Firefox v0.9 has just been released. The Release Candidate (RC) was just released on the 10th, so I suspect the RC they felt was pretty stable. Anyway, here's a peak at what's new:
I'm in the process of installing v0.9 as I type this. Hopefully all my extensions continue to work. I really love Firefox—it's become my primary browser, and I was beginning to think I'd be using IE forever.
Ok, I thought I'd compile a little list of Firefox extensions that are useful for any web developer (and a few that are good for any user of Firefox.) For those of you who read my blog, you'll know that I've switched to Firefox as my primary browser—it's just fantastic. Anyway, here's a list of the extensions you shouldn't be without.
Mark Russinovich, over at Sysinternals, has written written a ton of useful utilities—two of which no real Windows user should be without: Process Explorer & TCPView.
Process Explorer is a replacement for the Windows Task Manager's "Processes" tab—actually it really could be a replacement for the entire Windows Task Manager. This program adds some functionality really missing from the Windows Task Manager. First, it can show you the entire command line path to the all the process running. Next, it will show you all the handles and threads opened by the each process—and it's even searchable. This is great for tracking down rogue process or finding out what problems are locking a file down. This is one of the first things I download when a friend is having PC problems. I'll use this to discover various process that shouldn't be running (such as Trojans and Spyware.) It's extremely helpful. Best of all, no fancy install, just download and extact it to your system.
TCPView was designed to show all the open TCP & UDP ports currently on your computer. Just like Process Explorer, all this information is updated in near realtime (for actual realtime spool of your traffic, check out their free tool TDIMon.) With TCPView, you can quickly located what programs may be listening for remote traffic or for what programs may be trying to connect to remote servers. This is especially useful for finding programs that should not be accessing the Internet—such as trojans and spyware.
I came across a post on Gizmodo about the firing of the entire staff of Tech TV. When the merger with G4, owned by Comcast, was announced, I tried to be optimistic about union. G4 really sucks—they just don't have any interesting programming and I just can't get in to any of their programming. I was hoping they combine the programming of the two stations and end up with a better product than just Tech TV only could produce—afterall, there's not much of a need for two computer-related stations. Anyway, it sounds like the majority of the Tech TV programming will go away after this announcement. I hope I'm wrong and that Comcast doesn't screw this up like they're apparently doing. If they can keep The Screen Savers, Tech Live and Fresh Gear groups together, I'd be happy. Unfortunately, I don't think it'll happen—especially if all the employees have to relocate to L.A.
TechTV told 285 San Francisco employees on Thursday that their jobs are being eliminated, a move that was widely feared by workers after Comcast announced in March that it would acquire the technology cable channel.
Comcast will merge TechTV, owned by Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures, with its own G4 video game network when the buyout is finalized next week. David Shone, a spokesman for G4 TV, said the company plans to hire 80 people from the San Francisco office to work at the game channel's Los Angeles headquarters. Employees were given two months notice and various severance packages, he said.
Apparently there are two online petitions you can sign:
Reverse G4 / Comcast Decision to Fire Entire Staff of TechTV
Save TechTV
Apparently Microsoft's new operating system, codenamed "Longhorn", is taking a few pages from Apple's OSX.
Microsoft's demonstrations were interesting and somehow familiar. After looking at some images and icons that grew bigger or flipped when chosen, I couldn't help but think of the dock on Apple's OS X.
The good news for Apple is that Longhorn is still probably 2 years away from being released, so they have lots of time to implement something new. :)
Micah Dubinko has posted a response to the Ian Hickson's comments about the future of XForms. Micah says Ian "swings and misses", but I think that's more accurate of Micah's post than of Ians.
Dubinko has done a ton of great work and I admire what he's put together with XForms, but I just don't think his response does anything to discredit what Ian had to say. Until there's a large outcry from developers to support XForms, there's going to be no effort made to integrate within the browsers. I know there's a few diehard XForms fan, but we're a long ways away from the mass of developers being ready to use and understand XForms.
One point I really disagree with Micah on is the trusting of XForms to do server-side validation. There's no way using HTTP that I place any trust in an response received from the client. It's way to easy for someone to arbitrarily change the rules of the XForm when they submit the document back to the client. You really still need to do something on the server end of things to verify the "signature" of the XForms. After verifying the signature of the document, you'd still need to re-validate the data in the form. So, it's not as simple as he stated in his response.
This piece of news seems to have gone largely unnoticed by the community—so thanks to Colin Moock for pointing it out. ECMA has announced, that a new extension for the 4th generation of ECMAScript has been agreed upon. The new standard, E4X (or ECMAScript for XML) will standardarized, vendor-neutral programming syntax for adding native XML support to the ECMAScript language.
I was pretty excited when I first read this news, but after reading the article by John Schneider, I'm not so sure I'm found of the idea. I think I like the idea of a generic DOM model much better. The new syntax looks clunky to me and doesn't feel like a natural extension to ECMAScript (which what JavaScript has become.) John claims the code is "simpler, more compact, and more familiar to the average programmer..." I don't know that I agree with that. It looks like a pretty strange, foreign syntax to me. However, that example may not be good example. I look forward to seeing more on this. Lord know I'd love the browsers to come up w/a standardized XML DOM API.
Ironically enough, I was on Dean Edwards' site a couple of nights ago and completely missed this. Dean Edwards' has put together a neat little behavior for IE which attempt to correct IE's support for CSS2, called IE7.
