Mozilla Archives - Page 6 of 9 - inside aebrahim's head

where to get gmail invites

I decided a while ago that giving out Gmail invites on my blog was too much hassle to be worth it. So I had a bunch of invites (27 in total) that I had unused, lying wasted. But all is not lost if you still want to get an account. Just head over to SpreadFirefox.com, … Continue reading “where to get gmail invites”

I decided a while ago that giving out Gmail invites on my blog was too much hassle to be worth it. So I had a bunch of invites (27 in total) that I had unused, lying wasted. But all is not lost if you still want to get an account. Just head over to SpreadFirefox.com, where a huge Gmail giveaway is taking place. I’ve donated all the invites I have to that programme.

UPDATE: Looks like I spoke too soon. According to this post by RobinMonks, the sfx team has decided that the Gmail invite program is no longer going to be an sfx feature:

Well, I just found out not 30 seconds ago myself that the Gmail automation process was taken down.

Here’s what I know:
1) For unknown reasons and reasons I might never know the SFX team decided not to make Gmail an official site feature.
2) The automation process while it was online was successful and worked wonderfully.
3) The greater percentage of users were happy with the system
4) The project has been handed back to me to handle by hand.

Of cource, it’s almost impossible to handle all of the invite requests by hand.

From what I gather RobinMonks has been making some important contributions to sfx. Not cool pulling the rug out from under him. Also, what about all the invites that people have already donated, and haven’t been given out yet?

In the meantime, if you haven’t yet got an invite and want one, you can try your luck over here.

spreadfirefox server issues

Since the release of Firefox 1.0 PR, the SpreadFirefox site has taken quite a beating. yusufg, someone who deals with these kind of issues on a daily basis for sites that would put MoFo‘s relatively tiny usage to shame, writes about some ways that load problems could be alleviated. In particular, he mentions that static content (including images and other stuff) should be shunted off to another server or vhost that would run a lightweight, non-preforking server (that could host static content for all of MoFo’s stuff). He also talks about cache-friendly headers that could be used to help lessen the load too. For email woes, he notes that postfix is far better than sendmail.

firefox in the hong kong press

The South China Morning Post (Hong Kong’s premier English language newspaper) today reported on Firefox in one of its technology columns. The reviewer had mixed feelings about Firefox: he liked the product, but had problems with its installation. I’d link to the article itself, but it requires a paid site subscription, so instead I made … Continue reading “firefox in the hong kong press”

The South China Morning Post (Hong Kong’s premier English language newspaper) today reported on Firefox in one of its technology columns. The reviewer had mixed feelings about Firefox: he liked the product, but had problems with its installation. I’d link to the article itself, but it requires a paid site subscription, so instead I made a PDF and have made that available for viewing. Thanks to yusufg for the heads up.

thunderbird 0.8 coolness

Thunderbird 0.8 was released today, and with it comes a slew of new features which you can read about in the release notes. My favourite is the following: I’ve been wanting this feature for a long time, and finally it’s here. Now you can show images in emails on a per-email basis! Now that’s cool.

Thunderbird 0.8 was released today, and with it comes a slew of new features which you can read about in the release notes. My favourite is the following:

I’ve been wanting this feature for a long time, and finally it’s here. Now you can show images in emails on a per-email basis! Now that’s cool.

firefox.com owned

Courtesy of Kevin Karpenske, Firefox.com now belongs to the Mozilla Foundation. Kevin deserves a huge round of thanks for donating this domain to the foundation. It comes at a crucial time, with Firefox 1.0 just around the corner.

internet explorer team chat

Microsoft hosted another Internet Explorer Team Chat yesterday. I’ve put up logs of the chat in plaintext and RTF format. Not a whole that we didn’t already know was said. All in all, it was pretty disappointing compared to the last one I participated in, during which there was at least some useful discussion. Oh, … Continue reading “internet explorer team chat”

Microsoft hosted another Internet Explorer Team Chat yesterday. I’ve put up logs of the chat in plaintext and RTF format. Not a whole that we didn’t already know was said. All in all, it was pretty disappointing compared to the last one I participated in, during which there was at least some useful discussion. Oh, and for those who are wondering, the person nicknamed “ali” in the chat who was asking questions was not me. I don’t know who it was.

