InfoWorld had a nice post of 5 things to love about Firefox 3. Here are my comments on the lovely things of Firefox 3.

1. Much better performance

Mozilla developers borrowed some memory management tricks from the Free BSD operating system for the Windows and Linux versions of Firefox. (They say memory management on Macs already worked pretty well.) The effect is clear. The browser is much less likely to commandeer too many system resources. And Firefox’s developers worked to make sure that add-ons, notorious memory thieves, don’t cause problems either. They’ve rolled in cycle collectors that help prevent extensions from locking up RAM and not giving it back. They’re also distributing tools to third-party developers that will help them build more abstemious add-ons.

This is the best news I’ve heard of on Firefox development over years. Memory consumption of Firefox has always irritated me — right now I can see nearly 300 MB RAM is being allocated for Firefox 2 only!

2. The “Awesome Bar”

OK, so the official name is the Location Bar, the field where you enter URLs you want to visit. But beta testers have nicknamed it the Awesome Bar and it is, well, pretty awesome. Enter text in the Location Bar and a drop-down list appears of pages from your browsing history that include that text, not just in the URL, but in the page title or the page’s tag (see No. 4 below). The list even includes Gmail messages that include that word in the subject line. If you’ve already visited a Web page, there’s a good chance it’s useful to you. The Location Bar lets you very quickly search that useful subset of the Web.

I’ve got many URL I cannot remember exactly and therefore I depend on Firefox to get it after a few first strokes. The “Awesome Bar” sometimes proves very helpful but occasionally it makes me confused. How about you?

3. Can’t miss warnings

…there’s no danger of missing one of Firefox’s new warnings. When you enter the URL of a suspected attack site, Firefox brings up a full-page warning. With a click, you can see a detailed explanation of why the site was blocked. Or you can just click “Get me out of here,” which takes you to Firefox’s start page. If you really want to live dangerously, there’s a small link that lets you ignore the warning and proceed to the suspect site.

Well, in most of cases, I know the type of site I’m going to visit. Warning is good especially for net newbies however.

4. Better bookmarks

If you like a page, you just click the star in the Location Bar and it’s a favorite. A drop-down box lets you name it, choose a folder to put it in or add a tag to categorize it. Bookmarks (and your browsing history) are now stored in a database, which means you don’t have to spend so much time organizing bookmark folders. You can perform detailed searches of your bookmarks, then save that search as a special folder. Any new bookmarked page that fits the criteria automatically goes in the folder.

Yes, it looks like a good features but quite advanced for average users, I suppose. Anyway, who is not an advanced user using Firefox for web browsing?

5. Whole-page zooming

If your eyes aren’t what they used to be, it’s nice to bump up the size of text on Web pages, as Firefox 2 will do. But it only changes the text size — the other elements remain the same size. That makes for pages that look like The Incredible Hulk, with words bursting through the boxs and tabs that are supposed to contain them.

The new Firefox magnifies everything on the page equally. Everything remains in proportion, but becomes easier to read. And the next time you visit that page, it’ll display at the same level of zoom.

This is a killer feature (not unique to Firefox however) but it’s another challenge to developer to make application that automatically fits the page using JavaScript for some portions of the page may not scale as desired after many Cltr — +/- strokes.

Happy browsing with Firefox the next!

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I’d applied for Woopra beta since the service was introduced in a post from “Web Tools Collection” and just received approval for this blog a few days ago. Running client tool and seeing all info about who are visiting my blog in real-time, I could just say “Wow, so cool!”

Woopra provides realtime analytics via a Java-based desktop application so you must have Java 6 pre-installed (some Mac users may not have the latest Java install, version 1.6 can be found at this…

Searching a solution for how to bypass printer dialog box when printing multiple web pages in Internet Explorer which is required in one of my company’s projects I found a hack from DevX.com.

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if (navigator.appName == "Microsoft Internet Explorer")
{
     var PrintCommand = '<object ID="PrintCommandObject" WIDTH=0 HEIGHT=0 CLASSID="CLSID:8856F961-340A-11D0-A96B-00C04FD705A2"></object>';
     document.body.insertAdjacentHTML('beforeEnd', PrintCommand);
     PrintCommandObject.ExecWB(6, -1);
     PrintCommandObject.outerHTML = "";
}
else {
    window.print();
}

But it does not work in Windows XP SP2 (and Windows Server 2003 SP1 or above). Further researches reveal that the augments for printing command should…

As you may notice, I’ve used Ext JS in a couple of my own projects. I can say Ext JS is a professional project and what Jack Slocum has been doing are better than any other projects in term of UI components: with a few lines of JavaScript codes, you can create an excellent UI that gives you a new experience you may never have with other JavaScript/Ajax libraries (though it’s still far from perfection as anything else).

I got the first…

It’s hardly to believe that the creation of Firefox logo was inspired by space images captured by Hubble Space Telescope but the following pictures could prove that claim.

The picture on the left looks like the variable star V838 Monocerotis near our Milky Way Galaxy.

However, it is found that the original image (below) was modified a bit to look more like Firefox logo. “… it’s been rotated relative to the photo below, and some of the gas cloud may have been edited…

After installing Firefox 3 Beta 5, I found Firebug did not work properly and that led me to the 1.2 branch of this great add-on, in alpha at this time. This build can chuck out some issues but not all. However, the first beta of this branch is expected to come out soon and it should work well with the latest release of Firefox 3.

Some interesting new features you can see in version 1.2 are:

1. Programmatically disable firebug log from JavaScript
2. Showing…

I’ve registered and had some hand-on experiences with Amazon Web Services (S3 and EC2) since they were launched. I like the idea behind them and theoretically they provide very flexible hosting environment where you can deploy and publish your apps on fly. Yet, in practice, it’s not that simple: you must be an expert to create a system of high availability for your apps. In many cases, time to configure EC2+S3 is more than time to create the app. Also,…

Marcel Overdijk has released Ext plugin for Grails.

This plugin provides integration with the Ext JavaScript Library. When installing the plugin, it downloads and installs automatically the latest Ext 2.0.2 distribution in your application, and registers itself to be used with the adaptive AJAX tags. It also contains two helper tags to easily include additional Ext JavaScript and CSS files as well.

Installation

To install the Ext plugin type this command from your project’s root folder:

grails install-plugin ext

The complete Ext distribution is downloaded…

Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 is now available for download. This release includes “750 changes from the previous beta, improving stability and web compatibility, providing platform and user interface enhancements, and resulting in the fastest Firefox ever. Many of these improvements were based on community feedback from the previous beta” (quoted from the release note).

Adrian had a little hands-on time with Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 now and initial testing shows it to be the fastest browser available as claimed. He put the…

A few months ago, I told one of my friends, Bill Aue, that I was really tired with going tens of websites to read tech news everyday while my RSS reader had been overloaded with hundreds of feeds. Sometimes it’s very hard to find what important news is.

Idea and Implementation

Then, Bill had an idea of creating a weblog which pulls news/posts from all top tech websites/blogs (via RSS) and organizes them like a magazine so that readers can capture hot…