Archive for January, 2010
January 27th, 2010
How many times have you read a privacy policy or terms of service document from start to finish? Do you notice if a site’s privacy policy changes? Do you take your rights to your own data seriously?
Tomorrow the Mozilla team will be holding a live session discussion of the Drumbeat initiative for privacy icons, a project aimed at giving users ample awareness of the terms of service and privacy policies. We seek to understand the types of information users would like to understand from these legal agreements, such as how long companies keep user data and if these data are shared with third parties.
All are welcome to participate in the discussion at the Mozilla office from 10-3 or virtually via @Mozlabs on Twitter or via the comments on this blog. Some of the event will be live videocast and I’ll be live blogging the entire event (on this very blog!) and being the liaison between those at Mozilla in-person and those who desire to participate asynchronously with the internet as their intermediary. We look forward to your responses.
January 27th, 2010
Browsing space is important; especially for smaller netbook PCs out there. So, why have the menu bar, bookmark bar and navigation bar shown if you don’t need them? The Hide GUI bars extension for Firefox will let you hide all three, or bring them back with one single keyboard combination.
Once the Hide GUI bars add-on is installed, customizing it to fit your needs is pretty self explanatory. In the options you can choose which toolbars get hidden:
- Menu Bar
- Navigation Bar
- Tab Bar
- Bookmarks Bar
- Status Bar
Next, you just choose the keyboard combination you wish to use to hide or show all the Firefox toolbars.
How to Hide Toolbars Manually in Firefox
Can you do this without the use of the Hide GUI bars add-on? Yes, but it is a little more complicated. One of the new features in Firefox 3.6 is the ability to hide the menu bar. The navigation bar and bookmarks bar were already hide-able before this most recent release. To hide them, just right-click one of the toolbars, and uncheck the one you wish to hide:
You can pick up the Hide GUI bars add-on for Firefox on the Firefox add-ons web site.
Add me on Twitter! Come follow my daily antics, links, tips and more @mitchkeeler on Twitter!
© Mitch Keeler 2010 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!
January 27th, 2010
Mitchell with Lisa Burda, granddaughter of Aenne, at award ceremony. DLD conference, Munich 2010.
Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation, was awarded the Aenne Burda Award at the international Digital Life Design Conference in Munich, Germany. Mitchell is the fifth recipient of the award that honors successful, creative female entrepreneurs that are visionaries of the digital world. She received the award for alternative and transparent developments in software.
To quote from the press release issued by DLD-Conference: “Mitchell is a pioneer in the internet industry. The Mozilla Foundation calls for transparency and self-determination in the digital world and develops open-source software that allows everyone to contribute. With the popular browser Firefox Mozilla was able to take a significant amount of market share from the market leader.”
Mitchell Baker comments on receiving the award: “I am honored for the recognition, both personally and on behalf of the many thousands of Mozilla community members who contribute to Mozilla every day to bring innovation and self-determination to Internet life. I am proud to receive this award and proud that hundreds of millions of people today trust Mozilla to make their digital world better.”
The award commemorates visionary entrepreneur Aenne Burda. The German business woman was a role-model for many of the post-war generation. Starting with a small publishing house, Aenne Burda created the world’s largest fashion publishing house.
Previous recipients of the award are Marissa Mayer of Google, Caterina Fake, Flickr-founder, Martha Stewart, TV-host and entrepreneur, as well as investor and internet pioneer Esther Dyson who presented the award to Mitchell together with Lisa Burda, granddaughter of Aenne.
Please join us in congratulating Mitchell for this award!
January 26th, 2010
I have one more Firefox 3.6 about:config tip up my sleeve. By toggling one setting, you can go from having a drop down list of tabs to a thumb-nailed view of each tab that is open.
Here is how you too can enable this secret Firefox 3.6 feature.
How to Enable the Tab Preview Menu Button
- Type about:config in the address bar. Then, if needed click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
- Next, in the filter box – type in:
- browser.allTabs.previews
- Right-click that about:config entry, and select “Toggle”
This will change it from false, to true. You could take the same steps to disable it too. Now when you click that icon with the four tiny squares, you will get a visually prettier way to check out all your tabs.
Also once this has been enabled, you can use the keyboard combination:
Shift + Ctrl + Tab
To get the same tab previews, just without the button clicking.
