Yacoblog - Mozilla

Migrate ALL Firefox stuff between PCs

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 06:21:00 -0600

I tend to keep a fairly static setup for a couple of years when it comes to my PCs/Laptops. So I don't migrate personal settings between PCs very often. But next week is my birthday, and my present was a new desktop PC (I built it from scratch). Anyway, one of the pain points for my migrations in the past was always Firefox. It's easy to get the bookmarks, but I typically just started over for everything else (saved passwords, extensions, etc.) Well, I wanted this to be a lot easier this time, so I did some googling and found MozBackup. This little utility is AWESOME! With it I was able to backup ALL of my important Firefox stuff, including Firefox settings I had changed, extensions, saved passwords, saved form data, bookmarks, browser history...the whole freight train. And then restore all of this to my new PC's Firefox. I LOVE it! However, I won't go into details on the pain and suffering I endured just trying to get the %#$@! backup file moved from my old XP laptop to my new Vista PC (the Jury's still out on whether or not I will keep Vista on here or not)... Off topic, but I know many people like to see what another guy's rig is made up of, so here's my specs:

Mother Board: ASUS M3A78-CM
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000 Brisbane 2.6GHz Dual-Core
RAM: 4 Gigs, Dual Channel DDR2 800
Hard Drive: 250 Gb Seagate Barracuda, SATA 7200RPM
Video Card: On-board ATI (I'm not very happy with this so far...will probably buy a PCI Express card later)
Case: Mid tower ATX, black Alien look, sweet mama :)
Monitor: 19" LCD

Making the RSS icon show in the browser

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:00:00 -0600

In Firefox (and other browsers, I assume) when you are on a site with an RSS feed, Firefox shows an orange RSS icon in the address bar like this: I was trying to figure out how to get Firefox to show that icon for a site I'm working on at work. I am putting RSS into a page, and the RSS is working fine (I'm using ColdFusion's cffeed tag), but the Orange icon was not showing up in Firefox. In the past I had just assumed that Firefox discovered that the site was using RSS (using keyword searches in the page, or something) and displayed the icon accordingly. But it turns out the site developer has to put a link tag in their page header, like this:

Learn something new everyday! By the way, IE 7 doesn't display an RSS icon like Firefox does (does IE 8?).

Mozilla's answer to Adobe AIR

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 18:46:00 -0600

Adobe brings web apps to the desktop with AIR, Microsoft is doing similar things with Silverlight, and now Mozilla announces Prism. The biggest difference between Prism and it's competitors is that you don't have to do anything extra to create a Prism app from a web app. [More]

Adobe AIR is coroding the Internet?

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 13:53:00 -0600

Asa, one of the most public figures behind the Mozilla foundation (and thus behind Firefox), recently posted about Mozilla's goals with Firefox, and why it doesn't make sense to turn Firefox over to a for profit corporation. One of their main goals with Firefox is "to protect [the Internet] and to help it grow in ways that are beneficial to everyone rather than just a few." Their main way of accomplishing such a noble goal is to zealously protect open standards, and advance such standards through Firefox and related Mozilla technologies. [More]

Firefox 2 vs IE 7 security smack down

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 18:22:00 -0600

I thought it would be fun to check out the security records of Firefox 2 and IE 7, since they've been out for a couple of months and they were both released around the same time. I went to Secunia, which is a good site to look at these things because they organize their advisories by vendor and/or product, which makes it easy to compare two products. Anyway here are the results: IE 7
4 security advisories
3 remain unpatched
Most severe unpatched hole is rated Moderately Critical (3 out of 5)
Most severe patched hole was rated Extremely Critical (5 out of 5)
Firefox 2
2 security advisories
1 remains unpatched
Most severe unpatched hole is rated Less Critical (2 out of 5)
Most severe patched hole was rated Highly Critical (4 out of 5)
So there you have it. So far, Firefox is more secure.

