Firefox - Copy Cat

To start off with the topic, I am not a Firefox lover. Instead, I am an Opera fan and I love my Opera browsers (Opera on my desktop & Opera Mini on my phone). But yes, I like the browser business and always go on to check out the new features when a new version of any browser comes out. Uh! Wait! The browser business I am talking about here is only the major browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Netscape - or is it way too old now). Should I include Opera Mini too?

I always try hard to keep a copy of the latest versions of some (well, I should say that) of these browsers and occasionally (actually more than occasionally) use them for my browsing needs, specially for testing purposes of my web development projects.

Recently, the Firefox team released a beta of its upcoming Firefox 3. I was keen to check out the beta and after some days of busy schedules I managed to grab a look at the feature log. I was lucky to have a detailed explanation of each new feature. But believe it or not, as I read through the feature list I couldn't stop saying one word. "Copy Cat!" Don't offend me for that. That is just a handy word I use for people (or even things) that copy others.

So let me give you a little bit of details. Here are the new features that Firefox 3 beta has. Below is the release notes of Firefox 3 beta 1 and I have included my comments in green (No! Not red. Green is my favorite. May be because of that I have folders called "Green" instead of "Misc", in my email accounts )

What's New in Firefox 3 Beta 1

Firefox 3 Beta 1 is based on the new Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 27 months and includes nearly 2 million lines of code changes, fixing more than 11,000 issues. Gecko 1.9 includes some major re-architecting for performance, stability, correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers.

More Security

• One click site info: Click the site favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand. In later versions, Extended Validation SSL certificate information will be displayed. (In Opera we have a question mark at the end of address bar for the exact same feature.)
  
• Malware Protection: malware protection warns users when they arrive at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware. You can test it here (note: our blacklist of malware sites is not yet activated). (That's a great feature.)
  
• New Web Forgery Protection page: the content of pages suspected as web forgeries is no longer shown. You can test it here. (This is called fraud protection, in Opera. Implimented since Opera 9.01.)
• New SSL error pages: clearer and stricter error pages are used when Firefox encounters an invalid SSL certificate. (A part of fraud protection, in Opera.)
• Add-ons and Plugin version check: Firefox now automatically checks add-on and plugin versions and will disable older, insecure versions. (This is indeed revolutionary.)
• Secure add-on updates: to improve add-on update security, add-ons that provide updates in an insecure manner will be disabled. (I am wondering! Is this simply https?)
• Anti-virus integration: Firefox will inform anti-virus software when downloading executables. (Haha! Is there any browser on earth which can hide files from anti-virus softwares while downloading to hard disk? Then, what does integration mean?)
• Vista Parental Controls: Firefox now respects the Vista system-wide parental control setting for disabling file downloads. (Yea, yea! Firefox loves Vista. Not to blame IE.)

Easier to Use

• Easier password management: an information bar replaces the old password dialog so you can now save passwords after a successful login. (So, Firefox started saving my passwords to memory without my approval?)
• Simplified add-on installation: the add-ons whitelist has been removed making it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer clicks. (Wow! That's more Open Source now!)
• New Download Manager: the revised download manager makes it much easier to locate downloaded files. (In addition to this, Opera even has the native Windows context menu for downloaded items.)
• Resumable downloading: users can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting your network connection. (I am yet to test what if Firefox crashed during a download. Opera does a perfect job here. Not only I can recover, but I can resume downloads even If I mistakenly pulled off the power cable.)
• Full page zoom: from the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images. (That's what we call copying. Opera has had this since version 8.)
• Tab scrolling and quickmenu: tabs are easier to locate with the new tab scrolling and tab quickmenu. (Another copy!)
• Save what you were doing: Firefox will prompt users to save tabs on exit. (Yet another copy!)
• Optimized Open in Tabs behavior: opening a folder of bookmarks in tabs now appends the new tabs rather than overwriting. (Again!)
• Location and Search bar size can now be customized with a simple resizer item. (This is perhaps one feature I am missing in Opera.)
• Text selection improvements: Multiple text selections can be made with Ctrl/Cmd; Double-click drag selects in "word-by-word" mode; Triple-clicking selects a paragraph. (Copy Cat!)
• Find toolbar: the Find toolbar now opens with the current selection.
• Plugin management: users can disable individual plugins in the Add-on Manager. (Ooh! I am yet to see this.)
• Integration with Vista: Firefox's menus now display using Vista's native theme. (I told you! Huh!)
• Integration with the Mac: Firefox now uses the OS X spellchecker and supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates. (Good step!)

