Again: New tab switching interface in Firefox 3.1

I've previously written about new tab interface in Firefox 3.1.

Well, now it's changing again — this time for the better.

Pictures (click for original sizes):

Now with reCAPTCHA

As you may or may not know this blog is under what appears to be constant attack from spam comments. Some get caught by Akismet, others don't.

That's why I'm trying a plugin, WP-reCAPTCHA, let's all hope it works :-)

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Tags: About this blog, Spam

New session restore handling in Firefox

I'm running the latest Firefox trunk version (currently "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1b2pre) Gecko/20081015 Minefield/3.1b2pre ID:20081015032107") and when my browser just crashed (it does repeatedly at the time, the builds are seriously unstable), I saw this window:

Click image for larger version | View on Flickr

It looks as if there's going to be a new session restore handling coming in Firefox 3.1. In the smaller window (with the columns "Restore" and "Windows and tabs") Firefox lists all windows and tabs in every window that were opened when Firefox crashed.

Consider this: You know what page made Firefox crash. And you know reloading that page will make Firefox crash again. So a session restore is no good. Well, no more - because now you can just uncheck that page in the list and it won't be restored. Nice.

By the way, the session restore local URL in Firefox is "about:sessionrestore" in case you wanted to know.

See what others are saying about the "about:sessionrestore" feature
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Twitter needs to change their meta description

When you add a page to Facebook, maybe for later keeping or sharing it with your friends, Facebook looks at the meta field "description" in the source code.

On Twitter ALL pages have the same meta description:

<meta name="description" content="Twitter is a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time">

This means that when you post a Twitter page (no matter if it's a profile page or a single tweet) the description posted to Facebook (which you can't change) is: "Twitter is a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time".

That doesn't really say anything about the content behind the link, so I sugges that the folks at Twitter change the meta line to something more meaningful, depending on what page the user is posting to Facebook:

If it's a Twitter profile page, use the "Bio" that the user has written.
If it's a single tweet, well, just use the text in the tweet. It's only 140 characters long (at most) - perfect for a meta description.

I could do it in WordPress (you can customize it even further using custom fields). So how hard can it be? :-)

Danish TV 2 to cut Internet Explorer 6 support

Following in the footsteps of 37 Signals Danish broadcaster TV 2 will cut their support for Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 on the tv2.dk website.

TV 2 developer Martin Gausby has announced this in his Twitter stream:

Today we start to inform the users of Internet Explorer 6, that they should upgrade their browsers to IE7 or get Firefox http://xrl.us/osepc

Users of Internet Explorer 6 will see a gray box on the tv2.dk website telling them that their browser is outdated and will no longer be supported. They are told to upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 or switch to Firefox, the open source alternative.

In my view this is a good move by TV 2. IE6 has long been a thorn in the eye of web developers who need to design especially custom CSS for the browser, since it sometimes has its own way of interpreting the code.

Now it'll be interesting to see whether or not other Danish media websites will do the same.

Updating your Mozilla Prism to the latest build

I have already twittered about it but figured I'd might as well share it here.

You may know Prism - Mozilla's lightweight version of the Firefox browser. It makes the perfect browser for online applications that you might have running the entire day, such as Gmail or Google Docs that can slow down your browser.

What you might not know is that Prism (formerly known as "Web Runner") is built on Mozilla's XUL Runner runtime:

XULRunner is a Mozilla runtime package that can be used to bootstrap XUL+XPCOM applications that are as rich as Firefox and Thunderbird.

Now, Prism doesn't have nightly builds (a daily developer version of the software for testing purposes) like for instance Firefox, but XUL Runner does. This means that if you (like me) are a sucker for having the latest build, you can update the engine which Prism runs on (XUL Runner).

The recipe can be found here but all you really need to do is to download the latest XUL Runner build (from ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/xulrunner/nightly/latest-trunk/), extract it and put the content of the "xulrunner" folder in the already existing "xulrunner" folder in your Prism installation.

This actually solved an issue with my Prism which sometimes wouldn't load right. Now it does, and all it took was a bit of nerding around :-)

Running Windows Live Messenger 2009 beta

I just updated my Windows Live Messenger to the 2009 beta. I've only been using it for a few seconds and as with the last update (to 8.5 if I remember correct) it has received a visual upgrade. As you can read in my Twitter stream, the installation kinda annoyed me.

Here's a look at the chat window:

The Beta can be obtained from http://download.live.com/messenger.

Share the love - WordPress logos, buttons and wallpapers

Just posted on Twitter, the official WordPress logos, buttons and wallpapers are now available. Even the Pantone color codes are there!

So publish, paint or print - share the WordPress love today :-)

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Tags: Design, logo, Web, wordpress

Create a link to the lastest Chromium build (using PHP)

You may have heard of Chrome, but have you heard of Chromium?

Chromium is (according to the Google Operating System blog) »the open source project created for Google Chrome«.

As with, for instance, Firefox, Chromium also has nightly builds, which are less stable builds but with bleeding edge features. In Chromium these are labeled 'snapshots'.

In the Google Operating System blog post there's link to where you can download the most recent snapshop/build of the open source browser (for Windows only!). Some kind developer has left a file in the 'chromium-rel-xp' folder called 'LATEST'. All this file contains is the number of the latest build/snapshot.

We can use this number to create a direct URL to the most recent snapshop/build.

For this you use the PHP function called 'file_get_contents' and put the 'LATEST' file in it.

Here's how it looks when it's all done.

If you're curious you can look at the source code behind the 'latest Chromium' page.

Google Chrome has been released into the wild

You may have heard (you probably have if you're reading this post) but Google has announced it's web browser named "Chrome". Read more about the announcement at TechCrunch.

Chrome is now available for download, as a matter of fact, I'm typing this in Chrome. It's fast. It's really fast. But I lack some features, most of which I get from extensions for my Firefox browser.

TechCrunch also a first review of the browser.

Now, I've only been using Chrome for a short amount of time, but it still needs to impress me. Just signed into Gmail expecting Chrome to say something like "Wow, I can see you're using Gmail - good choice! Since Gmail and I have the same parents check out these cool Gmail features that were built into me".

But it doesn't.

Chrome seems, after at first test, as a fast browser. But that's not gonna make it my preferred choice for browsing. I might use it for Gmail and Google Calendar, but I already have Mozilla Prism for that.

I think I'm going to have quite the struggle finding a place for Chrome in my browsing habits.

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