Learn More About Firefox 3.6 | 
Subscribe for More Firefox Tips!
Add me on Twitter! Come follow my daily antics, links, tips and more @mitchkeeler on Twitter!
© Mitch Keeler 2010 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!
January 26th, 2010
My name is Alex. I am one of developers who helped make it possible to utilize CUDA from within Jetpack. (See the Jetpack-to-CUDA project) Andrey is Ph.D. at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, his interests include parallel computing and distributed algorithm development. The goal of this article is to share our ideas of how to elevate JavaScript performance by utilizing the GPU’s parallel processing power. Some of these ideas formed the basis for the “Jetpack-to-CUDA” project.
So, Why does this matter?
People are using the internet to collaborate more than ever before. Collaboration on the internet has been evolving at a rapid pace, and the applications and technology that will drive the next wave of internet collaboration will require even greater technical complexity and more significant computing resources than is currently available through the browser environment today. While text documents, videos, music, and image-base forms of collaboration are now common place, there are many needs require a level of compute performace beyond the web platform as it exists today, such as:
- consumption of high-quality digital video or music streams,
- complex image or speech recognition,
- manipulation and processing large pictures of nature or space,
- processing large sets of tabular data locally in the browser,
- complex animations with DOM elements (via DirectX or OpenGL),
- exploring 3D worlds, such as SecondLife or an OpenSim Grid,
- real-time audio and video editing,
- having an integrated development environment that runs entirely in the browser
There are endless examples of such complex uses of the internet platform that are just not feasible with the status quo web platform. Developers have tried to overcome such barriers in the past with client-side enhancements like ActiveX, Netscape Plugins, Java Applets, but each in its own way was flawed and failed to gain mass adoption. It is possible that the Native Client project will change all this, but standardization of such initiatives across the browser landscape is a lengthy endeavor. For the near future the tools that the developer uses to provide a rich user experience remain JavaScript and ActionScript, plug-ins, such as the ones previously mentioned, are significantly limited by the architectural mismatch of performance requirements they place on the CPU.
Read more…
January 25th, 2010
Looking for a way to make the social networking web site, Facebook, even better? If some things annoy you about Facebook, or you are just an addict (don’t worry, your secret is safe with me) check out the Better Facebook add-on for Firefox.
From head to toe, this add-on for Firefox will give you a lot of new toys, options and more to play with on your Facebook account, to make the Facebook experience even better for you.
Better Facebook Activity Tracking
After Installing, just navigate to Facebook’s web site to get started. Right off the bat, you’ll notice that your most recent notifications are now pinned to the right side of the Facebook window, as seen here:
If anybody un-friends you, you will also get notification from the front page of Facebook under the “Friend Tracker” section.
My Group Activity will alert you to new posts, members, and more in groups you are a member of. This is much more handy than visiting each, one by one.
Better Facebook News Feed
On your news feed, you have a few more options to play with too. Here is a little more about those from the developer:
Click ‘Mark All Read’ once you have read every story on this page. The stories will then be hidden the next time you view the page. But don’t worry – if any new comments are added they will show back up! This will let you keep track of conversations that you otherwise might have missed.
You can always go back and see all the hidden stories by clicking ‘Show All’, then hide them again by clicking ‘Hide Read’.
Better Facebook Options and More
By clicking the “Options” button on the front page, you can quickly configure and edit how you want to see updates come up. For example, you can show, minimize or hide new friend notifications.
You can pick up the Better Facebook! add-on for Firefox from the Firefox add-ons web site.
More Facebook/Firefox Fun > Best 5 Add-ons for Facebook Fans
Add me on Twitter! Come follow my daily antics, links, tips and more @mitchkeeler on Twitter!
© Mitch Keeler 2010 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!
January 23rd, 2010
It’s time to kick off our Labs Night series for 2010. Our first event for 2010 is going to be held on Jan 26 (Tuesday) from 6:00 PM onwards. We will be hosting the event at Mozilla Headquarters.
Featured speakers:
1. We’re very excited to host several Seedcamp companies at our Jan 26 meetup. From the Seedcamp website: “Seedcamp is a programme created to jumpstart the entrepreneurial community in Europe by connecting next generation developers and entrepreneurs with over 400 mentors from a top-tier network of company builders.”
