Resurrection

I'm back!

I'm resurrecting this 3 years old blog, this time with a new purpose!

I will make changes to this blog as time goes on.

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.

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Final Released!

That's right, folks. Mozilla Firefox 1.5 is finally released!

Basic new features are (as given by MozillaZine): "Firefox 1.5 introduces several new features, including an improved software update system, faster Back / Forward page navigation, a new options to clear private browsing data, drag-and-drop reordering of browser tabs, a redesigned Options/Preferences window and more robust popup blocking. Standards support is also improved, with support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), JavaScript 1.6 and additional CSS properties. Accessibility is much improved (including new DHTML accessibility features), security has been enhanced and Mac OS X support has also been improved."

For more detailed and completed list of bug fixes and features, read the Burning Edge's List.

FYI: For anyone who already using Firefox 1.5 RC3, you don't need to update since RC3 is now final version.

Canvascape

As reported by Slashdot: "Benjamin Joffe has developed Canvascape - "3D Walker", a simple javascript browser based 3D first person game engine that shows off the capabilities of the Canvas tag found in Firefox, Safari and Opera."

It worked beautifully in Firefox 1.5 RC3, but painfully in Safari and Opera 9.0 Preview (because those two browsers are just getting started with canvas). I think this is a great way to show off what Mozilla Firefox 1.5's new canvas tag feature can do. Plus, it also show off what canvas can do as multimedia applications. It can provide interactive graphics without the need of using resource-heavy flash.

I see great potential for canvas.

Microsoft: Free Softwares Are Anti-Commercial

Recently, Microsoft admitted that they successfully attempted to remove references of free softwares from an U.N document, known as Vienna Conclusions (2.8 MB PDF). The document, presented at last week's UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) conference, discussed about issues around Information Technology and creativity.

In original document, it stated:

Increasingly, revenue is generated not by selling content and digital works, as they can be freely distributed at almost no cost, but by offering services on top of them. The success of the free software model is one example...

But after Microsoft's request, the statement been changed to:

Increasingly, revenue is generated by offering services on top of contents...

The reason why Microsoft asked? Their answer is:

While we largely agree on the point that more choices should be given to creators and users (and the subsequent conclusions on Creative Commons or Wikipedia) we explicitly disagree on the notion that "increasingly, revenue is generated not by selling content and digital works, as they can be freely distributed at almost no cost, but by offering services on top of them. The success of the Free Software Model is one example" and propose to delete this text part completely, as it contains only an one-sided perspective on the ICT industry. The rationale for this is, that the aim of free software is not to enable a healthy business on software but rather to make it even impossible to make any income on software as a commercial product.

Basically, Microsoft just plainly said that all free softwares are anti-commercial and bad for businesses. But many developers today know this statement is false since there are several successful free softwares that actually make profits for the companies who made them. For example, Red Hat is a for-profit company that developed free softwares (Linux, etc.) and still maintains to bring in profit by offering services on top of those free softwares (as stated by the original document).

It saddens me to see Microsoft propaganda influenced the decision of supposedly-impartial international body. Well, just like what FSFE president Georg Greve said... "Just another monopolist trying to uphold their monopoly by preventing freedom of markets -- which is what Free Software really aims at."

Reducing Firefox's Memory Use?

Federico Mena Quintero proposed a proof-of-concept to reduce Mozilla's memory usage (Firefox is based on Mozilla codes). He used XFree86 on Linux to prove it is possible to reduce Mozilla's memory usage by factor of 5.5.

His method of reducing memory usage is done by dealing with how Mozilla handle images in cache. Right now, both Mozilla and Firefox handle images by uncompressing them and storing them in cache for every open tab. It is designed to give boost to performance (but at the expense of memory). So Quintero proposed to uncompress images and store them in cache, ONLY when the user is looking at the images. Meaning, he proposed to delete uncompressed images and uncompress new images in cache as soon the user scroll away from old images toward new images.

For example, supposed you are looking at a page with 3 large images, and your screen is only big enough for one image at a time. You are looking at image A which is an uncompressed image in your cache. Then you scroll down toward image B. While you are scrolling down, Mozilla will delete uncompressed copy of image A, then uncompress image B for viewing. Then you scroll down even further down to image C. While you are scrolling down, Mozilla will delete uncompressed copy of image B, then uncompress image C. The process are the same when scrolling back up too.

This method successfully reduced memory usage that now (modified) Mozilla doesn't have to keep ALL uncompressed images in cache. Just keep the ones that you are looking at.

However, there are performance hits. Everything you scroll to another image, Mozilla would have to go through uncompressing, painting and deleting processes all over again. Quintero admitted that "Scrolling is a bit jerky if you yank the scrollbar's thumb up and down very quickly. The jerkiness is barely noticeable if you use the scroll wheel or the scrollbar's arrows at about the same rate as you would use while reading a web page."

Unfortunely, some people don't scroll as slow as they read. Sometime I scrolled down really fast just to see what's near the bottom or looking for specific sections (like in Wikipedia or News articles.) So using Quintero's method, it could be painful scrolling down if you scroll down fast or doesn't have fast computer.

But still, it is an interesting read. I am glad to see someone trying to solve Firefox's and Mozilla's memory leak.