Archive for April, 2005

Friday, April 29th 2005

Halfway (almost)

… to a nice, round 100 million Firefox downloads:

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Friday, April 29th 2005

SVG in Firefox 1.1?

It looks like Firefox 1.1 could get pretty solid support for SVG. This is good news, since there are some pretty cool things you can do with SVG.

Opera 8 already has support for SVG Tiny, but as I understand it, the support that has been checked into Firefox goes far beyond that. I may be wrong though, since I haven’t studied this very thoroughly.

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Thursday, April 28th 2005

Hyatt Pushes Safari Across the Acid2 Finishing Line

David Hyatt has now fixed all the bugs in Safari which kept it from displaying the Acid2 test correctly. Now it just remains to be seen who does the first release which correctly renders the test. T’would surprise me though if it weren’t Apple.

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Tuesday, April 26th 2005

Seriously Cool Firefox Theme

If you haven’t yet tried the Abstract PC theme for Firefox, do so right away. It looks really professional and cool, both as in hot and low temperature.

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Tuesday, April 26th 2005

Firefox 1.1 Gets Lightning Fast Back & Forward?

Opera has long had blazingly fast back and forward performance. Now it looks like we might get this in the upcoming v1.1 of Firefox too, judging from the amount of activity in bug 274784.

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Tuesday, April 26th 2005

Good Free Software

I’ve been thinking for a very long time that I should put together a list of the free software I use. Free in the $0, no nags, no ads, we-want-you-to-use-it-for-free way. (If for no other reason, then at least so as to give them some well deserved Google juice.) So, here it is:

  • FTP client: FileZilla
  • Drive emulator: Daemon Tools
  • CD ripper: CDex (Latest ogg codecs here.)
  • Music/video player: Winamp
  • Calculator: GraphCalc (For those who feel limited by the windows calculator.)
  • Image editor: GIMP (Feels a little strange to begin with, but is pretty powerful once you get to know it.)
  • Office Suite: OpenOffice (Will rock even more once version 2.0 is out.)
  • Web browser: Firefox (Goes without saying.)
  • Email: Thunderbird
  • Anti-spyware: Spybot Search & Destroy
  • Antivirus: AVG (Not free for businesses. Now even easier to get – no registration necessary.)
  • Bittorrent client: Azureus
  • Instant messenging: Gaim (Chat without those pesky msn ads!)
  • PDF maker: Ghostword (Short guide here.)
  • Website/HTML editor: Nvu (The preview release still has some bugs, but v1.0 should be out pretty soon.)

Edit: As I see it there are three levels of free:

  1. Free: Use this software, but you’ll have to put up with enless nags about paying and/or ads.
  2. Free-er: Use this software without paying, and with no nags or ads.
  3. Free-est: Use and alter our software in any way you like.

Software classed as free-est can be counted as belonging to the free-er class too, since it to most users is simply free – $0, 0 nags.

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Sunday, April 24th 2005

OpenOffice.org Gets a New Look

I was just stopping by at OpenOffice.org, and saw that they have redesigned there website. Very nice!

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Tuesday, April 19th 2005

SP2 Turns AMD 3200+ Into AMD –3200

Today I decided I’d have a go at installing SP2 for Windows XP. Having heard of the various problems people have been having with SP2, I made a system restore point before starting.

I wasn’t really expecting any problems, thinking “Oh, I’m sure those things won’t happen to my computer”… Well, it turned out, SP2 made my AMD 64 3200+ (relatively speaking now) extremely sluggish. Everything that had previously been quick as a flash (like raising and lowering windows) was now excruciatingly slow. Windows were slowly rolled out over the desktop instead of just being maximized. Also, it decided to paint vertical turquoise lines of various lengths all over the screen.

So, after about one minute I decided to get rid of it. Thankfully, that wasn’t too difficult. I first went to Add/Remove Programs and uninstalled it from there. After the computer had restarted, I did a system restore back to the point I had saved before starting the installation. Now things are back to normal. And, strangely, the bug which pushed me into trying SP2 in the first place seems to be fixed now. (Dragging shortcuts from submenus of the Start menu to the Start menu itself didn’t work.)

So far, I’ve stayed safe by just using Firefox for (basically) all my surfing, Thunderbird for email and by using the NAT firewall in our WLAN router. (Plus an up-to-date antivirus of course – AVG 7.) That has been enough security to prevent any spyware or adware from getting in. The worst intrusion I’ve had so far has been a few tracking cookies. (Most of which have got in through Internet Explorer, for some strange reason.) I guess I’ll just have to cope without SP2 in the future too.

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Tuesday, April 19th 2005

Macromedia + Adobe = ?

MacDobe? (Would probably get them sued.) Adromedia? (Sounds like a galaxy.) AdMedia? (May send out unwanted signals.) Macrodobe perhaps? Any more suggestions?

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Tuesday, April 19th 2005

Opera 8 Officially Out Today

Opera have now officially released version 8 of their browser. I welcome the simplified default toolbar setup, which in version 7 could be pretty dauting even for a nerd like me.

Still, I find that Opera are a little inconsistent when they choose to always show the tab bar as default. The statusbar has long been set to auto-hide as default to maximize page space – why not hide the tab bar when only one tab is open? (I know there is a “show only when needed” option, I’m just wondering why it isn’t ticked as default.)

Also, the popup blocker in Opera 8 doesn’t seem as efficient as Firefox’s. When checking my website stats at my.statcounter.com I get a popup which I never get when using Firefox.

Update: Opera.com seems a little under the weather rigth now.

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