January 13, 2006

Thunderbird 1.5

Thunderbird, the Firefox’s sister product, released its 1.5 version.

It is now loading faster with my 1 year stored emails, better option dialog, spell-checking when you type…etc. Here’s some noticable new features:

Overall, Thunderbird 1.5 improved a lot in usability. Most of things getting you “feel right” now.

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December 10, 2005

Firefox Tab Tip

Just learn a new Firefox tab tip: double click at the empty space of tab bar call out a new tab! Great! With that I don’t have to always drag the “New Tab” icon to place at my personal toolbar — been used to click the icon to create new tab.

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November 30, 2005

A New Version, A New Home, A New Campaign

Mozilla.org released Mozilla Firefox 1.5. They have a new home: Mozilla.com — clean, simple, focus on Firefox and Thunderbird, I like the design. And with Firefox 1.5, no doubt it’s time to shout out the challenge to market loudly. Mozilla would have a new marketing campaign (note: page not ready yet) very soon. Finger cross…

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November 29, 2005

Get Firefox, Earn some cash

Google’s Firefox referral is now international:


The referral is only for Windows users, who previously never install Firefox in his/her PC, install and run the Firefox at the first time.

Get Mozilla Firefox, no matter you will help me earning some little cash or not. Get it, it’s for your own enjoying web surfing.

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November 28, 2005

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 in Mac OS X

I changed my browser back and forth in between Safari and Firefox. Lately Firefox 1.5 has been much more often than Safari. Its new tab option: “Force links that open new windows open in: A New Tab” just wins my heart — it match exactly what I used to do. I knew that Command+click could let you open a new tab of the links. But well, less key-strokes is always better for me.

On the other hand, probably I didn’t search hard enough for the right key (I don’t bother to do key remapping yet on my iBook). Use Command + Shift + {{ or }} is simply damn painful and inconvenient. Mozilla Firefox works sweet with Alt + 1, 2, 3… for the respective tabs opened. I use Adium as the basic IM client on Mac OS X, so it has the same shortcut key for multiple chat windows. So Firefox score +1.

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November 18, 2005

Firefox 1.5 RC3 Released!

The auto-update went through without problem for me, sweet. Mozilla.org has put up the RC3 logo on the main page, but at the time of writing, release note for RC3 seem not updated yet.

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November 11, 2005

Firefox 1.5 RC2

Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 2 is now available to download. I was using Firefox 1.5 RC1 since 2 weeks ago, worked fine for all my normal web surfing need (well, probably because I didn’t have much extension installed) — and the rendering speed seem faster most of the time. One noticable changes to most users is the layout of Option dialogue. It’s now more user friendly and easier to navigate and understand (hiding the un-necessary columns to avoid complexity).

Asa Dotzler has some brief info of what are fixed of this RC2 since RC1. And if you wonder why it shows Firefox 1.5 instead of Firefox 1.5 RC2 after the auto-update or manually installation, he has an explanation too.

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February 09, 2004

Firebird to FireFox

Mozilla team keep their promise:

* Mozilla Firebird Renamed Firefox, Version 0.8 Released
* Firefox 0.8 - The Browser, Rebranded
* The press release

If you stay tune at the Firebird mailing list as I, you would hear people asking time by time: when Mozilla is going to take action to settle the name conflict? Mozilla renamed its browser application, previously named Phoenix, to Firebird on April 2003. It has been brought concern to Firebird database community that the name conflict is hurting their promotion of the database server. Anyhow, it’s been promised Mozilla would take Firebird as an internal codename for the project and to rename it later in their release. Hence the rebranding. Hope this end the story. peace.

July 16, 2003

AOL laid off 50 Mozilla Hackers

AOL, mother company of Netscape, cut the remaining Netscape staffs who working on Mozilla web browser. Is this something related to the Microsoft’s settlement with AOL months ago? Then AOL suddenly found it isn’t justified to support the development of Mozilla?

The laid-off is sad for the people involved, there are still jobs out there for these smart people and some would continue the commitment towards Mozilla development. The impact would be more on the Mozilla group, because Netscape isn’t paying developers to develop Mozilla anymore. According to CNet News

The layoffs come as the loose Mozilla.org group, which had overseen the open-source development efforts of the Mozilla browser, transforms itself into a nonprofit foundation. The foundation is funded in large part by a $2 million donation from AOL and $300,000 from Lotus founder Mitch Kapor.

Mitchell Baker, who will be president of the new Mozilla Foundation, said the group would use part of its seed funding to hire “a core group of people,” which would include project managers and “key technical contributors” to the open-source project. Some of those people are expected to come from Netscape’s ranks. A broad group of independent volunteers and staffers at other companies are expected to continue working on the open-source browser effort, however.

