Internet Explorer 7's RSS Icon

After a long consideration, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 Team finally settled on....



That's right. It is the Mozilla Firefox's RSS icon.

From the post:

This seemed like a very good idea, so in November, Amar and I took a visit down to Silicon Valley to meet with John Lilly and Chris Beard from Mozilla to get their thoughts on it. We all agreed that it’s in the user’s best interest to have one common icon to represent RSS and RSS-related features in a browser.

I’m excited to announce that we’re adopting the icon used in Firefox. John and Chris were very enthusiastic about allowing us (and anyone in the community) to use their icon. This isn’t the first time that we’ve worked with the Mozilla team to exchange ideas and encourage consistency between browsers, and we’re sure it won’t be the last.

I am very happy to see collaboration between Internet Explorer developers and Mozilla Firefox developers. It will surely benefit the internet users greatly by creating and establishing standard among most (if not all) internet browsers.

I know it is just a tiny RSS icon, not a major achievement between IE Team and Mozilla. However all achievements start with small steps.

Google + Opera?

There is a rumor going around that Google is planning to acquire Opera Software ASA, the company who developed Opera Browser.

Gary Price said:

Dirson's New Google Blog links to a French language blog by Pierre Chappaz (former president of Yahoo! Europe), says that the acquisition is going down but to use the terms given in Google's mechanical translation of the post, this info needs to be "taken with precaution."

I agree that this rumor need to be "taken with precaution", but this is a very nice rumor. It made me think what would be like if Google actually acquired Opera.

I believe if Google acquired Opera, there is a good chance that Google will open Opera's source to the public. It would greatly reduces Internet Explorer's marketshare while creating fair number of good internet browsers. That way, no single browser will dominate the browsers market; thus, creating a heathly competition among browsers. Frankly, I don't believe in "size-fit-all" browser, because there is no such thing.

There are some other speculation that Google will rebrand Opera as "GBrowser" and use knowledge of both Firefox developers and Opera developers to improve it. Not a bad speculation but unlikely since there is no need for Google to make "GBrowser" if Google already got their men and women working on Mozilla Firefox.

Another speculation is Google will take Opera out of the market and move all Opera developers over to Firefox team. Well, after laughing on the floor for a while, I would say "fat chance." There is no good reason for Google to take Opera out of the market because taking out Opera will not help the competition in the browsers market.

I hope this is more than just a rumor because I am pretty excited to see what Google would do with Opera. I think it is a great idea for Google to acquire Opera. Google is a good company and Opera is a good internet browser. They would make a good couple.

Mozilla Firefox's Long Title Bug

Recently there been news going around about so-called "exploit" that can crash Mozilla Firefox and cause buffer overflows which allows hackers to break into Firefox. I like to point something out:

This "exploit" is, in my opinion, merely just an overrated bug. In most of cases, Firefox didn't crash. All it did is enlarged history.dat to the point (40 megabytes or more) where Firefox get painfully slow start-up. The slow start-up is caused by Firefox loading a huge file such as history.dat. Deleting the history.dat will fix the problem.

It only can be called exploit if the buffer overflow actually happens or at least Firefox crashing (Denial of Service). There were some cases of Firefox crashing, but not often enough or widespread enough to be considered DOS exploit. Heck, sometimes large PDF files crashed my Firefox, but does that mean the PDF reader has DOS exploit?

At worse, it is just a weak DOS exploit, as stated by Secunia. At best, a minor nuisance.

But I am not saying we shouldn't be worrying about this bug. I believe it should be fixed, just like all bugs needed to be fixed. The title should be truncated in the first place as part of good practice. In fact, every single thing we put into buffers should be truncated, no matter how long it SHOULD be, just make it as long as it HAVE to be. It should be standard practice among all developers... make the darn thing fit in the buffer.

My point is... the media tends to overrate the bugs because they have no clue how the bugs work. So when you read about the bugs in the media, check out Secura or Mozilla's site before you make decision. Secura and Mozilla definity know what they talking about, not the press.

Firefox Logo In The Sky

Look! It's a bird! No, it's a plane! No, it's a... Firefox logo!


The Hubble Space Telescope took this photo of the variable star V838 Monocerotis which lies near the edge of our Milky Way Galaxy.

If you rotate it 180 degrees, you might will notice strikingly similar to Firefox logo.



I know this is an old news (March 2004), but still funny news nevertheless.