Microsoft is not on Acid

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 19:30:00 -0600

I decided to take another look at how the latest browsers are rendering the Acid 2 test (I'll explain this test later). The last time I looked, none of them rendered it properly. Microsoft's IE still does the worst job (I tested IE 7 beta 3), but it's better than it was in IE 6 (screenshots: IE 6 & IE 7). Firefox is looking pretty close (screenshot), so they must be working on it. Opera's browser renders it perfectly (screenshot), except when you shrink the window really small, which causes part of the smiley face to mysteriously jump up above the rest of the face. I'm actually pretty excited about this, even though IE 7 still does a horrible job. I can see that all three major vendors are making progress towards standards compliance, which makes me happy. :D If you are wondering what the heck I'm talking about, the Acid 2 test is a reference page that will only show the pretty smiley face if the browser follows all the latest CSS , XHTML and other Internet standards correctly. The test page was created by Opera, but was intended as a challenge for all the major browser vendors. The test was originally announced in early 2005, but Opera is the first of the big 3 to 'finish the race' with version 9 of their browser. Apparently Safari (officially the 1st), Konqueror all support Acid2, as well as the latest development builds of Firefox 2. Yipee! :) There was an original Acid test back in the late 90's, and that page eventually rendered correctly in all the major browsers of the time. But since then Microsoft gained a monopoly in the web browser space, and web standards have largely been ignored by most web developers (because Microsoft stopped developing IE, and thus stopped trying to follow the standards). Note: I no longer believe that IE has a monopoly, as most of the stat's I've seen show them at around 85% market share. There were times when IE had over 95%, and that is what I'd call a monopoly.

I converted someone to Firefox!

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 12:28:00 -0600

Ok, I've actually been the instigator of a lot of Firefox conversions. But I just noticed today that someone clicked my 'Get Firefox with Google toolbar' button a few days ago, and actually downloaded and installed Firefox! :) That means Google pays me $1, and there's one more person browsing happily. I've had that button in the top left of my blog since Novemeber 7th, 2005. 10 people have clicked it, but only one person actually installed Firefox. 1 out of 10 ain't bad though.

The Moon's orbit, how did it get there?

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 12:06:00 -0600

I ran across this site today that shows a very cool use of SVG in the new Firefox 1.5 (the site only works in Firefox 1.5, as none of the other browsers have implemented SVG yet). It's a tool that let's you play with various scenarios of how the Earth's moon got into orbit. You can start the moon in space, from the Earth's surface, or finally on the moon's current orbit location. Then you choose a launch angle and launch force, and see what happens. If you read the instructions, it gives a nice run down of the various scientific theories surrounding the moon, and it gives you some pointers on trying to get the moon into the perfect orbit. But it doesn't give you the answer! :) I also liked this paragraph, "There are some people who think that the moon was actually placed into orbit. It neither came from the Earth or outer space. It began its journey in a circle on the circle. But they are just unscientific aren't they?" Of course, we're talking about the Supreme Being vs. Pure Science debate. The interesting thing about that paragraph is that earlier in the directions the site's author says this, "If you want to get the moon to follow the red orbital path then you have to start it somewhere on the red orbital path." Did he rig the test? Assuming he is using correct mathematical principals in this tool, is it true that you can't place an object in orbit unless it starts on the desired orbit path? Or is there a better scientific answer for this problem?

Firefox usage share up again

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 19:30:00 -0600

OneStat just released web browser usage stats again. This time the numbers are pretty impressive for Firefox. From their site: The most popular browsers on the web are:

1.	Microsoft IE	85.45 %
2.	Mozilla Firefox	11.51 %
3.	Apple Safari	1.75 %
4.	Netscape	0.26 %
5.	Opera	0.77 %

The most popular browsers in the USA are:

1.	Microsoft IE	80.73%
2.	Mozilla Firefox	14.07 %
3.	Apple Safari	3.55 %
4.	Netscape	0.76 %
5.	Opera	0.77 %

I find it intersting that Firefox has a better usage share in the US than in the rest of the web. Most of the numbers I've seen show the US as using IE more. I have to say that I don't find these company's stats to be completely reliable. Looking at stats gathered from one company's statics software is kind of a skew. However, since most of these studies show similar numbers, they must be fairly accurate.