It’s time to cut the link between Netscape and Mozilla, it’s time for some group to stand up and promote Mozilla for end user (which the role Netscape used to play).

July 02, 2003

Mozilla 1.4 released

What’s the big deal of this latest stable release of Mozilla? The 1.4 branch would replace the 1.0 branch as the stable development base, which also means Netscape would adopt it as the base for Netscape web browser. In fact, they have done it, Netscape 7.1 is based on Mozilla 1.4. Alright, may be there isn’t anybody would care about Netscape. But with this changes, they are actually more advanced than IE now. Switch to Mozilla if you’re still using Internet Explorer, read my call on Mozilla switch, and part 2, part 3.

Here’s the new features quoted from its release note:

June 05, 2003

New Mozilla Book on-line

Creating XPCOM Components, by Doug Turner and Ian Oeschger, is published on-line. The hardcopies would be available this August. It is licensed under Open Publication License. Thanks go to the authors and Mozilla community, publisher to make this great resource available on-line.

Another Mozilla book, Creating Applications with Mozilla, was published around 9 months ago, which is also available on-line. Great to see more Mozilla books published, it did help to create more Mozilla-powered application. As Mozilla isn’t just a browser, it’s more than a browser, it’s a framework.

June 04, 2003

Call for Mozilla Switch, part 3

You’ve heard about the reasons, maybe it’s time to get motivated by listening to people who’ve just trying it out or switched. Joel’s recent comment on Mozilla Firebird has attacted lots of notice, and quite a number of people inspired by him to try out Mozilla Firebird.

What is Mozilla Firebird anyway? First of all, Mozilla is actually refer to a suite of browser softwares that including a Web Browser, Mail & News application and Chatting application. It’s an Open Source project, along the way of development, the development effort has forked quite a number of different project under its name (Mozilla). For example, tools helping software development: Bugzilla, Tinderbox, Bonsai. Mozilla Firebird, previously named Phoenix, is one of the Mozilla projects. It is a standalone browser, with redesign of Mozilla’s browser component.

Comments/Experience from people trying out Mozilla or switched to

Noted most of the following links are copied from adot’s notblog. Thanks for the effort and ping, adot! :)

Call for Mozilla Switch, part 2

Are 6 reasons enough to convince you to switch? No? Let’s make it 10.

7. Font resizing
Mozilla is a clear winner over IE on resizing the text size of viewing web pages. You might have encountered many situations where IE can’t resize the eye-hurting font size properly. Mozilla handle that better and give you more scale on resizing.

8. Security
One day, you might find your IE behave weird:

You are getting parasites. It could be checked by pointing your IE to here. As it explained parasites:

‘Parasite’ is a shorthand term for “unsolicited commercial software” — that is, a program that gets installed on your computer which you never asked for, and which does something you probably don’t want it to, for someone else’s profit.

Many parasites installed their softwares through IE’s ActiveX installation option. It could be avoid by carefully answer the popup question from websites, or guard it by always ensure you got latest patches/updates from Microsoft, or protected with third party software. However, most people are ignorant of these tactic. And that put IE users under higher risk to get those annoying parasites, which waste your CPU power, and even worse, make your surfing uncomfortable.

Mozilla? It’s out of this mess.

9. Users’ voice heard
You sure would gain better control over the browser with Mozilla. And you could join the community if you like. Lots of thing you could do though you aren’t technical savvy: test beta product, sending bug report…etc. If you act politely and do your homework, the community would give you the best support you’d ever have, much better quality, and faster than the paid support. Paid support? You ask. “But IE is free?” You did paid, don’t you. Remember, *it’s part of the OS*.

10. Last, but not least, is the overall improved experience
Using Mozilla is in fact, kind of learning process. It giving you a different view of the world. Alright, you couldn’t care less, it’s OK. If other reasons is enough for you to try it out, you’d feel like to stay with it. There might still have websites where the web developer is too Microsoft-minded, so it was designed only for IE. That you could keep the option to use IE just for the purpose, for example, your internet banking site.

June 03, 2003

Call for Mozilla Switch

It’s the best time on switching from IE to Mozilla than ever before. Microsoft wrote a $750 millions check to AOL and settle the Antitrust case and browser war (reported here, here and here). And it will no longer making stand alone Internet Explorer. What does it mean? You could still use IE? Newer version of IE? That you got to upgrade your OS, which means, a newer Windows! Because IE is a component of the Operation System.

Let alone the settlement between Microsoft and AOL, if you are using Internet Explorer, that means you are missing a better Internet experience with missing Mozilla. What’s Mozilla? you ask.. you’re just using whatever come with Windows.…Well, with little effort to download and install an alternative browser (Mozilla), it’d make your life easier and improve the surfing experience.

