• Feb 11, 2004

    More on Mozilla - Mozilla Backup, BT tracker, updated TBE

    Ah Mozilla is buzzing (bzzz!) all over the World Wide Web. More news from yours truly, this time on some tidbits that I found to be useful to the common Mozilla Suite/Firefox/Thunderbird user.

    Get Firefox


    So, in no particular order:

  • Feb 10, 2004

    Firebird is now Firefox, milestone 0.8 released

    It's been posted all over by now, even Slashdotted (mozilla.org was down for quite awhile earlier), Neowin-ed, blogged a thousand times over. Yes, Mozilla Firebird is now known as Mozilla Firefox. With the 0.8 Milestone release of the lightweight Gecko-based browser formerly known as Phoenix (now also formerly known as Mozilla Firebird), the Mozilla Foundation has come up with a name which shouldn't run into any legal tussles like the old Phoenix and Firebird names seemed to attract (well, the Firebird name wasn't exactly a legal tussle, more like an act of brotherhood among fellow Open Source developers).

    Ben Goodger (Firefox Engineering Lead) wrote about the rebranding of Firebird to Firefox. Steven Garrity was drafted in as the new Visual Design Coordinator who developed the new Firefox icon you see below (together with the rest his team). Jon Hicks implemented it (meaning he did the computer graphic design work), as he describes in his journal entry. Yes links galore and more to come.

    Firefox icon

    The rebranding also entailed some new spiffy icons, decals and ads which you can find in the Mozilla Firefox ad webpage. If you had a Firebird button or ad, it's time to update them! For my case, I had an 80 x 15 pixel Firebird blog button, but the new Firefox one is 94 x 15 pixel large, which was totally out of whack with the rest of the buttons. Photoshop to the rescue...

    Firefox button

    So what's new in Firefox 0.8? I won't repeat what's already been written, so you can refer to the Firefox What's New section and Jesse Ruderman's listing of new features and bugfixes. In particular, one nasty regression that wasn't fixed was the "Installing 2 extensions without restarting re-launches extension-installer for previous installed extensions" regression. Hell, one of the biggest flaws of Firebird was it's poor extension management. Extensions often break a Firebird installation, like Tab Browser Extensions (Firefox 0.8 doesn't seem to work with TBE, so I got this patched TBE extension which you can get as well). Piro Date (author of TBE) has updated TBE and it works with Firefox 0.8. See his post in his forum. And removing extensions has to be done manually (and tediously). Thankfully this will be addressed in Firefox 0.9 where an extension uninstaller is planned.

    As for zip builds (as opposed to installer builds) for Windows, there isn't an official one yet, though Ben Goodger says he'll have one by the week. Unofficial builds are also being released, and the best place to get them is to check out the Firefox builds forum at MozillaZine.org. jesus_x has a zip build which was highlighted at MozillaNews.

    More links:

  • Feb 9, 2004

    Microsoft FrontPage ad dripping with irony

    Look at this Microsoft skyscraper ad for FrontPage 2003:

    Microsoft FrontPage 2003 ad

    Notice anything? No? Hint: zoom in on line 28.

    Source: David Tenser

  • Feb 5, 2004

    Kuro5shin article insults MovableType and MT bloggers

    Why your Movable Type blog must die goes out of the way to spectacularly insult weblogs. In particular, the author slams Movable Type for "bad design" and being vulnerable to comment-spamming scripts. Funny. Provoking (to MT users and bloggers at least). Read it, laugh, and move on.


    Doug provides some insight into the Kuro5shin article:

    The K5 article is not a simple rant by an individual. It is part of a script-kiddie assault on MT weblogs.

    ...

    The K5 posting was written by one of the script-kiddies, and not surprisingly it provides a link to the crapflood script.

    Read Doug's entire comment.

    James Joyce, the article author, has also made a response where he says of this weblog:

    There was also the person who made two identical TrackBacks and thought it was funny.

    The article was funny, yes, but "making" 2 identical TrackBacks wasn't my intention nor was it meant to be funny. I'm not saying MT doesn't have it's flaws, erm, dude, I'm just saying your insulting tone is simply that, insulting, which makes it harder to take you seriously.

  • Feb 4, 2004

    Test your browser security

    Scanit, a Brussels-based security company, has put online a Browser Security Test which tests for vulnerabilities in your web browser. There is a complete listing of the tests they run should you be interested.

    I ran the test on 3 of my the big browsers (for the Windows platform, that is) and collected the results.

    Results for Firebird 0.8.0+ (20040202) WinXP:

    The Browser Security Test is finished. Please find the results below:
    High Risk Vulnerabilities 0
    Medium Risk Vulnerabilities 0
    Low Risk Vulnerabilities 0

    Results for Opera 7.23 WinXP:

    The Browser Security Test is finished. Please find the results below:
    High Risk Vulnerabilities 0
    Medium Risk Vulnerabilities 0
    Low Risk Vulnerabilities 0

    Results for IE 6.0 WinXP:

    The Browser Security Test is finished. Please find the results below:
    High Risk Vulnerabilities 0
    Medium Risk Vulnerabilities 0
    Low Risk Vulnerabilities 0

    Seems like all my browsers are safe. However, as this thread at SitePoint Community Forums shows, IE needs to be patched with the latest security patches (as mine has been) to protect it from severable major security flaws. If you haven't, do so now by going to Windows Update in an Internet Explorer browser!

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