i’m an opera user now

Opera has snagged a new user. These days I’m spending almost as much time on Opera as I do on Firefox. Why the change, you might wonder… Mozilla has a gap in its product line that Opera not only fills, but does so excellently. I’m talking of course about the mobile phone/PDA web browser segment. … Continue reading “i’m an opera user now”

Opera has snagged a new user. These days I’m spending almost as much time on Opera as I do on Firefox. Why the change, you might wonder…

Mozilla has a gap in its product line that Opera not only fills, but does so excellently. I’m talking of course about the mobile phone/PDA web browser segment. As 3G and GPRS networks are becoming more and more commonly used, web browsing on mobile devices is become commonplace. Yet, Opera has a virtual monopoly on the Symbian OS web browser market.

Not that I’m complaining, their Opera 6.10 for Symbian OS (which came free with my Nokia 6600), and Opera 6.20 which I downloaded (also free for my phone model) are both amazing. They render websites designed for normal computers in a very readable format, thank’s to Opera’s Small-Screen Rendering technology. At the same time, if I want, I can view them exactly as they’d render on a normal sized PC, and am able to scroll left and right to do so.

As if this wasn’t enough, Opera has figured out how to turn their mobile web browser (optionally) into a subscription product without shafting the user and delivering no value for lots of money. Opera’s Mobile Accelerator is a proxy server hosted by Opera which strips (X)HTML content of elements that Opera can’t render, compresses images to much smaller sizes (who needs high-res on a 2″ screen?), and optimises the page so it renders quickly on low bandwidth connections. This is pretty smart, and it seems to work well too. I’m still in my 14-day trial period, but I’ve already decided that I’m going to purchase the service when those 14 days are up. At USD13 per 3 months, it’s very reasonably priced too. This is especially cool for those users who have metered bandwidth on their GPRS connection. Luckily in Beijing I’ve been able to get unlimited GPRS for around USD25 per month. But I think even the fast pageloads make this worth it, because GPRS isn’t exactly a speed demon to begin with.

So Opera has picked up a new and very satisfied user. I’m of course still very partial to Firefox on regular PCs. However, now that I’ve entered the consumer marketplace for mobile web browsers, it’s clear to me that Opera is the only company who has any real product aimed at this market. Luckily, they’ve still managed to innovate and put out a great product.

What does this mean for Mozilla? My reading of the situation is that Mozilla has a gap in it’s product line. Mozilla has an excellent, mature, cross-platform rendering engine in Gecko. Mozilla has talented FE developers. I think it’s time that Mozilla once again pioneered it’s way into uncharted territory.

UPDATE: It’s been pointed out that the Minimo project exists to fill this void, but after looking at its site, it still looks very much in its infancy. It also looks like nobody is working on it anymore. Maybe it would be a good idea to revive it and somehow gauge OEM interest in a Gecko/Minimo-based browser. One thing to note is that the Minimo project appears to have rather heavy hardware requirements. It’s targeted at machines that have 32-64MB of RAM. My Nokia, for example, has only 8MB of RAM (total, not free) and a lowly 104MHz ARM9 processor. There’s a pretty large gap between Minimo’s target requirements and the mobile hardware that’s out there today.

UPDATE 2: You can see my response to Daniel Glazman’s post about Planet syndication in the comments section of his post. Nothing personal against Daniel, I just felt it deserved a response from me.

order a windows xp sp2 cd on microsoft’s dime

Do you know anyone who needs to grab Windows XP Service Pack 2 but doesn’t have the bandwidth? Microsoft has a solution: they’ll ship an SP2 installer CD for free to pretty much anywhere in the world. All you have to do is fill out this form, and a CD will be shipped out almost … Continue reading “order a windows xp sp2 cd on microsoft’s dime”

Do you know anyone who needs to grab Windows XP Service Pack 2 but doesn’t have the bandwidth? Microsoft has a solution: they’ll ship an SP2 installer CD for free to pretty much anywhere in the world. All you have to do is fill out this form, and a CD will be shipped out almost immediately. My brother received his less than a week after it was ordered.

