefox plugin. When Firefox starts up, this extension automatically fetches Abe Vigoda's current status, and displays it in a small panel on the status bar. It periodically does so again every so often, so that you always have ...

Schneier on Security: Internet Explorer Sucks: Security God Bruce Schneier tells it like it is. MSIE was 98% unsafe. There were only 7 days in 2004 without an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. Firefox was 15% unsafe. There were 56 days with an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. 30 of ...

Google treading on Microsoft turf in Dell tests: In the article, both Dell and Google confirm this report. The report, citing unnamed sources, said Dell and Google are in talks to put Google software on as many as 100 million new Dell PCs following a bidding process in which Google ...

About four months ago, I asked you all to send me a screencap of the Gadgetopia home page sitting in your browser window. I promised to do some analysis of the results, and I kept meaning to get to it, but never got to it. Tonight, I finally sat down ...

Firefox Experiments With Keyboard Navigation: This reminds me of DVD menu navigation, which kinda sucks, so I don't know how well this is going to work. Bravo for trying, though. Rather than point and click with the mouse, these Firefox builds let users apply the Shift and Alt keys, then ...

What is Google cooking with Firefox?: The concept of a Google-based browser is gaining steam. I promise you that Ben Goodger knows what's going on. Someone kidnap him and force him to talk. It is all over the news that Google just hired two major software developers from the Mozilla ...

Thunderbird Finds It Hard To Mimic Firefox's Rapid Rise, Says Report: A report has been released which indicates that Thunderbird is not flourishing the way Firefox is. Thunderbird's major shortcoming is the absence of an integrated calendar, the report says. A future release is expected to fill that void. Once ...

Resizeable Textarea 0.1a: The guys over at Lifehacker are on my "happy list" today for pointing out this Firefox plugin. It lets you hover over the edge of a textarea, grab it, and resize the box. I know a lot of Firefox plugins are just gee-whiz stuff, but this is ...

Ars Technica has an interesting blog roundup article this morning with quotes from a number of MS employees who are questioning the wisdom of keeping IE around without improving it. The saga of Internet Explorer, the piece of software that once brought the Department of Justice to the brink of ...

ScrapBook: This is a great little Firefox extension that lets you save Web pages locally with a right-click. That's handy all by itself, but it also has a browser sidebar that lets you manage and organize everything you've saved. ScrapBook is a Firefox extension, which helps you to save Web ...

Joe told me last night that he upgraded to Firefox 1.5. Looking through my Skype history, here's the conversation: Joe: Firefox 1.5 is out, looks really nice. Deane: What's the big difference with 1.5? Joe: Supposedly faster, some security tweaks. The big noticable one is drag and drop tabs. Ad ...

If you've been following the search engine wars, the latest craze the kids are into these days is providing thumbnails of the web sites that return in search results. Google, however, sticking to the 'less is more' approach, doesn't have this feature. Chu Yeow points us to a Firefox extension ...

Google takes 'beta' off desktop search: What? A Google tool coming out of beta? How unlike them. The SDK sounds very, very promising. Google on Monday plans to introduce a full version of its desktop-search software, with a developer's kit and support for Firefox and Netscape Web browsers. The Mountain ...

Bridging Desktop And Web Applications - A Look At Mozilla Prism: Here s an article about what are being called Single Site Browsers (SSBs), or little standalone browsers that let you browse and interact with a single Web app in a desktop app-ish environment. Surf to Gmail, for instance, choose “Convert ...

WikiAlong is a new extension for Firefox that s so cool, I may need to go lay down for a while. Basically, it puts a Wiki page in the browser sidebar, and displays a Wiki entry for every page you visit with the browser. Wikalong is a FirefoxExtension that embeds a ...

Office 2000 HTML Filter 2.0: This is a handy little tool. Once you have completed editing an HTML document in Word 2000 or Excel 2000, you can use the Office HTML Filter to remove the Office-specific markup tags from the final copy of the HTML document. I took a 45-page ...

Stopping Flagrant Piracy of Mint: Mint is a stat-tracking app that I actualy purchased and used for a while. I paid $30 for it. Well, shocker, Mint is being pirated and the developer is none too happy about it. I can't say I'm shocked that it's being pirated -- when ...

