Internet Tools and Web Design

It’s been about five months since the first alpha version of Firefox 3.1 released.  As a beta tester, I received an email about the next beta release of Firefox 3.1 (aka Shiretoko).

Firefox 3.1 (pre)beta is available to all beta testers. Well, everyone can download and check out this new beta version but it’s good to contribute. This version is only a pre-beta version which Mozilla aims to get some feedback and help from its users to fix the bugs.

So if you wish to contribute to this beta version, please head over to the “Event post” at Mozilla Quality Site and follow instructions.  You can use Litmus for testing purposes.

Also, if everything goes as it supposed go at Mozilla, they will be releasing Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 on February 18, 2009.

Download Link for Firefox 3.1 Pre-Beta 3 (aka Shiretoko):

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-1.9.1/

This event will stay opened until Friday, 13th.  So if you wish to contribute to this release, you can do it until Friday at 08.00.

You probably heard about Google Earth before, it was one of the products Google has received a lot of attention when it first came out.

They have just released a beta version which introduces some new features;

• Time Travel: It lets you browse the old images a place you visit on Google Earth.
• Google Earth Touring: This is another new feature I really like.  With this new feature, you can record your trip on Google Earth and save it. Which makes it a lot easier to share with other people.
• Google Ocean:  Ocean view. It’s finally here. You can actually dive under ocean and see what’s going on. Watch the video for details.
• Mars & Sky View:  Nasa and Google finally working together. During the couple of years, Nasa’s Mars mission grabbed a lot of attention from people and they actually found some sort of ice. Anyways, with this new version of Google Beta, you can actually view planet Mars as you do with Earth.

You can also watch these video learn more about this new release.

What page do you have as your Browser Homepage? You know the page that appears every time you open your browser.  Internet Explorer will take you to msn.com which always takes a lot longer than usual to load. But there are sites that’s both useful and practical as a homepage. Keyboardr.com is one of them.

You can watch the video to learn more but keyboardr is an application that lets you do quick search on popular sites and shows them on a page, which includes google, youtube, wikipedia, google blogs, google images.  It also lets you nagivate through the results with your keyboard. So Keyboardr is a good alternative.

As many of you know, Firefox is an open source project. Which means that users of this project can contribute.  Even though that’s pretty much the whole idea of project being open source, contribution brings problems with it.  Even the developer of Firefox make mistakes while putting together the application.

There are users that use Firefox for plenty of reasons with the help of add-ons. Functionalites are more than ever. Every day a new add-on is being released for a different purpose.

But most of add-ons out there don’t tend to work with Firefox in harmony. Since there are too many add-ons, it isn’t really possible to keep a record of all problematic extensions.

Link: Problematic Extensions

However, the list can help you determine if an add-on is causing a problem with your Firefox. There are also some useful links at that page which you follow to investigate your problems with Firefox.

It’s been over a year since Microsoft started testing Internet Explorer’s latest version.

Microsoft recently released the release candidate version of  IE 8. If you were a beta tester of IE 8, you are not going to be surprised much. If you are just learning about Internet Explorer 8, you might want to check out the web site of IE to see what it’s all about.

As I have indicated in my 2009 predictions post,  Internet Explorer will not be able grab a lot of attention with this new version.

Installation is still a major pain

I do not get this at all, I can not believe that a software developer like Microsoft is doing this.  Installation nearly takes a fifteen (15) minutes. Yes, it does. First, you download the installer and run it.  First process removes the current IE version from your system and ask you to restart your system.  If you say no, program will not load. Before the restarting is completed,  IE installation will prompt you asking to run the actual installer.  At this point, nothing else is being loaded(your desktop and etc). Since nothing else is being loaded, I thought that IE will finish the installation and start loading my system without restarting it. But after nearly ten minute installation, it restarted my machine once more and I was able to run Internet Explorer for testing purposes.

Microsoft should really figure out a better way to install its software on their another software.

Features

If you are a IE 7 users, you might like what they have done with the software.  They added some of the popular browser features like “In-Private Browsing”.  They have also added  developer tools where you can edit CSS and scripts within the browser and plenty more.  Gears can be used.

Current version of Stumbleupon is compatible with this RC version as well.