Mozilla Firefox

[Sim]

My web browser of choice, Mozilla Firebird has just had an upgrade and a name change.

Mozilla Firebird is now Mozilla Firefox and is v0.8

I've been using it since last night without any problems.





(PS. the small text entry box for posts when using Firebird/Firefox is fixed in vBulletin v3 - so when we upgrade it will all work nicely)

 

[duncan_m]

Originally posted by Sim
Mozilla Firebird has just had an upgrade and a name change.

Great news! It should never have been called Firebird to start with. Firebird has always been the continued open sourced development of Borland's once open sourced Interbase product.

On another note, I strongly encourage everyone to consider swapping away from Internet Explorer there is such a good range of much much high quality, more usable, faster browsers available.

I use Opera from www.opera.com, well worth the download, it makes surfing so much more fun. Firefox is equally as good.

Try them! you wont look back.

While you're at it, dump your crappy Outlook or Outlook Express mail client and consider Mozilla Thunderbird or Eudora (I use Eudora)

Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/
Eudora: http://eudora.com/

After you've done that.. dump MS Office and try your hand at Open Office as a great replacement and just as functional : http://openoffice.org/


Life after Microsoft, it is possible. For the record, I love Windows XP, stick with it

 

[Sim]

Keep your eyes open for announcements later this year from IBM in regards to other "desktop" alternatives to Microsoft - both in the Office productivity space and the OS space. Things are about to get interesting in the IT world again !

 

[duncan_m]

Originally posted by Sim
Keep your eyes open for announcements later this year from IBM in regards to other "desktop" alternatives to Microsoft - both in the Office productivity space and the OS space. Things are about to get interesting in the IT world again !

Oh you teaser you!

 

[Sim]

Hey - I'd give more details if I had them, but there are nothing more than rumours at the moment. All we've been told is that it will happen.

Probably won't mean terribly much to the average consumer given that it will be targeted at the corporate world, but I'm hoping the outcome will be some products that the Microsoft divorcees amongst us can use.

I've also heard suggestions that IBM should just buy Apple and be done with it. Personally I'm not sure that's a great idea - different focuses. But it is an interesting concept.

 

[Peter_Tersteeg]

Sim does this mean further divergence in the Java standard between Sun and IBM?

 

[Sim]

Not sure what you mean there PT ?

As far as I am aware, IBM adhere to all the standards where relevant. Was there a specific technology or example you were thinking of - or was it a comment about JREs ?

 

[johnnyb]

Originally posted by Sim
Hey - I'd give more details if I had them, but there are nothing more than rumours at the moment. All we've been told is that it will happen.

Sounds like something you'd hear about MS

 

[quoll]

Browsing with TABS is great I've been using Moz for a long time now. Worth trying for all the IE users out there.

What are TABS?
You have multiple windows inside your browser but you can only see the tab on top of all those below the top windows, you can see which ones are still loading, makes it very easy to browse the forum you can open mulitple threads and keep track of them.

What more do you want.

Cheers
Quoll

 

[Sim]

Originally posted by quoll
Browsing with TABS is great

I find it so difficult to use IE these days. Especially with my wheel mouse - when I'm browsing I tend to open multiple browser windows at once so I can lauch a whole heap of links and go and read them once I've finished reading the current site.

In IE this leads to a very cluttered task bar (WinXP task grouping could help - but I don't use that feature anyway for other reasons).

In Mozilla it's easy to open a link in a new tab by clicking the middle mouse button (ie the wheel on a wheel mouse - which is actually a button as well if you press down on it). Makes it so easy to browse (without having to reach for the keyboard and making it easy to keep track of the pages yet to be visited).

Example: browsing the Somersoft forum... I typically use the "View new posts" search to get a list of threads, and then I simply select the ones I want to read by clicking the middle-mouse-button on each of the thread links, causing the threads to each open in a new tab window. This lets me view them all at my leisure without constantly needing to go back and do a new search.

 

[Peter_Tersteeg]

Hey Sim, sorry about that.

Sun and IBM and BEA are going through a bit of a thing at the moment because Sun is trying to devlop Appserver 8.0 and Tiger, which they say will revolutionise the way developers use Java.

At the same time, IBM and BEA and the open source community are doing things with Eclipse and other tools, which Sun is complaining will spliter Java into two paths.

The both sides have lots of good ideas and for two groups using the same tools, you'd think they could get along better. Personally I'm getting sick of the whole IT industry and looking to get out and get a life of my own...

 

[Sim]

Yeah, Sun has a long history of complaining about the rest of the industry not wanting to play their game. So many times have they threatened to "take their ball and go home" - especially over the tooling.

There are only two vendors in the Java tooling race. Borland and IBM. Sun is an also ran when it comes to market share.

From Software Development Times

For IDEs, Borland’s JBuilder (37 percent) narrowly edged out IBM’s Eclipse (35 percent) and WebSphere Studio Application Developer (25 percent) as the top tool by those respondents who are currently using Java, or who plan to use Java within the next year. These were followed by Oracle’s JDeveloper (21 percent), IBM’s VisualAge for Java (15 percent), Microsoft’s Visual J++ or Visual J# .NET (15 percent), Sun’s NetBeans (13 percent) and BEA’s WebLogic Workshop (12 percent).

Other popular integrated development environments were Sun’s Forte for Java (12 percent), Sun ONE Studio (11 percent), JetBrain’s IntelliJ Idea (8 percent) and Control Center from TogetherSoft/Borland (7 percent).

