On 17th June 2008 @ 12:23 pm by Arul N S
The entire community living in the eastern hemisphere of the globe have to wait a little longer to taste the final release of Firefox 3. According to the Mozilla blog, the record attempt will start at 10:00AM PDT [05:00PM UTC] [10:30PM IST] [09:00PM GST] on June 17th 2008 CE. But do remember you have entire tomorrow also to download.
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On 17th June 2008 @ 07:30 am by Arul N S
I am yet to download the official release of Gran Paradiso, the Mozilla Foundation‘s developers are already discussing about the next update to Firefox. Going with the tradition of naming Firefox projects with place names, the Firefox 3.1 project is named as Shiretoko after the Japenese National Park in the north eastern tip of the island of Hokkaido, Japan. The word in native tongue means “end of earth”.
Shiretoko is a minor update to the Gran Paradiso which would be running the Gecko 1.9.1 Engine and most of the features that didn’t make in time to the 3 release.
- One of the major feature would be visual Tab switching. For now Ctrl+Tab extension serves the purpose in Gran Paradiso. This feature would be integrated into the browser along with Tab searching and filtering.
- There are lot of features for Tagging which include bulk tagging, tag autocomplete, lightweight tagging UI, Advanced Search UI.
- In the add-ons divison there would be enhanced compatibility checking during upgrades which means we might have to really wait till the developer makes the extension compatible than we doing it ourselves
The entire feature list of this release can be obtained from the Mozilla’s planning center for Firefox 3.1. The nightly builds of alpha release 1 can be obtained from Mozilla’s FTP servers here. It will be installed under the name of Minefield, the codename for Mozilla’s testing builds.
Source : [Mozilla Wiki]
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On 17th June 2008 @ 12:57 am by Arul N S
Opera Software ASA released their latest version of Opera Desktop Browser 9.5, thereby becoming the first major release in 2008 for the browsers. Although the market share of Opera remains very small compared to Micro$oft’s Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, it is a favorite among many netizens. It was also a one time favorite of mine before Firefox wooed me with its extensions and themes. It’s quite a lite browser and indeed one of the fastest down in the market.Finally I downloaded it and tested it today.
The loading time is awesome, nothing compared to Firefox or Safari. But again there is no plug-ins or widgets added in Opera, whereas my Firefox is loaded with extensions.
The 9.5 version has a great address bar but somehow my honeymoon with Firefox’s address bar is yet to get over and Opera didn’t get anywhere near to take me away from it.
One of the features which really turns your head is the Bookmarks Sync. You can achieve this in Firefox with extensions but Opera has a built-in feature. This feature is a useful one for somebody who has Opera in their Mobile also. It saves you a lot of trouble.
Regarding the Malware protection in Opera 9.5, didn’t get much chance to test it. But the online reviews already place Firefox to be better in this department. Opera has to do a lot in this if it needs to be taken seriously.
Lifehacker’s Browser Tests proves the Opera’s Unbeatable launch time and also Firefox’s low memory consumption. Also complete list of changes in this version can be seen here in Opera’s Website.
Even though this browser is lite, standard compliant, fast it is yet to drag me away from Firefox because of the lack of extensions and it is not Open Source.
Source : [LifeHacker, Opera]
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On 16th June 2008 @ 04:11 pm by Arul N S
After being told by European Union in 2004 to standardise and open their Office format or else face the risk of being kicked in the butt, Micro$oft decided and went ahead with a new standard which is supposed to be one for its upcoming Office releases. But instead of following the already approved ISO standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006 Open Document Format for Office Applications), Micro$oft decided to create one more standard called Office OpenXML and by questionable tactics got it to the approving body and got it nearly approved till India, Brazil, South Africa and Venezuela protested. It still pending review and there is a fear that it might approved. The reasons why it should not be approved are
- There is already a standard ISO26300 named Open Document Format (ODF): a dual standard adds costs, uncertainty and confusion to industry, government and citizens;
- There is no provable implementation of the OOXML specification: Microsoft Office 2007 produces a special version of OOXML, not a file format which complies with the OOXML specification;
- There is information missing from the specification document, for example how to do a autoSpaceLikeWord95 or useWord97LineBreakRules;
- More than 10% of the examples mentioned in the proposed standard do not validate as XML;
- There is no guarantee that anybody can write software that fully or partially implements the OOXML specification without being liable to patent lawsuits or patent license fees by Microsoft;
- This format conflicts with existing ISO standards, such as ISO 8601 (Representation of dates and times), ISO 639 (Codes for the Representation of Names and Languages) or ISO/IEC 10118-3 (cryptographic hash);
- There is a bug in the spreadsheet file format which forbids any date before the year 1900: such bugs affect the OOXML specification as well as software applications like Microsoft Excel 2000, XP, 2003 and 2007.
- This standard proposal was not created by bringing together the experience and expertise of all interested parties (such as the producers, sellers, buyers, users and regulators), but by Microsoft alone.
Because of the reasons stated above, there has been a heavy opposition to this format and a online petition to prevent this standard getting approved is available online. So please visit it and make your voice heard.
Also check out the technical comparison available at ODF Fellowship.
Source : [No OOXML, D Wheeler]
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