Whomwah.com

Here’s a fun easter egg in Firefox 3. Type about:robots into the url bar and you get a fun response. I love robots, and one day I would like to be one.

I’m sure people will not fail to know about this but as it’s not completely official yet and I think the Mozilla FTP site has melted under the load, you can still get a copy from this mirror. Version 2.0 comes with a bunch of new features: Spell checker, Better Session management etc etc. I’m sure there’s loads more but I haven’t looked through the release notes. I hope they have made an effort to fix the hogging of memory that FF is is infamous for.

This release comes just 2 weeks after the IE7 release, which seems to have done half a job in improving the poor IE6. I can’t believe they’ve found a hole already!! Thank goodness I don’t have to use it (Thanks Steve). I’m sure the dissecting of both browsers will occur over the next few weeks I imagine you’ll find it hard to fine someone backing IE.

It looks like the final release of Firefox 1.5 is available for download. Get it now. Oh and it also looks like the Spread Firefox site is gearing up for something exciting.

I have been doing a little messing with the canvas tag that comes with Firefox 1.5 and Safari. This tag is a new HTML element for programmable graphics. canvas is based on the WhatWG canvas specification, which itself is based on Apple’s canvas implemented in Safari. It can be used for rendering graphs, UI elements, and other custom graphics on the client.

I had seen some examples of using canvas to draw pictures and was inspired by the 3-d demo done by Benjamin Joffe, so I thought I’d have a little play myself. It felt a bit like the early experiments done when Flash5 and MX came out.

Here’s a couple of experiments using some simple physics.

• example 1 (elastic)
• example 2 (bounce)

I know this extension to firefox has been around for ever, but I feel it deserves it’s own little big-up as I find it so useful. Developed by Chris Pederick, it is a toolbar extension for Firefox that allows you to use many great tools that the toolbar has built in. For example a useful one is the ablity to highlight all block level elements, also to view the CSS ID’s and Class information on the page and then edit that information live.

There really is too many features to list. Let’s just say if you are a web developer, you need it!

One the guys at work did a quick browser stats review yesterday for the figures in 2005 (yes I know we’re only 6 days in) and my they have made interesting viewing. Firefox has made a giant leap. Let hope this continues for the rest of the year.

58.92%  IE6 (down 8%)
23.37%  Firefox (up 11% - bear in mind this is from just 3 days of stats though)
5.41%  IE5 and 5.5 (down 3% - IE5 family appears to be dying out!)
1.62%  Safari (down 0.2%, but still above FF on Mac which is now at 1.058%)
1.20%  RSS News Feed Aggregators (new, better detection = higher % here)
1.12%  Phones + Handhelds (new, better detection = higher % here)

In little more than a month, Firefox has been downloaded more than 10 million times.

This is fantastic. I’ve been using the browser since the early days of development and singing it virtues to everyone I know. MS must be quaking in the there boots? I don’t think they’ve ever seen such completion growing so fast. To show the level of growth it has, even my grandparents have it installed on there computer!

I read from the spread firefox site that the advert in the NY times is set to be out by this coming Wednesday, December 15… If you keep tuned into the site they’ll let you know the day before the ad is set to run. There’re also saying ‘You’ll want to be sure to stake out a copy for yourself – we’ve got a surprise for you!’