Sun's refusal to "play the game" with the Eclipse community has just served to hurt it's own tools. I believe they have recently announced some limited support for Eclipse, but they are still pushing ahead with their competing proprietary platform (I think).

The tooling arena is going to get interesting - now that Rational has effectively taken over development and the direction of the WebSphere Studio product range. These guys do seem to know what they are doing !!

The industry is full of has-beens (has-beans ? hah !) who are trying to cling on to their old ways. The world is changing - rapidly ! The IT Software landscape is going to be a very different beast within the next couple of years I predict - I expect some of the biggest players to either go out of business or more likely, be bought out or merge to try and compete with the big players in town (Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle to name the biggest).

The rationalisation of the industry (Rationalisation ? hah !) is bound to happen - it started to pick up pace post-dot-com and will continue for quite some time I feel. The opportunities for smaller players are as ISVs for the larger vendors - producing specialist software that works with or runs on software provided by the bigger players. The tools developers producing stuff for Eclipse are an example of companies who have found a niche in the new marketplace.

Competition is good - and there will always be competition (IBM and Microsoft will see to that), but to compete, you have to be competitive. If you know what I mean.

Just my opinions !

 

[Learner]

Thanks for the recommendation guys, i have always used explorer and wasn't aware that you could use another. I have given Firefox a go and must admit Sim that the feature of tabs is certainly a great feature. I've set it up and running through it, although as i am IT illeterate, is there something i have to do to customise the set-up or will i have enable or disable anything so that it doesn't conflict with any other programme???

Learner

 

[Learner]

Also, how can i stop pop-up advert's from coming through????

Its Bl***y annoying.......

Also for those IT gurus out there, i'm currently using XP and am on dial up, i leave the phone cable in the port when not on the net, although when there is an incoming call to the residence it switches the PC on....is there anyway i can disable this feature??? I called my service provider who indicated that i would have to take the hard-drive into a computer shop so that they can play around with it..apparently about $120....its fairly pricey.

Learner

 

[Sim]

Originally posted by Learner
Also, how can i stop pop-up advert's from coming through????

Actually, Firefox should do that automatically for you.

Look at "web features" in the Tools -> Options menu. You can turn on popup blocking (if it's not on by default).

You are notified that a popup has been blocked by a little blue exclamation mark in the bottom left hand corner of the browser page (if you have the status bar turned on). You can click on that to disable blocking for that particular URL (some sites uses popups as a part of their main function so you need to unblock them to have it work properly.

 

[Sim]

Originally posted by Learner
Also for those IT gurus out there, i'm currently using XP and am on dial up, i leave the phone cable in the port when not on the net, although when there is an incoming call to the residence it switches the PC on....

There is a setting in the BIOS for "wake on modem" or similar. This needs to be disabled. There might be a setting in WinXP that does the same - I'm not sure.

Playing with the BIOS is dangerous if you don't know what you are doing - but it's easy to make the changes if you are game.

You need to go into your BIOS settings - usually that means pressing the DEL or Delete key (or something else - varies by computer manufacturer) when the computer is first powered on - there is usually some kind of message to this effect in the startup screens immediately after you power on.

Note - if you do go playing with your BIOS and mess it up so your computer doesn't work anymore - don't come complaining to me ! I'm not going to fix it.

Ask a professional if you are not sure.

 

[Gill Bates]

Re

although when there is an incoming call to the residence it switches the PC on....


As Sim suggests you can do this via a BIOS setting.


Another way is to turn the power top the computer off at the wall. ( After a shutdown in Windows of course ) . If u just turn ur computer off at the front of the box - ur computer kind goes into a deep sleep . Which with ur present computer configuration can be woken by ring signal from your modem. If u turn off the power to your computer at the wall , your computer will really be powered off and will not resond to the signal from the modem .

By turning computer off at the wall , you will save a small amount of power, about 5 watts

[A typical use for this feature is if the pc is acting as a FAX machine.] Turning your computer off at the wall will also increase the protection to some degree from power surges / spikes during storms .

 

[Learner]

Thanks for the tips, unfortunately am no IT buff and therefore "can't afford to go and run to anyone if i play with the Bios" so best i leave it as is and take G. Bates' advise and switch it off from the wall unit "once shutdown is complete" till next usage.

thanks again

Learner

 

[Mondie]

Originally posted by Sim
I find it so difficult to use IE these days. Especially with my wheel mouse - when I'm browsing I tend to open multiple browser windows at once so I can lauch a whole heap of links and go and read them once I've finished reading the current site.

In IE this leads to a very cluttered task bar (WinXP task grouping could help - but I don't use that feature anyway for other reasons).

In Mozilla it's easy to open a link in a new tab by clicking the middle mouse button (ie the wheel on a wheel mouse - which is actually a button as well if you press down on it). Makes it so easy to browse (without having to reach for the keyboard and making it easy to keep track of the pages yet to be visited).

Example: browsing the Somersoft forum... I typically use the "View new posts" search to get a list of threads, and then I simply select the ones I want to read by clicking the middle-mouse-button on each of the thread links, causing the threads to each open in a new tab window. This lets me view them all at my leisure without constantly needing to go back and do a new search.

Thanks for posting the link Sim.

It was your post above that sparked my interest in Firefox as l use the internet 95% of the time for visiting forums (l am a forum nut ) It is brilliant for opening and managing multiple windows, it even seems slightly faster on my XP machine.

l'm a convert!!

 

[Gill Bates]

Since Microsoft have such a large share of the browser market ( Internet Explorer has something like 80 - 90 % ) they appear to have lost interst in updating their product.