We hope to have companies such as Brainient, Codility, Kwaga, Platogo, and many many more giving us lightning talk style presentations.
2. Jay Sullivan, VP Mobile at Mozilla will talk about our Mobile strategy and show off some cool demos, including our upcoming version of Firefox for mobile devices.
3. In addition, we will also have a round of updates on various Mozilla projects from Labs, Addons and more.
If you are planning on attending, be sure to RSVP on the Meetup page. We hope you’ll join us for food, fun and lots of good discussions.
January 22nd, 2010
The Mozilla community is proud to announce that Firefox 3.6 has shipped and is now available for free download at www.firefox.com. Firefox 3.6 and the new Gecko 1.9.2 platform were built by a global community of passionate contributors, including thousands of experienced developers, security experts, localization and support communities, and hundreds of thousands of active testers.
What’s new in Firefox 3.6:
Below are some of the new features in Firefox 3.6:
- Personas: Personalize the look of your Firefox by selecting new themes called Personas in a single click and without a restart
- Plugin Updater: To keep you safe from potential security vulnerabilities, Firefox will now detect out of date plugins
- Stability improvements: Firefox 3.6 significantly decreased crashes caused by third party software – all without sacrificing our extensibility in any way
- Form Complete: When filling out an online form, Firefox suggests information for fields based on your common answers in similar field
- Performance: Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness, and startup time
- Open Video and Audio: With the world’s best implementation of HTML 5 audio and video support, now video can be displayed full screen and supports poster frames
What’s New Under the Hood for Developers
- Support for the latest HTML5 specification, including the File API for local file handling
- Font Support: In addition to OpenType and TrueType fonts, 3.6 now supports the new Web Open Font Format (WOFF)
- CSS gradients: Supports linear and radial CSS gradients which allow for a smoother transition between colors
- Device orientation: Firefox 3.6 exposes the orientation of the laptop or device to Web pages
- See more complete information in this article for web and software developers
How to get Mozilla Firefox 3.6:
Firefox 3.6 is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in more than 70 languages – more platforms and languages than any other browser! You can download Firefox 3.6 at www.firefox.com.
January 22nd, 2010
New to Firefox 3.6, when you are on a page, and you want to open a link in a new tab – rather than opening the link in the far right of the tab bar, Firefox will now open the link right next to the tab you are in. Now, while this might be convenient for some, it is a feature I don’t really need. So here is how you can disable the new “Insert Related Tab After Current” tweak in Firefox 3.6.
Make New Tab Pages Open in the Far Right of the Tab Bar
- Type about:config in the address bar. Then, if needed click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
- Next, in the filter box – type in:
- tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent
- Right-click that about:config entry, and select “Toggle”
This will convert Firefox back to loading opening a new tab from a web page on the far right of the tab bar, rather than right next to the tab you opened it from.
To switch back, follow these same steps and toggle the “false” back to “true”.
This should help those of you out there who do not like this new feature to Firefox 3.6, or are just not ready to switch how you open a page in a new tab just yet.
Learn More About Firefox 3.6 | Subscribe for More Firefox Tips!
Add me on Twitter! Come follow my daily antics, links, tips and more @mitchkeeler on Twitter!
© Mitch Keeler 2010 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!
January 22nd, 2010
With Firefox 3.6’s release, we can all do a quick about:config tweak that will enable the prettier tab switching. By default, when you hit the keyboard keys Ctrl + Tab you just rotate through your tabs. By making some quick adjustments though, you can pull up the new tab switcher that you see in the picture above.
How to Enable Firefox’s Secret Visual Tab Switcher
- Type about:config in the address bar. Then, if needed click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
- Next, in the filter box – type in:
- browser.ctrlTab.previews
- Right-click that about:config entry, and select “Toggle”
Now, when you hit the keyboard combination of Ctrl + Tab you will get the new visual tab previews, rather than just scroll through the tabs one by one. If you want to switch back, just follow the same steps to toggle it from true, back to false.
Learn More About Firefox 3.6 | Subscribe for More Firefox Tips!
Add me on Twitter! Come follow my daily antics, links, tips and more @mitchkeeler on Twitter!
© Mitch Keeler 2010 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!