More Personal

• Star button: quickly add bookmarks from the location bar with a single click; a second click lets you file and tag them. (Is this a replication from the Firefox child - Flock?)
• Tags: associate keywords with your bookmarks to sort them by topic. (We call it "nick names", in Opera.)
• Location bar & auto-complete: type the title or tag of a page in the location bar to quickly find the site you were looking for in your history; favicons, bookmark, and tag indicators help you see where results are coming from. (Copy, copy, copy!)
• Smart Places Folder: quickly access your recently bookmarked and tagged pages, as well as you more frequently visited pages with the new smart places folder on your bookmark toolbar. (???)
• Bookmarks and History Organizer: advanced search of your history and bookmarks with multiple views and smart folders to store your frequent searches. (Opera is well known for this.)
• Web-based protocol handlers: web applications, such as your favorite webmail provider, can now be used instead of desktop applications for handling mailto: links from other sites. Similar support is available for other protocols (Web applications will have to first enable this by registering as handlers with Firefox). (Are they copying IE too? IE had this from 6.0 - If I am not wrong.)
• Easy to use Download Actions: a new Applications preferences pane provides a better UI for configuring handlers for various file types and protocol schemes. (Again, a copy!)

Improved Platform for Developers

• New graphics and font handling: new graphics and text rendering architectures in Gecko 1.9 provides rendering improvements in CSS, SVG as well as improved display of fonts with ligatures and complex scripts. (Yes, that's real improvements.)
• Native Web page forms: HTML forms on Web pages now have a native look and feel on Mac OS X and Linux (Gnome) desktops. (Good!)
• Color management: (set gfx.color_management.enabled on in about:config and restart the browser to enable.) Firefox can now adjust images with embedded color profiles. (Hahahahhahahahahahah! I just can't stop laughing. Even the Opera Mini on my mobile phone has this feature.)
• Offline support: enables web applications to provide offline functionality (website authors must add support for offline browsing to their site for this feature to be available to users). (That's great! People have been waiting for this. Specially us, web developers.)

Improved Performance

• Reliability: A user's bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences are now stored in a transactionally secure database format which will prevent data loss even if their system crashes. (What does that mean? Can somebody explain?)
• Speed: Major architectural changes (such as the move to Cairo and a rewrite to how reflowing a page layout works) put foundations in place for major performance tuning which have resulted in speed increases in Beta 1, and will show further gains in future Beta releases. (Great!)
• Memory usage: Over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation. (I am afraid, I will choose IE! How many more memory leaks does Firefox have?)

I have no more lines to write and thus I shall end the article.
Ends!

You Comment - I Follow

I am taking part in the "You Comment - I Follow" movement. If you wanna know what it is then keep reading. Commenting has been one of the ways where bloggers get to know each other. I indeed have a reasonable amount of visits to my site through my comments on other blogs. But the sad part here is that links in comments are not crawled by search engines due to the nofollow attribute attached to those links. Blogger and almost all the other blogging services include the nofollow attribute for the links in comments as well as backlinks. This has been a frustration for most of the bloggers, but no more. Now we can remove the nofollow attribute from links in comments and backlinks in our blogs. How to do? Uh! I can't explain very well, so have a click here. That is also the place where I came to know about the You Comment - I Follow movement. To represent participation in the movement you can insert a small banner image in your sidebar. Also, you can find a variety of banners at that blog.

Hope to see you guys join the movement. It is a good sign of togetherness and support amongst us bloggers.

Spammer!

In a short explanation, a blog spammer is a person who try to get traffic or backlink to their website by puting unrelated comment or hyperlink in our blog such as in the comment section. It has been a lot of times every day I’ve been confronting spam comment in my wordpress blog (that is one reason I switched to Blogger) and it’s a bit tiring to label them as spam everyday through the Wordpress Admin Panel.

Should I have used captcha in the comment form? Akismet seems less reliable. The screenshot below shows one example of the spam comments that I always get for this site.



I already know my blog had an interesting design but if the spammer wanted to sell something, sorry coz I’m not too stupid to buy his penis-elongating pill. haha..

To put spammers off to hell, you might want to put this logo to your blog.



or even more extreme graphic like this one..but it’s quite scary..



p/s:How do you fight spam in your blog/website?

Shaheedhunge Azum

Found this cool video while digging through YouTube. The masterpiece music and the creativity of the camera man makes me WOW! Specially, I love the lyrics.

Opera - take the web wherever you go

This is a comment I posted to a post, "Why you should be using more than 1 web browser" in Blogger Tips and Tricks. It was later that I thought this is worth posting in my blog. So here it goes. The comment has been edited to remove some of the irrelevant parts and add some more. Refer to the post for the original comment.

There are many, in fact so many reasons why I love Opera. Friendly UI, simplicity of design, the RSS reader, mouse-gestures, voice recognition, widgets, etc... (too many to list.) I agree that Firefox is a very good browser but there a some good reasons why I choose Opera over Firefox. Security and Speed are the key factors. Opera is undeniably faster than Firfox. Try doing a test yourself and do some research on it. You will agree. Opera is THE most secure browser in terms of bug fixing and vulnerabilities.(Refer here: IE | Firefox | Opera | Safari | Konqueror ) It has built-in fraud protection [SCREENSHOT] and when you access an untrusted website, it wont just end up saying "The website you are accessing uses an untrusted certificate." Opera will indeed give you a brief description WHY it is not trusted and even gives you the option to view the certificate itself. This is the best way you can decide whether to accept or deny the certificate. [SCREENSHOT]

Firefox has one thing that I don't like. It keeps copying other browsers (specially IE) [LINK]. You will feel the difference with Opera. It feels like the browser of new generation of browsers.