The idea behind this behavior is that you can use IE's ability to dynamically alter a stylesheet in order to correctly display CSS statement currently not support by IE5+. It does this by changing the CSS statements to styles that IE does support and that will mimic the correct CSS behavior as per the W3C spec. This behavior will also attempt to correct a few other issues IE has with compliancy—such as PNG transparency. Make sure to check out his list of compatibility fixes.
It's a pretty cool idea that could help developers start writing W3C compliant code. I've been developing websites professionally since 1995 and always trying to hack code in order for it display correctly has gotten very old. Anyway, go applaud Dean and his affords.
I was reading the XForms Mailing List this morning and came across a message which pointed to a post on gmane.comp.mozilla.devel.layout newsgroup about the future of XForms and Mozilla.
The author of the newsgroup post, Ian Hickson, also works full time for Opera Software—the maker of the Opera Browser—so I'd imagine Opera shares a similiar path as Mozilla. Here's my favorite quote from the post:
> so I just don't buy that its so complex that that our weary little
> brains will melt.Many authors I have spoken to disagree. The entire concept that your form controls aren't what gets submitted is very difficult for many people to understand. You have to realise that for many people, even the concept of CSS is hard to understand. People ask "how do I make this text blue", not "how do I make all my headers blue". The former is answered by the WYSIWYG mentality, stick in a <font>. The latter is answered by the semantic/style divide mentality, mark up the text as being a header, then add a rule to your stylesheet that maps headers to a colour.
In XForms the problem is even worse -- "how do I disable this control?" has the answer "you tell your data model that the relevant subtree is no longer relevant, then you bind your subtree to the control". People's brains dont melt -- they just go elsewhere.
Ok, two blogs in a row—both courtesy of Rob. I was browsing through his archieves and found an entry about a cool extension for Firefox/Mozilla that does all sorts of really cool stuff for Web Developers. I can think of a number of times when a tool like this would have been useful in the past. Unfortunately, there's been an IE tool that's similiar that I never knew about. Geez! Anyway, check out the following tools that should be useful to any web developer.
If you need more storage space, Office Depot has the Maxtor 250GB 7200 RPM ATA/133 drives on sale for $159.97. Not sure how long this price will last, but you should be able to get the drive for this price either at the local store or from their web site.
I ordered mine yesterday and it got here today—and it's already installed! It's hard to believe how quickly you can eat up 200GBs when you're doing video editing (not too mention archive all your CDs.)
For those of you who don't know, I've pretty much found that I've switched to Mozilla's Firefox v0.8 as my full time browser. For me that's a huge change. I've always hated Netscape v4.x—its was buggy as heck, yet people loved it cause it wasn't from Microsoft. I'm not saying IE is anywhere near perfect, but it certainly gave Web Developers a lot more flexibility to build web app that functioned like a traditional desktop app. I started using Firefox when it was known as Firefox and really started to fall in love with it. It loads super fast, has lightning fast rendering and is an all around great browser. If all you're looking for is a browser, I recommend checking out Firefox from Mozilla.org, it doesn't include all the extra fluff that Netscape v6 & 7 have or that the full blown Mozilla has.
Anyway, the main point of this entry was to point out a nice little extension I found for Firefox/Mozilla called RSS Reader Panel. All you need to do to set things up is install it and create a bookmark folder pointing to all the RSS feeds you follow. Next, just hit [ALT][R] (or go to "View > Sidebar > RSS Reader") to bring up your new RSS Sidebar. I like the fact that it pulls up the full URL page when you click on a link. I normally end up wanting to see the entire page anyway. The other thing I love about this plugin is that I no longer have to load another app to check what's new on my RSS feeds.
The only thing I would change would be to provide an option for an additional panel underneath the RSS thread panel for descriptions. Right now mousing over the thread will show the description, but a panel would be nice for those of us who use the keyboard to navigate. This isn't huge anyway since I like to just pull them all up anyway.
CFML on the XBox? Charlie Arehart blogged about a customer's note on the BlueDragon Mailing List who claims to have had success installing BlueDragon on his XBox—which is running the Debian build of Linux. Talk about an inexpensive server. :)
As a bazillion blogs have already stated, Amazon's got a new search out called A9.com.
The one thing that appears that might set this search engine apart is that it will also search over any of the indexed books in Amazon's collection. This could be very useful for people doing research or homework.
They've still got a few issues they've got to tweak. I think they need to figure out a better way to page through results. It seems like you should have seperate paging for each type of search (although I can see while in split mode where have one paging mechanism would work well.) I also noticed that the same URL pulled up different descriptions depending on how the search was done. That didn't make sense to me. Try searching for the phrase "dan switzer" both with and without quotation marks around it and you'll see what I mean.
Have you ever wanted to turn off Internet Explorer's "auto-complete" feature for a specific form field? Well, there's a lesser known, IE-specific, attribute named "autocomplete" for the <input> tag which will disable the auto-complete drop down box from appearing. Why would you want to do that, well there's lots of reasons. Maybe your creating a site geared towards public computers that allow a user logon; in that case, you don't want user names appearing in the autocomplete box.
To disable the auto-complete feature, just add the "autocomplete" attribute to your form field tags with the value of "off". For example:
<input type="text" name="userId" autocomplete="off" />