Are the Browser Wars Back? - How Mozilla's Firefox trumps Internet Explorer: This is a good article from Slate that rings true Mozilla and Firefox are surging in the market right now. More and more, people are switching. You've probably been told to dump Internet Explorer for a Mozilla ...

Here's something I'd love the ability to synchronize two installations of the same software on two different computers. I'm thinking right now of Thunderbird. I have so many settings customized email accounts, RSS feeds, custom search rules, address book entries, adaptive spam filters, etc. Settings I tweak on ...

It seems that there's always some consternation in the web design community regarding the styling of form elements. Usability studies and user observation has taught them that they shouldn't be applying styles to form controls; if you change the look of the control, it's less recognizable for novice users who ...

I love plugin architectures. Having a well-done method for people to extend your system is a huge, huge benefit that we've discussed and lauded in relation to Firefox and Movable Type. But, there's a dark side. When you update software to a new version, you normally do a regression test, ...

I Wanna Devise A Virus: Funny. Devious. Illegal. Isn't it about time someone wrote a web standards virus? It would uninstall older browsers and replace them with Firefox or worse case, IE 6. Maybe even be so nice as to move the victims bookmarks/favorites and homepage over to the ...

SpellBound - Spellchecker for Firefox and the Mozilla Suite: All those comments this morning about my spelling made me self-conscious. This works beautifully. SpellBound is a port of the spellchecker code and user interface from the Mozilla Suite's Composer that enables spell checking in web forms such as html textarea ...

bitter pill: w3ctextarea 'textarea xhtml validator': Huh. This is a pretty good idea. Or you could just use Markdown. w3ctextarea is a Firefox extension that allows you to validate data within a textarea as 'XHTML 1.0 Strict' using the w3c xhtml strict validator. It gleans any text from any and ...

TrackMeNot: Would this really make a difference? Probably not, but it's an interesting idea. TrackMeNot runs in Firefox as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. It hides users' actual search trails in a cloud of 'ghost' queries, ...

Mozilla Foundation Announces Creation of Mozilla Corporation: Most of the foundation is transferring to a (technically) for-profit, taxable corporation. The creation of the Mozilla Corporation should eliminate some of the thorny legal and tax issues that have been caused by the revenue-generating potential of Firefox and Thunderbird. The Mozilla Corporation ...

tabbed message display in Thunderbird: Apparently coming soon: tabbed message browsing in Thunderbird. Here's a screenshot of a test build. Firefox has shown that keeping a particular page open and browsing multiple web pages simultaneously is easier when the pages are loaded into tabs. The same is true for email ...

Enable DesignMode: I tried this, and it worked great. Someone please tell me there's something like this for Firefox. Enable DesignMode is an extension for Internet Explorer that adds a context menu option that enables Design Mode. Design mode lets you edit the web page in the active window. No ...

RAM Upgrades Are A Wonderful Thing: Let's take a little survey: How much RAM do you use? I can't imagine using a modern computer with less than 1GB of ram. When you factor in Thunderbird, Firefox, Emacs, two IM clients, Office Apps, PuTTY, the Gimp, and the various other stuff ...

Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0: Acrobat Reader 7.0 is out, and it sounds like it's much less aggravating. Adobe have finally got around to addressing the biggest single problem with the Acrobat Reader - startup speed. In my web-browser (Firefox), Version 7.0 startup is quicker than I ever remember it being. ...

SeaMonkey News: While the Mozilla Suite split into its component parts (Firefox, Thunderbird, and Nvu), the combination of all the pieces will live on as SeaMonkey. The group is planning to deliver an Alpha version of its first release, SeaMonkey 1.0, within the next few weeks. [...] SeaMonkey contains a ...

Using Firefox on OS X? Like to find free content for your iPod? If so, FoxiPod just made your job a little bit easier. FoxiPod is a Greasemonkey script that will place a small icon next to any link to an audio file compatible with iTunes. Clicking the icon downloads ...

Macromedia - Dreamweaver 8: The new version of Dreamweaver is out, and it includes this snazzy feature: Simply point a web page to an XML file or a URL of an XML feed and Dreamweaver will introspect it to enable dragging and dropping the appropriate fields onto the page. There's ...

