HTML5 Video and Mozilla

I’m going to skip the introduction and go right to the point: support Mozilla!

How? Use firefox and promote it.

Why? Because you want the web to be Free (not free as in “free beer” but Free as in Freedom). Because you value Freedom and knowledge!

Read these two blog posts:

HTML5 video and codecs by Mike Shaver, Mozilla VP of Engineering

Video, Freedom And Mozilla by Robert O’Callahan, Mozilla Developer

(originally via Slashdot)

If you use Firefox you are giving it a bigger market share and thus more power with content providers. After all, youtube would be worthless without viewers.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

What if a video site is online but no one can view the videos in it? Is it still a video site? Would it have any traffic at all?

I was planning on switching to chrome – after all, it is open source and firefox is slower, uses more resources and I prefer chrome’s UI in many aspects (but not all). However none of those things is nearly as important to me as keeping the web an open place and I believe in the importance of sites like youtube (we’ve all heard about videos on youtube documenting things like police abuse for example).

I’m no Richard Stallman and I not trying to turn anyone into Stallman but the choice between Firefox and Chrome is a close one to begin with. It’s not like I’m going to start promoting Linux (gNewSense at that) over OSX.

Firefox 3 First Impressions

+/-:
+ Faster
+ Lighter
+ Better default theme
+ Cool new features

- nothing so far

Download Link

Fullread

Fullread is a simple tool that helps you organize your online readings.

The way I use it: “web readings queue”
While I read my feeds I often click on links that open in new tabs and keep reading my feeds. When I’m done with the feeds, I start browsing the tabs that I opened. Often I don’t have time or patience to read them all so instead of having 30 or so tabs open in firefox at any given time, I simply add them to Fullread and when I have the time/patience I open my fullread queue page (fullread/lrei) and read the some pages, marking them for archival (sort of like when you archive mail in gmail). All my bookmarks in fullread are marked private so only I can see them.

In the future I also plan to use it as a full History of my web readings instead of just a Queue.

And yes I know fullread launched a while ago but I only got around to using it a while ago.

Firefox 3 Beta 2 – Not so fast

Sadly, the most important addon I use, Google Browser Sync is still not compatible with Firefox 3b2. Google needs to stop slacking… or would need to if it had competition :/

Anyway a few other addons I use are also not compatible yet: Google Gears, DownThemAll, Adblock Plus and the Growl addon.

Oh well, guess I’ll have to wait in memory leak land for a while – at least until Google releases a compatible browser sync.

Multiple Profiles in Firefox with Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon

For those of us who use multiple profiles in firefox, there’s a small surprise in Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon – firefox is no longer compiled with -NO-REMOTE as default. What that means is that now you have to pass the -NO-REMOTE option to firefox if you want to use multiple profiles simultaneously. Example:

firefox -NO-REMOTE -P work

Basically, just add -NO-REMOTE to all your firefox shortcuts (I have one shortcut for each profile).

A Defcon (or public wi-fi) survival guide

The Register has this article entitled “A Defcon survival guide” which contains a list of measures you should consider taking when using public Wi-Fi.

EDIT: Yes I know this is more than a month and a half old – it has been one of my open tabs in firefox (which works as a sort of to read/to blog list) for that long.

And while we’re on the subject

Note To Self: take a look at firekeeper – project page, project weblog.

Firekeeper is an Intrusion Detection and Prevention System for Firefox. It is able to detect, block and warn the user about malicious sites. Firekeeper uses flexible rules similar to Snort ones to describe browser based attack attempts. Rules can also be used to effectively filter different kinds of unwanted content.
Other features of Firekeeper include:

* Ability to scan incoming Firefox traffic – HTTP(S) response headers, body and URL and to cancel processing of suspicious responses.
* HTTPS and compressed responses are scanned after decryption/decompression.
* Very fast pattern matching algorithm (taken directly from Snort).
* Interactive alerts that give an ability to choose a response to detected attack attempt.
* Ability to use any number of files with rules and to automatically load files from remote locations.

NoScript – before I forget… again

I’ve been meaning to make a decent post explaining why you should use the NoScript extension in firefox but I can never get around to it and end up forgetting for months at a time only to forget all about it again so I’m gonna leave here the link, say “It’s a Good Thing” and leave you to figure out why.

Here’s a nice and recent example.

Javascript is pretty powerful and with great power comes great responsibility or something like that… I’m gonna go to sleep before I say any more weird stuff.

Making Windows look good – Linux themes in Windows

I learned about Linux themes in Windows via the Tux Vermelho blog (in Portuguese) which in turn learned about it from the Tech by Colin blog (in English). I’ll mirror the instructions here just in case:

1 – Download the Belchfire to patch to make Windows accept new themes (hurray for MS crippleware) from here.

2 – Download a Visual Style (Colin recomends these):
* Clearlooks
* Human
* Plastik
I went with clearlooks (same one I usually use in Linux).

3 – Icons. Get the Tango Patcher. Previews here.
I went with Tangerine (though I usually use the OSX icons in Linux – they are just sooo purrty).

4 – Tango for Firefox and Tango/Tangerine for uTorrent. You may be able to find (some of) these themes for other applications too.

And that’s all folks.

Internet Explorer 7 & CCleaner

I’ve been a firefox user since 0.5 or 0.6 something like that. Before I was a mozilla user and for a while before that I even used Netscape. It’s safe to say that i’ve never been much of a fan of IE. I’ve used IE (even on linux over wine) too browse some IE-only webapages on a few occassions but most of the time I use it to access one specific webpage: it’s a local webpage that acts as a sort of “customization” of a remote website. It uses a bunch of ActiveX controls, javascript and stuff. It is a IE-only webpage. I decided to try out the new IE7 beta2, obviously I didnt make it my default browser and when I tried to open the local webpage with it, it opened it in firefox. Talk about being useful… IF I WANTED TO OPEN IT IN FF I WOULD’VE DONE IT WITHOUT IE! Damn stupid browser… sigh. Only 10 seconds into the new version of IE and I’m already trying to uninstall it – that’s a record. And yes, I said “trying”. Why? You would’ve thought that a company that incorporated an “Add and Remove Programs” app to their Operating System would’ve used it, especially with beta software… sigh. So I had a non-useful browser installed that I couldn’t install its slightly more useful previous version until it was removed – I knew that without even trying it, it’s the “Microsoft Way” not allow you to replace programs with their previous version. That’s when the hero of this story stepped in, CCleaner:

CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system – allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. But the best part is that it’s fast (normally taking less that a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware!

It can also uninstall programs, in this case it uninstalled IE7 and I’m back with IE6. And that’s how CCleaner saved the day. Thank you CCleaner

UPDATE:

OK SORRY! I was a bit pissed off when i wrote this post and a few people (namely Pedro Fernandes and Relax) already pointed out to me that you can remove IE7 as an update via the “add an remove programs” app.