You seem to love Firefox with Google toolbar. Well, have you heard about Opera Widgets [SCREENSHOT]. There are couple of Opera Widgets out there which is the same (sometimes even better than) as the Google toolbar [LINK]. You can install one of those widgets just like you install a Firefox extension and voila! you just got Opera with Google toolbar. [Opera Widgets are now accepted by W3C too].

Opera has so many features you are yet to discover, Opera has recently launched 9.5 beta with a lot new features including Opera Link (bookmark synchronization). Have a look at this post for more details.

Opera pioneered many of the hit features present in most browsers today [LINK]. Did you know that Opera was the first browser to introduce tabbed browsing, the first to introduce pop-up blocking, and the first to introduce integrated search boxes within the browser.

Opera is a cross-platform and even a cross-device browser, having versions of it running in TV systems, game consoles, pocket PCs and mobile phones. I myself use Opera Mini on my mobile phone. [Note: I used Opera Mini to post the original comment.] Well, Opera Mini is no more called a mobile browser. We call it the Opera Mini web browser because we can view web pages just the same way we view them on a desktop browser. Opera has gone beyond the screen size and brought the full web to the palm of our hands.

For a last word, have a look at this article. [LINK]

Site Compatibility or Browser Compatibility

It has been a big debate whether websites are not compatible with browsers or browsers are not compatible with websites. While webmasters and web developers claim that a certain browser is not compatible with their website, browser companies fight back saying that the websites are indeed not compatible with the browser and sometimes have even been proved.

One of the powerful weapons used by both parties in this war is web standards. Webmasters are giving more importance to validating their HTML rather than testing it on different browsers and browser companies are focusing more on supporting web standards than the rules (mostly set by IE). Opera stands out in this field and has a slogan "break the rules, follow the standards" (or is it vice versa).

As the web moves towards the second step (the web 2.0), web standards are becoming a vital and inevitable part of web development. Partly because more and more browsers are moving towards web standards (we are at the end of the IE dominated web) and specially because browsers are dominating/winning the war of compatibility. There are already plugins/addons developed to find out whether the site you are visiting uses valit HTML or not. In the near future, browsers might start displaying error pages for web pages using invalid HTML.

Web standards are simple and easier to follow and it eliminates the need to test web pages in different browsers. It is everyone's dream for the web to be standardized rather than ruled.

Opera Link - Bookmark Synchronization (The end of the dream)

The Opera Mini team has finally moved out Opera Mini 4 (OM4) from beta. The new release of OM is even more exciting and stable. Many of the ever-waiting and most requested features has been implemented in the new version. One of the remarkable features (which I loved most) is Opera Link.

Opera Link enables bookmark sychronisation and is built into the new OM4 and Opera 9.5. You could seemlessly sychronise your bookmarks in the desktop browser with that of the OM4 on your mobile phone. With OM4 on your phone, you could now easily show your friend, the cool website you found while browsing with Opera at your office, on the way to grandma's house. With Opera on your laptop, you could show your wife, the delicious looking recipe you found at work. With the web version of Opera Link at http://link.opera.com, you could still bookmark that new blog your friend has just started, while you browse on your friend's PC which doesn't have Opera installed. Opera has once again pioneered one of the greatest browser features of the century. Now I am (impatiently) waiting to see this feature copied by other browsers, as they have done in the past.

Isn't it exciting that I am blogging this on my brand new Opera Mini 4, installed just a while ago.

Update
While doing some experimenting with Opera Mini 4 and Opera Mini 4 beta3, I found that feeds are also synchronized between the two. Opera Desktop 9.5 beta (Kestrel) currently does not have feeds menu. I guess the Desktop Team will be adding feed synchronization between Opera Mini and Opera Desktop too. And WOW! Here I found that it's not just the feeds that is synchronised. But also the read count of feeds too. Opera seems to be reading our minds.

Keyword Cloud of MV Blogs

Have you ever wondered what is being blogged around the mvblogosphere. Well, quite a lot of times what you must be doing is checking the mvblogs homepage for the new blog posts or visiting your favourite blogs. But what I am talking about is a bit different.

What if you wanted to know which are the most blogged topics bloggers are talking about. Then here is the tool which you will run to. The mvblogs keyword cloud. This tool gives you an idea of what is being blogged around the MV blogosphere by displaying the most common keywords used by bloggers. It bolds out the word which is more frequently blogged and displays, in a bracket, the number of times bloggers have used the word. Cool, heh!

At the time of this posting the most popular keywords are Blog(16), Ever(15), Girl(21), Http(12), Maldives(29), October(20), Think(14), Want(15) and 2007(23).

In addition to this, they have also developed link clouds to display the number of mvblogs linked to mvblogs and mvblogs linked from other mvblogs. I couldn't understand the difference between the two, but it's worth checking out.