MOOX :: Welcome to my Werxshop...: This guy custom compiles Mozilla apps for various platforms. If I'm reading his analysis (PDF) correctly, he's claiming 10-20% rendering speed increases for various Intel processors. I am currently releasing four versions, or "M" builds M0, M1, M2, and M3, of the Firefox ...

Mint: Requirements: Here's the requirements page for Mint. It's kinda nice to see IE not supported. In order to view Mint you should be using a modern browser with support for transparent PNGs, modern DOM scripting (including XMLHTTPRequest) with competency in CSS 2. Safari or Firefox, both free, are highly ...

User Agent Switcher Extension: I don't know how, why, or when I would ever use this, but it's a great example of the velocity of the development over at Mozilla. They have an extension for about anything these days. The User Agent Switcher extension for Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla adds ...

Google just hired Mike Pinkerton, the brainfather of Camino. He will join Firefox Big Dogs Ben Goodger and Darin Fisher, among others. So the biggest search engine is putting a lot of horsepower behind the most popular browser (at least the most popular one not owned by a competitor). This ...

Beyond Proprietary Databases: Helen Borrie on the Future of Firebird: Here's an interesting interview with one of the people behind Firebird, an emerging open-source, multi-platform database server. It's a fork of a mature commercial database called InterBase. InterBase is an enterprise-level database Firebird is the same, but better. You'll ...

The folks over at mozilla.org have been busy: New Firefox Release 1.0PR includes Live Bookmarks, which creates a bookmarks folder out of an RSS feed, and a really slick interface for finding text in a page. It does disable some older extensions, though, so look out. My main gripe is ...

Email Call to Action: The Mozilla Foundation is planning to give the Thunderbird project away so they can concentrate solely on Firefox. We have concluded that we should find a new, separate organizational setting for Thunderbird; one that allows the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny. Mozilla is exploring ...

Opera tries to force IE into W3C compliance with EU complaint; Firefox s success may work against it: Opera has filed a complaint with the EU trying to get a ruling that forces IE into W3C compliance. Opera wants the EC to hold Microsoft s feet to the fire when it comes ...

20 Things They Don't Want You to Know: This is just one page in an excellent article from PC World (found via Slashdot) that has links to multiple resources for finding passwords that you've forgotten. Finding license keys for software you currently have installed Revealing saved passwords in IE that ...

Download details: Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar Beta: Hadn't seen this before, but I'm game for anything that makes developing for IE suck less. Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page. [...] Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques. ...

Whiting Out the Ads, but at What Cost?: This is an interesting article on the AdBlock Plus controversy. We talked a couple weeks back about the guy blocking Firefox because of their support of AdBlock Plus. The article concentrates on the taboo question: what if the Firefox-blocking guy is actually ...

Fix your mom s computer for mother s day: Joel rules. What a great promotion idea. This Sunday is Mother s Day. Why not fix your mom s computer? You know: remove the spyware and adware, install Firefox, and make it so that weird toolbar toast doesn t pop up every 15 seconds. To make ...

Opera, the Forgotten Browser: About a month ago, we asked "What will be come of Opera?" now that Firefox has such momentum. Here's a Wired article about the future of Opera that points to mobile and handheld devices as the platform it's staking out. Things seem good at the company: ...

PHP Meet Mr. FireBug - PHP Debugging for Web 2.0: Another great little debugging extension for PHP. Like FirePHP, it has integration with FireBug, the greatest Firefox extension in recorded history. The real gem here is a great little screencast (QuickTime link) which shows how simple this thing is to ...

ZDNet states that the latest variants of the Bagle worm include the original assembler source code of the virus as an attachment to the emails it sends. Security experts worry that this will produce a lot more variants, and make it harder to prosecute the author. "On Friday, the perfect ...

Given the growing success of Firefox, a new Mozilla-based project code-named 'Lightning' may be worth keeping an eye on. Lightning is the working project name for an extension to tightly integrate calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Thunderbird. [...] Q. Is Lightning meant as a competitor to Outlook? A. With ...

