FireFox surpasses 1 billion downloads!

The team of 1 billion downloads of firefox - whatwasithinking.co.ukMozilla Labs have done it – the download counter shows more than 1 billion downloads of Firefox! What started as a rewrite of the old Netscape browser has now become the second most used browser world-wide, with an almost 23% market share (according to stat counter’s figures).

The recent release of FireFox 3.5 boosted those numbers (with about 5 million downloads in the first week!) to over 1 billion. Why not celebrate with Mozilla Labs by reading about the history of FireFox or treating yourself to some cool extensions? 😉

Microsoft and Yahoo partnering up in online search deal

microsoft and yahoo search engine deal Yahoo and Microsoft have finally announced an internet search deal in the hopes of rivalling Google’s search services. Microsoft’s search engine will power the Yahoo website, and in turn Yahoo will become the advertising sales team for Microsoft’s online offering.

Through this agreement, both companies hope to create more innovation in search and better value for advertisers and its users. Let’s hope that this partnership brings a better and more credible alternative to Google 🙂

The trouble with IE6 – why you still may have to support it (and debunking some myths)

the trouble with supporting IE6 - whatwasithinking.co.ukOver the last week or so, the discussion “should we continue to support IE6” has been gaining more and more momentum. Digg, Mashable, Techcrunch and other websites ran features about why IE6 should be given the boot, websites like facebook and youtube are starting to phase out the browser, hinting users to upgrade their browser.

This sparked a long and heated debate in a number of web design agencies and clients I am working with (or have worked with / for), whether it would be worth just dropping the support for Internet Explorer 6 and ask users to upgrade their browsers so that they can enjoy the website to the fullest.

Coming from a usability, accessibility, SEO and web dev background, I thought it might be a good idea writing why I would recommend supporting (or not supporting) IE6 in the industry I am working for. Keep Reading

WordPress 2.8.2 – XSS vulnerability fixed

WordPress 2.8.2 has been released, a quick update which fixes an XSS vulnerability: comment author URLs were not fully sanitized when displayed in the admin backend, which could be exploited to redirect you away from the admin dashboard to another site.

Download 2.8.2 from here.

WordPress 2.8.1 – tighter plugin security and a faster dashboard

WordPress has just released an update to their popular blog-software: WordPress 2.8.1.

Aside from the usual bug fixes, this update addresses a security issue where admin pages created by certain plugins could be viewed by unprivileged users. In other notes, the update reduces the memory usage of the dashboard (always welcome!), improves the automatic upgrade process (no longer will the upgrade accidentally delete files from a failed upgrade), fixes glitches in styling in the plugin editor and auto-save errors in IE as well as a fix to the rich-text-editor not loading properly due to compression issues.

For a full list of changes, head over to the official WordPress blog, and download WordPress 2.8.1 from here.

Mozilla Jetpack – FireFox add-on development using HTML, CSS and Javascript

Mozilla Jetpack released - whatwasithinking.co.ukA couple of weeks ago, the creative minds behind Mozilla Labs have launched the open source project Jetpack to the FireFox community.

Jetpack is an API which enables designers and developers to write add-ons using HTML, CSS and Javascript, encouraging more and more developers to join the 8,000+ people strong add-on community.

The Mozilla Labs Jetpack website already has a wealth of information, from guidelines to tutorials (ranging from how to disable <embed>’s or how to integrate the twitter API) and information on distributing your new add-on.

If you would like to find out more, just head over to Jetpack.mozillalabs.com for more information.

FireFox 3.5 – big update, new technologies, faster browsing

firefox3.5 released - whatwasithinking.co.ukFireFox, one of the most popular browsers on the market, has been updated to version 3.5 yesterday. Based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, this browser promises to be about twice as fast as FireFox 3 (and 10x faster than FF2!), to support new technologies, improve its performance and be even easier to use than before…

Keep Reading

Small downtime – but now I’m back!

Downtime - whatwasithinking.co.ukDear reader,

I would like to apologise for the downtime and/or sluggish speeds in accessing this weblog over the last week. The reason was that one of the servers of the datacenter this website is being hosted with has malfunctioned and needed some TLC and a reboot or two.

Everything should be sorted now and we are back in business! 🙂

While you’re reading this, why not check out one of the most popular posts of this site or follow me for more news, information, links and advice here?

Cheers,

ALEX