Firefox – Technobabbles

Archive by category "Firefox"

WOT 3.0 Review

dgw 2008-04-20 - 14:00 2015-10-31Firefox, freeware, internet, Internet Explorer, tools, w00t, WOT 1

I decided against delaying this post until next weekend, because this way it comes before the press release and will inform people (potentially) before the new version is pushed out. I’ve been sitting on the new version of WOT for a little while now, after having been invited to the beta-test team (thanks guys!) on April 15. Almost a week has gone by (well, five days), and I feel I have played around with it enough to form a reasonably complete opinion. The Good First of all, I’d like to say that the new rating icon is wonderful and much…

Portable Computing

dgw 2008-04-16 - 13:15 2009-11-02Firefox, freeware, ideas, MySQL, opinion, PHP, strange, technology 0

I really have no right to talk about this subject, as I have never actually done it. I thought it might make for a good hypothetical post, though, especially since I don’t have any other good ideas right now. What can I say, it’s on my mind. That’s because of where I was when I wrote this. I’m thinking about portable computing right now because I keep everything on my hard drive. Well, stuff that isn’t email or associated with a Web service. Applications and stuff all live on my computer. When I go somewhere else, I can’t get at…

Webapp Keyboard Focus Issues

dgw 2008-04-12 - 08:00 2009-11-02complaints, Firefox, Gmail, Google Reader, internet, Remember The Milk 1

I’ve found a pretty frequent problem with keyboard-enabled webapps. Gmail, Google Reader, Remember The Milk, and a whole bunch of other services (Google Calendar, for instance) all fit into this category. It seems that nearly all keyboard shortcut-enabled webapps have one big annoyance in common (no, not AJAX): The shortcuts lose focus in certain scenarios. The three apps I’m most concerned with are, of course, Gmail, Google Reader, and RTM. I do use them the most, after all. I’ve found tab-switching to be the number one cause of focus switching. Keyboard entry is sent to the browser chrome or something,…

McAfee Destroyed SiteAdvisor

dgw 2008-03-27 - 07:58 2009-11-03complaints, Firefox, internet, Internet Explorer, opinion, tools 1

You may or may not have heard of SiteAdvisor before. I’ve mentioned it a few times on this blog, but usually in passing. Say, when comparing it to . This post focuses on McAfee SiteAdvisor, and the reasons I’ve dropped it. First off, it used to be an independent company. Then it was acquired by McAfee, a company that makes anti-virus software (subscription-based). Before the acquisition, everything was free. After the acquisition, McAfee removed some features and put them into a paid version of the program available as part of their Internet security suite. But that wasn’t enough. They also…

WOT Going 3.0

dgw 2008-03-22 - 08:04 2012-05-05Firefox, freeware, internet, Internet Explorer, tools, w00t, WOT 0

WOT, a website-rating (think McAfee SiteAdvisor, not StumbleUpon) browser extension available for Firefox and Internet Explorer, will soon be testing another new version. I was sent an invitation to test their last release before it was launched, and the upgrades there were pretty substantial. WOT 3.0 will include comments and a plethora of details on sites rated using the add-on, including categorization, popularity, server location (country), and a direct WHOIS lookup link. It sounds even more impressive than the last upgrade. I’m excited! I’m not sure how I found the WOT site, but when I first started using the extension,…

Remember Your Add-ons!

dgw 2008-02-17 - 11:34 2009-11-03Firefox, Gmail, Google, internet, tools 0

Ionut Alex Chitu made a very good point last night about Greasemonkey and related add-ons. His post, entitled “Your Gmail Adds New Features“, showcases three (last I checked) separate instances where people installed Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail and then forgot about them. In each case, the add-ons’ features were interpreted as being part of the Gmail core, rather than add-on functionality available only in that customized browser. Yesterday, the post I published about Garett Rogers’ discovery of a tip-off to a was also revealed to be another forgotten add-on (, if you’re wondering), a case I mentioned in the comments…

Q4 2007 Site Stats Review

dgw 2008-01-02 - 17:10 2009-11-11Apple, Firefox, internet, Internet Explorer, Leopard, Linux, Microsoft, Vista, w00t, Windows, XP 0

As , I’m reviewing the browser and operating system statistics for this site again. All data is from the period 2007-10-04/2007-12-31. So, on to business. First up is the overall browser chart. Firefox leads with 57%, followed by Internet Explorer at 29% and Safari at 10%. I also got some negligible visits (less than 2%) from Mozilla, Opera, Camino, Netscape, and Konqueror, plus a very few hits from what appear to have been mobile browsers, such as HTC_TyTN_II Mozilla and Palm680. Drilling into per-browser version information, Firefox had a pretty good spread of versions, even getting about 80 hits from…

Netscape Getting Killed Off Next Year

dgw 2007-12-28 - 14:52 2015-10-29Firefox, internet, Internet Explorer, Microsoft 0

AOL/Netscape has announced plans to kill off Netscape Navigator, the venerable old browser that once held 90% market share, spun off its code into open-source Firefox, introduced the world to JavaScript, and showed us what CSS could do. The end of support: February 1, 2008. The official recommendation is to switch to Firefox. Extension developers from Netscape’s development team have been working on creating Netstripe, a Firefox version of the Netscape 9 default theme. (Update (2010-05-12): Netstripe is gone; the Netscape Navigator and Messenger 9 themes were merged to create Simple Green.) I used Netscape briefly to test website designs,…

Review: Remember The Milk for Gmail

dgw 2007-12-19 - 22:36 2009-11-11Firefox, Gmail, internet, Remember The Milk, tools, w00t 0

Remember The Milk today released a Firefox extension to add an RTM sidebar to Gmail. It looks cool, I must say. The sidebar can create tasks when you star a message or apply a specified label (useful for me, because I usually star messages that require action). It can also auto-suggest events from your calendar and contacts from your Gmail address book. The full feature list is available on the RTM website. I can see it becoming very useful, because I like to have as few tabs open as possible, and integrating RTM into Gmail would eliminate a tab from…

Microsoft Cripples Internet Explorer

dgw 2007-12-19 - 00:14 2015-10-29errors, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Microsoft, security 0

Now that I’m done , I can talk about today’s news. One of Microsoft’s security updates for this month has been causing problems for Internet Explorer users, of both versions (6 and 7). Users have been reporting that IE either won’t start or crashes when trying to load certain sites. Microsoft is reportedly looking into the issue. It doesn’t happen on all machines. My computer’s perfectly fine. Admittedly, I use Firefox for everything but my school website, but at least I don’t have trouble starting the browser. As long as Microsoft is only messing up their own browser, I’m happy.…

Category: Firefox