There are a lot of nice enhancements in Internet Explorer and Outlook Express in SP2. They feel a lot smoother. Browsing with Internet Explorer is no longer popup hell, and Outlook Express is no longer prone to loading remote content without thinking. Even so, Firefox and Thunderbird still blow them away.

lots of changes

It’s been over a month since I last posted anything to my blog. Posting after so long seems somewhat weird, because so much has happened since July 22. So here’s the short version of events: July 30-August 4: Visit New Jersey. August 6: Leave Chicago permanently and return home to Hong Kong. August 7: Reach … Continue reading “lots of changes”

It’s been over a month since I last posted anything to my blog. Posting after so long seems somewhat weird, because so much has happened since July 22. So here’s the short version of events:

July 30-August 4: Visit New Jersey.
August 6: Leave Chicago permanently and return home to Hong Kong.
August 7: Reach Hong Kong.
August 13-18: Go to Singapore to visit my brother and his family. My fiancee flies down from Kolkata, India and joins me in Singapore.
August 18: My fiancee and I fly to Hong Kong for a short visit (she returned on August 28 to Kolkata).
August 25: I fly to Beijing, China to start a 10-month Manadarin course at the Beijing Language & Culture University.

All of these things have kept me very busy, and away from Mozilla/Firefox. In fact, I think I went a whole month without logging into Bugzilla. That must be some sort of a personal record.

Anyway, now I’m located in Beijing for the next ten months or so. My first impressions of Beijing are very positive. China is far more developed than I imagined, and Beijing is a very cosmopolitan city, even more so I think than Chicago, where I spent my last four years.

Technologically speaking, Beijing is light years ahead of the US. Cellphone providers here are deploying 3G networks capable of sending data at 384kbps down/64kbps up, and GPRS is already in widespread use. The hotel I stayed at for a few nights before moving into my permanent place was the unquestionably best hotel I’ve ever stayed at. Everything was computerised, from the TV controls, to the room lights, to the air conditioning, to calling a valet. And it was all accessible from a central control panel next to the bed. It had to be seen to be believed. I haven’t seen anything like it in either the US or Hong Kong.

The only complaints that I have about internet connectivity are that firstly that it is rather slow, and secondly is that it is censored (though not as heavily as I had imagined). For example, sites such as BBC News and Google Cache are completely inaccessible. I’m sure there are more examples.

Thankfully, I still have VPN access to the University of Chicago (at least until February, after which I’ll need a new VPN provider). Since VPN access is not blocked, I have effectively unrestricted internet access by tunneling to uchicago.edu. I’m glad I’m able to use VPN, else having restricted internet would be somewhat of a bummer. My Vonage box also works here, which is nice, because calls between anywhere in the world and the US are far cheaper than between anywhere in the world and China. I had to buy a new phone to use with it, since using my American wireless phone which was not type-approved for China would probably be the quickest way to annoy the police here, since I’d be broadcasting RF on restricted frequencies.

I’m hoping now that I’m somewhat settled into my new place in Beijing and that my net connection is working (albeit slowly) and unrestricted (thanks to VPN) that I’ll be able to spend some time catching up on my Firefox QA stuff.

internet explorer blog

It looks like Microsoft is hosting a new IEBlog over on their new MSDN Blogs site (thanks to mine for the heads up). It’ll probably be worth following and seeing what they have to say. Certainly not daily reading, but probably something to check out every now and then. I’m hopeful (though not very optimistic) that we’ll see some good debate there. Right now most of the comments over there are just mindless IE-bashing, which isn’t very conducive to getting any real use out of the blog. If this sounds like something you’ve done, consider leaving thoughtful comments instead.

Also, there is an Internet Explorer Feedback Wiki hosted on Channel 9. There are some useful links on there, but surprisingly, the site seems to have a somewhat ‘IE-sucks’ kind of vibe. Odd for an MSDN wiki.

All in all I’m happy that Microsoft is trying to become more open with its development efforts. It’s headed in the right direction. However, it remains to be seen how committed they are to it, and whether or not it translates into any real changes.