Microsoft to roll out online versions of Windows, Office: This is apparently a very big deal, but I can't figure out why. I went to the site -- there's nothing really available yet. Windows Live will be offered for free and try to make money from the rapidly expanding online ...

Firefox and the Anxiety of Growing Pains: What happens when you go from no money to lots of money? What do you owe the people that got you there? Thanks to the Google agreement, the Mozilla Foundation went from revenue of nearly $6 million in 2004 to more than $52 ...

Xinha Here! - All Releases: Your content management system doesn't have WYSIWYG? No problem -- here's a Firefox extension to make any textarea a WYSIWYG HTML editor on-demand. Xinha Here! is a wrapper for the Xinha HTML editor that enables WYSIWYG editing in any HTML textarea and text input elements. ...

Yesterday during the Mozilla love-in, Gadgetopia reader Tomas hipped us to the Bookmarks Synchronizer Extension. I hadn't heard of it before, but it's a great extension. Basically, you give it an FTP site, and it will upload a copy of your bookmarks. Add it to another copy of FireFox (at ...

Web 2.0 Service Mark Controversy (Tim responding this time): Tim O'Reilly responds to the "Web 2.0" trademark controversy which has apparently been pretty hateful over the last week. O'Reilly also values its trademarks -- as do other companies and individuals aligned with the values of openness and sharing. (I'll note ...

I've been hunting a decent RSS aggregator for Linux for some time. Liferea and Straw refresh at the speed of smell, and Sage (for FireFox) is the only RSS aggregator I know of that doesn't aggregate. AKregator does the trick. Ragica over on KDE-apps sez: A nice clean sensible RSS ...

I'm using a new stat tracking app called Mint. It has a plug-in called "User Agent 007" (ho, ho -- what wit) that captures browser stats. Interesting stats: almost 90% of Gadgetopia visitors are at 1024 x 768 or greater almost 20% of visitors are at higher resolution than 1024 ...

403 Forbidden: In writing my earlier tinydb post, something odd happened. All requests to tinydb were stopped with this message. We re sorry but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can t process your request right now. The message ...

mozdev.org - platypus: index: Holy cats -- Greasemonkey is going to change the Web forever. This plugin works with the latest version of Greasemonkey, to let you change pages visually, then save the results as a Greasemonkey script. Platypus is a Firefox extension which lets you modify a Web page ...

Not all web piracy is the sexy stuff, like games and movies. Julis Schorzman notes that one of his college textbooks recently showed up as a BitTorrent. The book the UW uses to teach Calculus showed up on Suprnova the other day. Here's the link. (Wish we had Bit Torrent ...

Firebug 1.0: It's Hot, Baby, Hot!: I agree with Josh -- if you have the Web Developer extension, its perfect partner is Firebug. The ability to inspect the CSS of individual elements is a huge help. If you have anything at all to do with making web pages, you've gotta ...

Is Opera in Microsoft's future?: Dvorak says Microsoft should dump IE altogether and buy Opera lock, stock, and barrel. This week Microsoft announced that it wouldn't upgrade the Internet Explorer for the Macintosh, leaving that market segment to apparently languish and gravitate towards the Safari browser and Firefox. Microsoft does ...

I've been looking for a small project to test out the Rails framework, so I've decided to combine that with exploring ways to reduce the time and complexity involved in creating a blog entry. This will be an ongoing series of articles, but this is a low-priority project, so each ...

Here s a question for you all: is there anything magic about the CSS value transparent ? Does this value change a selector s specificity? I had a class with this rule: a.SomeClass { background-color: transparent; } Below that, I had another rule: ul#SomeId li.SomeClass a.SomeClass { background-color: [some specific color]; } This ...

Elias Fotinis TaskArrange :: Arrange the Windows taskbar buttons: Okay, this sounds stupid, but I'm wicked guilty of it. From left to right, it has to be Outlook, Thunderbird, Firefox. If it's not, I get a little...anxious. Sometimes we open our programs in a specific sequence, to keep their taskbar ...

Fantastic article (as usual) over on A List Apart this morning. The next version of CSS (CSS3) includes a lot of handy features, one of which is a 'column-count' property, telling a web element to render its contained text into multiple columns (think magazine or newspaper). That would be a ...

