Tag: mozilla

Shiny New Firefox Theme

So, I just installed the “nightly” Mozilla Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 RC1. It’s a whole lot more stable than Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 was.
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I really like this new default theme. It’s much prettier, although I don’t really like some of the icon choices.

In addition to the new theme, there’s also some apparently new functionality when downloading .exe files. Every time I download a .exe it pops up a window saying “You have chosen to open blahblah.exe”. Only, it won’t let you open it directly, you gotta save it to your hard drive somewhere first.

I think I am going to stick with this release until FireFox 2.0 Beta 2 officially comes out, because as I said before, this is just a nightly build with the Beta 2 name RC1 name. This release has yet to crash on me, where Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 crashed roughly 10 times each day. Looks like the Mozilla team has been busy.

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Performancing For Firefox 1.3

Performancing For Firefox 1.3 has been released. Lots and lots of changes are included in this release. There’s now support for themes and addons. The performancing team has also open sourced Performancing For Firefox, which means anyone can get the source code and modify it as they please.

Some of the new features are listed below:

I’m writing this post with this new version of Performancing. So far nothing unusual. The addons and themes API additions are sweet, hopefully some worthy developers will hack together some neat addons. I’m excited about this new version, it’s opened a lot more doors for Performancing.

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More WordPress and some FireFox

UPDATE: Get SK2-WP2Compatibility, a plugin for Spam Karma 2. It fixes the comment count problem mentioned below when using Spam Karma 2 with WordPress 2.0. OK, just wanted to get that out in the open. Please continue.

Now that I’ve spent a little more time with WordPress 2.0 RC1, I’ve discovered a plugin compatibility problem that’s probably going to destroy me. Spam Karma 2 causes some problems when updating the “comment_count” value in the “wp_posts” table. It doesn’t just cause problems displaying comment numbers, I had to manually updated that field for some posts. But, it’s not like this type of thing wasn’t expected. I’m not brave enough to run slackware-current on my main workstation anymore, this works for me though.

So, I can either use Spam Karma and not have any comment counts for new or updated posts, or I can just stop using Spam Karma. I really don’t want to let Spam Karma go. I’ve already seen about 200 trackback/comment spams since disabling Spam Karma earlier today. I really hope to see a new release of Spam Karma that works with WordPress 2.0. I guess this problem was known about a few weeks ago. I somehow didn’t notice it when I upgraded to 2.0 beta 1 and then to 2.0 beta 2.

Anybody know of a comment/trackback spam WordPress plugin that’s known to work with 2.0? There’s the list in the support forums, which also happens to discuss the Spam Karma problems. I may see if the latest WordPress Hashcash will work at all.

There is good news though, not really relating to WordPress though. FireFox 1.5 stable is out! You can get FireFox 1.5 at the new official home of FireFox and Thunderbird, Mozilla.com.

Also, my favorite Mint Pepper has been updated to work with Mint 1.23. I was thinking of downgrading to Mint 1.14 just so I could have the Outclicks Pepper. Andrew Sutherland couldn’t have picked a better time to release his updated pepper.

CONTINUED UPDATE: Too bad I didn’t see this about an hour ago. Looks like I’ll get to keep my Spam Karma thanks to SK2-WP2Compatibility, a plugin for Spam Karma 2.

SK2-WP2Compatibility is a plugin for Spam Karma 2. It has no effect without Spam Karma 2.0 or higher being already installed on your WordPress system.
This plugin has no spam fighting or spam killing abilities. Instead, it is intended to provide a way by which all users moving to WordPress 2.0 can enjoy the benefits of Spam Karma – without having to worry about WordPress 2.0 specific changes.

Might not need that SK2 plugin for too long, there’s word of a Spam Karma 2.1 soon.

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Horrible Lag is Gone

This site had been experiencing horrible lag over the last few days. I sat down lastnight and got it all figured out. First, I thought it must somehow be related to the new apache httpd server I installed, not the case. After determining that it wasn’t an apache config problem or something, I started into WordPress. The lag didn’t come from WordPress itself, but a plugin I was using. Said plugin was wp-shortstat.

After disabling wp-shortstat, the page loads much quicker without the lag when loading the end of the page. It’s almost like my web server would get to the bottom of the page and then just stop sending the rest of the data to the browser. The browser would get to the very end of the page and just stop loading. If I’d view the rendered HTML in IE or FireFox, the the trailing “body” and “html” tags would be missing. It’s all better now though.

I also downloaded Flock lastnight at home. It’s pretty interesting, all sorts of feature for blogs and other services like del.icio.us. Flock is built on FireFox 1.0. And if you’d like a WordPress.com blog, download flock and you can get one without an invite (H/T IO ERROR).

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IE UI Designer Switches

Scott Berkun was the UI designer for Internet Explorer (versions 1.0 through 5.0). He’s decided to make the switch to Firefox, for various reasons.

It’s a sad day and a good day. For years I’ve held onto my IE install out of love. I worked on IE 1.0 thru 5.0, and was one of the people that designed much of its UI. But my love for the past has faded. Last week I switched to Firefox: and I’ve been happy.

Check out his reasons for switching to Firefox and some UI changes he might make in Firefox. Makes for a good read, especially coming from a guy who was an IE developer.

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