May 2006 Archives

PCWorld just released their top 100 products of 2006 and Firefox came in at number 12 -- the top rated browser. "The 2005 product of the year continues to improve, with a better set of features and stronger security than Microsoft's Internet Explorer." Thunderbird also ranked high on the list coming in at number 28. "Excellent junk-mail filtering and efficient address gathering make Thunderbird the best e-mail application for your electronic correspondence, regardless of price." Notable Firefox extensions, NoScript, StumbleUpon, and Greasemonkey also made the cut.

Only Apple was able to match Mozilla's command of the top 100 list with 5 products listed. Not a bad showing for the Mozilla community :-) Congratulations to everyone who made this year's top 100.

If you're a fan of the great(est of all) television series, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan's Cosmos, you're sure to appreciate this site, The Music of Cosmos, which catalogs nearly all of the music featured on the series.

Kathy, over at Creating Passionate Users has a good post titled Don't give in to feature demands where she offers some advice on how to deal with feature requests from your users.

I agree with most of what she has to say and I've been through a lot of this from my years on the legacy Mozilla suite and later, and especially, Firefox.

Kathy offers one piece of advice, though, which I think matters more than almost everything else on the page. She says at the conclusion of the post, "Be brave". I couldn't agree more.

It's not easy saying no. You won't always be right. It only gets worse. Be brave :-)

PC World lists Internet Explorer 6 as the 8th worst tech product of all time. Not too long ago, they named Firefox as the PC World Product of the Year and the best of 2005.

FireBug 0.4 with JavaScript debugging is out -- download it now! For all you Firebug fans, be sure to add the button to your web pages or blog.

If you're using Bon Echo Alpha 2 or the latest trunk builds, you can now take advantage of the new microsummary available at this weblog. Just go to your bookmark for my blog and click on the summary dropdown to select the latest title. I've set up the summary to give you the title of the latest post so if you've put a bookmark to this blog in your personal toolbar, the bookmark label will display the title of the latest post rather than the boring page title. (assuming I implemented it correctly.)

You can read more about microsummaries here.

This Tuesday's Bugday will be focused on Layout bug triage and testcasing. Head over to http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_QA_Community:Bug_Day to learn more about the activities planned and then join Tracy and the QA squad this Tuesday at 12:00 pm PDT in #qa on IRC.

Blogging is going to be sparse this week. I'm in Amsterdam, attending the X-Tech conference. What a beautiful city.

The Spitzer Space Telescope, with an amazing infrared contribution, and the Hubble Space Telescope, with its visible light snapshot, have teamed up to give us this magical view of NGC 2207 and IC 2163 -- a pair of galaxies in a cosmic dance nearly 140 million lightyears off in the constellation Canis Major.

On a related note, don't forget to follow the links in my mini-blogroll to a couple of wonderful astronomy related sites Centauri Dreams and The SpaceWriter's Ramblings. Also, don't miss Susan A. Kitchens' 2020 Hindsight and Martian Soil (I really do need to get those two added to the link list.)

There are two great quicktime movies up at Planetary Photojournal that take you on the Huygens journey to the surface of Titan.

The first movie covers the four hour descent sped up to about 5 minutes and gives you a great feel for all of the probe's activity using video and audio. I was completely entranced. (If any of you have contacts or know where I could find the full sized version of this video, please email me.)

The second movie covers the nearly two and a half hour plunge into and through Titan's thick atmosphere.

You can find the rest of today's Huygens Titan images here.

This week the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity marked it's 800th sol (martin day) with more than 4.6 miles on its odometer. Spirit, Opportunity's older sibling, has been on Mars about a month longer and has more than four and a quarter miles on its odometer.

These amazing machines keep going and going.

While playing around with the new Opera beta, I noticed that Opera has finally dropped the "Page" label and is now calling them "Tabs" -- just like Firefox. This follows their recent adoption of the Firefox feed icon and many of the Firefox keyboard shortcuts.

Robert Accettura has just posted a great mini-tutorial on Cleaning a Firefox Profile. If you're like me and you've just got to test out every available extension, theme, setting, hack, etc. your profile probably gets pretty crufty after a while. Robert tells you how to clean it up and keep it looking and working like new.

If you haven't downloaded your copy of the free Firefox Facts ebook, brought to you by Mitch Keeler, Lockergnome and Gada.be, you should head over to FirefoxFacts.com and get it now.

The ebook is a great collection of tips and tweaks for making Firefox your browser. There aren't many people that have been using Firefox longer than I have and even I found some great new information in the ebook. Oh, and it's free! so get it today.