Nic Wolff has come up with an ingenious solution to having different password for every site you log in to. To get the full effect, check out Jon Udell's screencast on the subject, which does a great job of summing things up. Essentially, Nic asks you to come up with ...

Have you ever wanted to chat with other folks looking at the same web page you are? Now you can. Chatsum is a Firefox extension that lets you chat and leave messages on any website for other Chatsum users to see and interact with. The Chatsum sidebar houses a fully-fledged ...

A while back we posted on 'Knows Your Name' Elmo. (The idea of an Elmo that knows my son's name creeps me out. I couldn't really watch A.I. because of that bear. For me, Elmo has taken a base-jump into the Uncanny Valley). I add this next to, "Chicken Dance ...

Chris Pederick is the guy who makes the awesome Firefox Web Developer Toolbar, so he gets free beer from me if he ever needs to drop by Sioux Falls for any reason. We've talked up Chris' toolbar since way back, and it takes CSS development from a headache to a ...

Jon Udell: Visualizing change: I wish I was Jon Udell, as he gets everything he asks for. This time he along with some help from Andy Baio got someone to write a script that animates Wikipedia changes inline. See the picture at the above link, and he apparently ...

Move over, AJAX. Microformats are the new 'it' technology: Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current ...

Web Developer Extension: I don't remember where I heard about this one, but it's a peach of an extension. We've talked about the Web Developer extension for Mozilla and FireFox before, but the latest version comes with the sweetest sidebar you could ever imagine... You can open the stylesheet for ...

Rhapsody is giving away music. I was able to listen to a dozen full-length songs today with no cost and no catch. According to this article at O'Reilly, anonymous users can listen to 25 songs per month (but no free repeats -- the same song twice counts as two songs). ...

MBoffin.com did something really cool while redesigning his blog. They made a 'design timeline' while working on his latest site design. Every time the designer saved the site, he took a screencap, and turned it into an animated GIF. He's imbibed the 'presentation separate from content' Kool-aid, so you can ...

Firefox add-on lets surfers tweak sites, but is it safe?: This Greasemonkey extension is getting a lot of coverage these days. Essentially, it lets you write JavaScript that's applied to individual pages automatically. So if there's this one page that shows too many ads, you can write some JavaScript to ...

I've discovered yet another use for the Web Developer Toolbar; I can perform The Site Design Litmus Test, heretofore known as "Joe's Razor" (named for no one in particular): Open up a site you've done in Firefox, and take a look at it. Now, open up the 'Edit CSS' sidebar ...

What they got right I was pleasantly suprised by a lot of the features they are offering. First off, making new entries is terribly simple. They already define categories, give you an easy way to add pictures to articles, and there's neither a WYSIWYG editor nor markup needed to write ...

I'm not working from a Windows box as much as I used to these days, so maybe I'm a little too blissfully isolated from the sheer volume of crap that most of you put up with from your computer each day. Tonight, though, I was working from my wife's PC ...

A little while ago, I made a short post on Miguel de Icaza s comments on Avalon, Longhorn s new UI API (which obsoletes WinForms, which obsoletes the unmanaged API s). Miguel, one of the driving forces behind mono and Gnome, pointed out what he considered to be problems with Avalon. Well, Chris ...

I've purchased a shrink-wrapped copy of Turbo Tax every year for the last five years or so. I was going to do it again this year, but Joe told me to try their Web-based version (same link as above). I've known about Turbo Tax for the Web, but I've always ...

Joe and I have been working with eZ publish for the last few months. It is, without a doubt, the best content management system I've ever used. I got more done in one week with eZ publish than I did in nine months with Documentum. I like it so much, ...

Essentials : Mark Pilgrim has listed his "essential" software tools for doing his job. I always like to see these the absolute, "can't live without" tools of people who do the same work as me. As the risk of being self-indulgent, here's mine: Email: Thunderbird or Mozilla Mail via ...

Are you paying someone to make web pages? By now I'm sure that everyone is sick of hearing web people wail and moan about how much they hate IE. But the sad truth is that aside from giving your security guy nightmares, and serving as the source of a lot ...

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