Why switch?
You might already heard about Mozilla, and think it’s just a geek tool since lot of geek has switched to using it. Nope, with Mozilla, you could do things IE need extra effort (plugins, third-party tools) to achieve. It isn’t only benefit to computer geeks or web designers/developers (yeah, I know how you feel, who cares about standard compliant, CSS….blah blah). Here’s the top 6 reasons to switch, top 6 reasons for you as a normal browser users:

  1. Popup Blocking: you hate the annoying popup windows, aren’t you? Mozilla let users in control of how they want their tool behave. You could block popup windows at all or specify allowed sites to popup. In addition, you are in control of what Javascript could do to your browser, preventing those naughty jscript to resize your browser, lowering it.…etc.
  2. Block Image from: Even though you’ve been used to eye skipping the ad banners, you’re still suffering the unwanted images which occupied your 56K (modem) bandwidth. Mozilla let you block images from certain sites, for example you could block most images from certain heavy-ad sites.
  3. Tab Browsing: Multi-sites surfing in one windows, easy navigation by Ctrl-tab, raising new sites in bookmark to tab.….lots of tips to help you manage the windows appearing, thus saving space on your taskbar.
  4. Accessibility: Typing Ctrl-L, Alt-D quick access to location bar, Ctrl-K for Google bar, specify your favaorite search engine and access them directly from location bar. You could search any words in page by typing straight away.
  5. Password Management: Secured and helpful password manager, no more hassle to keep all sites’ password in somewhere else…it’s all here in Mozilla
  6. Faster, More responsive, and prettier: Mozilla load and render the page faster, you’d feel it’s more responsive in day in day out using it. At last, it did render the page more beautiful! By simpler UI and more space, it give you better viewing, especially in Windows XP (Is it just me? I got to admit this is my very personal experience).

It’s isn’t about Open Source, not better web standard support, Mozilla is just simply better.

In a rush to somewhere else, to be continued.

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June 01, 2003

Mozilla 1.4 Release Candidate 1

Mazilla has released 1.4 RC 1. It’s a recommended update. So far I’ve never encounter any problem since I used 1.4 Beta. Lots of bugs fixed in this version and I do feel the improvement of performance. The helpful junk mail feature has been improved too with a option “Delete junk mail in this folder” under Tools menu. However, I’d prefer junk mail is deleted by default after trained.

One key reason I switched totally from IE/Opera to Mozilla was its rendering. My usual platform is Windows XP/NT4, and I always feel the web page looks nicer under Mozilla, especially the fonts. Not sure if this is only happen to me, I do enjoy it a lot.

Joel also switch.

May 08, 2003

Mozilla 1.3.1 and 1.4b Released

Mozilla 1.4 Beta (Release Note) and 1.3.1 (Release Note) are out. Mozilla 1.3.1 was released to restore XPI functionality for Mac OS X users. In addition, initial implementation of Mozilla Midas, rich text editing controls, is included in 1.3.1.

Notable new features in 1.4 beta:

Mozilla has been my main web browser since version 1.2 (I am rarely using other browser such as Opera or IE after version 1.3, except for testing purpose). It has come to significant stage to be considered to replace IE since it rendered HTML better (showing prettier page, in my opinion), and hardly crashed. The only defeat is that it’s still out of those IE-specified designed websites.

My sister is doing publishing works with Adobe Pagemaker and Illustrator. Last week she faced an IE problem after process some korea fonts related projects: all web pages displayed scrambled in IE, looks like korea fonts, but not. Uninstalling all the Asian fonts, upgrading IE6 to SP1 (with auto-upgrading in WinXP), all couldn’t work! Not bothering to search on MS support, I just introduced and installed Mozilla 1.3 for her. It works like charm! And definitely it isn’t hard for an IE user to switch over.

April 17, 2003

Mozilla Phoenix/Minotaur Renaming

Phoenix, the Mozilla browser project which is a redesign of Mozilla browser component, has been renamed to Firebird. And Minotaur, the clone of Mozilla Mail/News component, is renamed to Thunderbird.

The renaming of Phoenix was needed due to the legal issue, which the name against trademark of Phoenix Technologies (a BIOS maker). It seem a obvious change from name Phoenix to Firebird. Unfortunately, the name "Firebird" was taken by an Open Source RDBMS Engine. The Firebird DB is a continue development of Borland Interbase Database since Borland released Interbase 6.0 source code to Open Source community.

There is no legal issue against the name chosen. But I took it as unhealthy to Open Source world. Although there is little or even no cross over of two community, it did bring confusion. Mozilla is a pretty high profile project nowadays, and whatever its application group take would surely affect other application's territory. Naming is always difficult, more difficult while there are more people involved in decision making. And whatever name you choose, there might have dozen application out there in SourceForge taken the same name. However, it would still be better to survey the market and politely query other group's opinion before taking the conclusion.

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