Tom Raftery, social media consultant, speaker, blogger and podcaster
Fair dues to Damien Mulley and it@cork for putting on a great Firefox event last night.
Marcio Galli is a Consulting Software Developer at Mozilla Foundation based in Brazil. He gave a fascinating talk entitled “Talk: Read, Write, and Recycle the Web with FireFox 3“.
Watch the it@cork blog for a detailed review of the talk later today.
UPDATE - Mark Crowley’s detailed review of the talk is now up on the it@cork blog.
Tom’s on holidays, I’ll be your host for today. My name’s Frank P, you might remember me from such blogs as “BifSniff.com”,” FestivalShirts.net/blog” and “Aonach.com/chatter”.
Damien asks us what our site stats for Firefox are after reading the results of a survey by XiTi monitor which shows Firefox having 38.6% marketshare in Ireland.
You can read more about the survey and it’s findings on itWire.com
A study of nearly 96,000 websites carried out during the week of July 2 to July 8 found that FF had 27.8% market share across Eastern and Western Europe
With regard to Damien’s question: For BifSniff.com Google Analytics puts Firefox at 39.54% for the month of June - that’s for all traffic not just European traffic (Northern Europe accounts for 50.48% of that traffic with Ireland accounting for 18.59%).
Flock’s latest version of their browser, Flock 0.9 was released this morning and I must say I love the new look.
The integration with sites like Flickr, Del.icio.us, and YouTube is great but there are still a couple of wrinkles to iron out.
For instance, there is a Feeds sidebar. You would imagine that if you are on a site which has a feed, you should be able to drag the site from the address bar to the sidebar and have it added. Not possible.
Also, there was a button on the button bar which, if you dragged an image over it, it opened the uploader for uploading the image to Flickr. That has been moved to the small Flock Toolbar and is easy to miss. It should be possible to add it back to the main toolbar.
I’d like to see some kind of FaceBook and Twitter integration there as well - they are the sites du jour at the minute.
The memory footprint certainly seems to have improved with this release which is good because previous releases were total resource hogs.
The idea of the Web Clipboard is an interesting one. I’ll have to see if I can get into using it.
The built-in blog editor is too bare bones to be of use though. It can’t see your blog categories, for instance. And i can’t get the Media Bar to open on my Mac (it opens fine on my Vaio) - no idea what is going on there.
Overall though, despite the criticisms above, this release is a big improvement and I’ll continue to use Flock (it is my default browser on Mac). Keep up the good work guys.
Apple have released a Security Patched version of Safari for Windows (v 3.0.1). The patch fixes security vulnerabilities in Safari I wrote about earlier this week.
There is still no fix for the bug I highlighted earlier this week (clicking on the x to close a window with multiple tabs doesn’t alert you and goes ahead and closes all tabs).
It is still beta software and should be used with extreme care for the moment.
The download links are on the Safari Download page.
via infoworld
Mozilla recently released Gran Paradiso 1.9 Alpha 5 (aka Firefox 3). This is the up and coming version of Firefox and although still in Alpha, I have been running it for several days now and it is quite stable.
According to the release notes:
Gran Paradiso 1.9 Alpha 5 introduces several new features:
- Bookmarks portion of Places has been enabled
- New crash reporting system, Breakpad. It’s enabled by default on Mac OS X, on about 50% of Windows installations, and not yet available on Linux.
- You can also view crash reports at this site.
- New Javascript-based Password Manager. More details available here.
- Support for Growl notification under Mac OS X
- Support for native controls on Mac OS X
- Miscellaneous Gecko 1.9 bug fixes
Most of these fixes are under-the-hood, so the new Firefox is remarkably similar to the old one!
The major obvious differences are it appears slightly faster (though this could be due to the lack of plugins!) and the pages render better. The major downside is that Gran Paradiso is a memory hog, using 1.15gb of virtual memory on my MacBook Pro! But that is with four windows and fifty tabs open.
Upgrading, as always, disables most of the plugins. I have mixed feelings about that. Some plugins I love and hate having to go without (Adblock, for example) but the majority of the plugins I had in Firefox 2 were downloaded to try out and never used again!
Overall, if you are happy running Alpha software, try Gran Paradiso. You will like the improvements and there are very few downsides.
Wow that was fast!
Apple released a beta of their Safari browser last night to run on Windows and a few short hours later, vulnerabilities which allow remote code execution have been published already!
It looks like Safari for Windows was released a little early. Whatever about the small functionality bug I found, the ability to run code remotely on your Windows machine is a critical vulnerability. Don’t use Safari on a Windows machine until these exploits have been fixed.
Hard to know where the blame lies for this - Thor Larholm blames Apple’s ignorance of Windows:
On the OS X platform Apple has enjoyed the same luxury and the same curse as Internet Explorer has had on the Windows platform, namely intimate operating system knowledge. The integration with the originally intended operating system is tightly defined, but the breadth of knowledge is crippled when the software is released on other systems and mistakes and mishaps occur.
While some commenters on his site blame Microsoft:
I don’t know, the way you described it seems more like a hole in the way Windows handles things than a Safari hole. Does a Windows API call launch a shell process, or does Safari manually go and run a command line program? If it’s the Windows API for URL handling, then it’s clearly broken. Every program that needs to grab a URL should not be responsible for patching holes in Windows.
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