FireFox download counter in ColdFusion

Fri, 28 Oct 2005 15:30:00 -0600

FireFox has a realtime download counter on their Spread Firefox site. They syndicate the counter as RSS, and there are lots of code snippets available to put it on your site. I found one that was in CF, but it didn't work. So I wrote my own and added it to this site in the top right. Here's the code:

<cfset feedUrl = "http://feeds.spreadfirefox.com/downloads/firefox">
<cfparam name="errorsFound" default="0">
<cftry>
   <cfhttp url="#feedURL#" method="get" timeout="3" throwonerror="true"/>
<cfcatch type="any">
   <cfset errorsFound = 1>
</cfcatch>
</cftry>
<cfif errorsFound eq 0>
   <cfset dloadFeed = XMLParse(cfhttp.filecontent)>
   <cfset numDownloads = dloadFeed.rss.channel.item.description.XmlText>
   <div style="font-size:8pt; font-weight:bold; font-family: arial; text-align:center;">
   <cfoutput>#NumberFormat(numDownloads,",")#</cfoutput>
   downloads and
   counting!</div>
<cfelse>
   <div style="font-size:8pt; font-weight:bold; font-family: arial; text-align:center;">
    <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
   </div>
</cfif>

I had a bug in it that I fixed today. Well, not really a bug. If the rss feed doesn't respond, the page will just spin until it hits the default timeout in the CF server. Today I added the code that sets a timeout, and if it doesn't get a response in 3 seconds, the code just displays a blank section. I put the blank section in so it looks good on my site, but you can modify it as best fits your site.

IBM touts Firefox

Mon, 16 May 2005 10:52:00 -0600

Cnet reported that IBM is asking its internal employees to move to Firefox. The company is making the browser available for download on its internal servers, and their IT staff has been trained to give support for Firefox. Apparently, 10% of IBM employees already use Firefox. I see this as a sign that more businesses will start to use Firefox, and Intranet apps should follow.

Google feature for Firefox

Wed, 30 Mar 2005 19:50:00 -0600

I read the Google Blog now and again to keep up on news from the company. Today I see this post that blows me away. Searching Google with Firefox now does something different than any other web browser...its faster! Google has decided to take advantage of Mozilla's prefetching feature, so now the top search results will be downloaded before Firefox users click on them. That way the resulting pages load faster. This feature can be disabled, and Google gives directions for doing that. But when was the last time you saw a major Internet property release a Mozilla only feature?

IE vs Firefox

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 18:41:00 -0600

Today I was doing some web design, and noticed that IE was really slow at rendering the CSS tabs I had for navigation at the top of the page. It was just a simple CSS hover, to change the text and background color when the mouse is over each tab:

#navRow2 a:hover {
  background-color: #ecffff;
  color: #000066;
}

I popped open the windows task manager, and did some unscientific testing. When I moved my mouse back and forth over the tabs, Firefox used 15-25% of my CPU while IE used 90-100%! That's a pretty extreme jump. I don't know why it should take so much CPU to render a CSS hover color change, but it doesn't surprise me that once again Firefox appears to kick IE's fanny.

Firefox 25 Million old

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 17:31:00 -0600

Yesterday Firefox passed the 25 million download milestone. Internet Exploder is now down to between 85-90% market share, depending on which study you read. Microsoft announced this week that they will release a beta IE 7 this summer, reversing their policy to only update Internet Exploder with new versions of windows. The press keeps reporting on the success of Firefox. It looks like the ball is moving and I don't think Microsoft can do much to stop it.
All I have to say is that I love competition. The web has suffered long enough from Microsoft's stagnant web browser. If IE drops down to around 60% market share, and stays there, I'll be happy. I don't want to see IE get destroyed, but I hate the effects of zero competition. Web standards are ignored, security gets lax, and the general public suffers from a lack of innovation.

Microsoft to block Firefox?

Mon, 20 Dec 2004 19:12:00 -0600

This satire is awesome! It describes a New Microsoft Patch that Blocks Firefox Downloads. Worth the read.