Firefox

Sunil Jayaprakash sends me this very handy plug-in he wrote for Firefox.

He writes, (and I quote):

You might be knowing that there is a sudha weekly (www.sudhaezine.com) that gets published. Infact, I personally enjoy reading Sudha at home. She has been my companion for many years now. I could hardly wait to get a copy on every Thursdays.

Now, I have written a small firefox plugin that lets you read Sudha at your ease.

Few advantages of this plugin are

1. Ease of use - All the technical details are abstracted. Just click the page you want to read and voila! you have it on your desktop.
2. It provides off-line capabilities. - You can read Sudha even without using internet.
3. Saves your internet bill (useful for dial ups and traffic based billing) - Once you read a page using this plugin, it archives in your system, so next time when you would want to read the article, the saved copy is served from your own desktop. No internet is required for subsequent visits.

Infact we could implement many more social ideas around this.

You can download it from here.

Installation: Download the xpi file to a local folder, drag and drop it to Firefox (or open it with Firefox) to install.

UPDATE: 1.5.0.2 shared build is here.

[:http://hpnadig.net/blog/index.php/archives/2005/12/14/firefox-1-5-pango-enabled-indic-build|Like before], I've built pango enabled build of the latest firefox (1.5.0.1 this time) on my Ubuntu for my own use. If anyone of you would like a copy of the build (with installer), let me know and I'll put it online or share it with you.

UPDATE: 1.5.0.2 shared build is here.

Tired of switching back to the Firefox 1.0.7 whenever viewing Kannada websites, I decided that I would try a hand at building the latest Firefox (1.5) from source.

Firefox 1.5 - released very recently, is very much worth the upgrade. Its sleek, faster than before while loading pages and has got some nice changes the Firefox users were looking forward to.

But, this latest stable version for Linux segfaults on Breezy Badger (Ubuntu 5.10). Maybe its something to do with SCIM, again (I use SCIM 1.4.2).

Meanwhile, on the Windows version, the first change I could spot was the difference in the way the "Page not found" error dialog was showing up - now, they have the message appearing on the page itself rather than dialog box. This has been a much needed modification on Firefox (when opening multiple pages at a single time, multiple dialogs used to prop up before this).

The second change quite conspicuous on upgrading, is the feather lightness of the browser. The pages also seem to load faster. The usual 'GTK like' menu is missing from the default theme.

There's also a handy command Ctrl + Shift + Del that clears "Private data".

More changes on the release notes of 1.5 and the unofficial changelog.

Still to fix the age old problem

Few of those Unicode related issues on Firefox are still to be solved. But of course, since Firefox is an Open Source project, instead of blaming them for not fixing the bug for 1.5 release, someone interested in solving this has to pitch in and contribute a patch.

The discussions on bugzilla's bug reports were suggesting that these issues had something to do with the Uniscribe API support on Mozilla. The bug report has been there for almost 2 years now, unsolved.

Although its a sad thing nobody has taken this issue up seriously until now (and Mozilla still continues to badly render Unicode, and Indic in particular), Mozilla still is 'ok' for Indic users if not 'all is fine'.

Hope someone will tackle this age old issue with Mozilla - Indic and would come up with a patch soon. The discussions on bugzilla do seem to suggest that good amount of work is needed to be done, for this to be realised.

This was expected. After yahoo came up with its own toolbar for firefox, one would've expected google to come up with its own, as well. It has, finally.

There were already couple of extensions for google on firefox. I had been using the 'googlebar lite' all these days. But what makes google's very own bar significant is that its way better than the existent ones. But hey, there's a catch! Google collects data via this toolbar!
The toolbar has all the functionalities that were there on the IE toolbar previously. There's an additional spellcheck option which is cool (Spellbound used to do that for me, anyway). PageRank is there (and yeah, its not dead, yet, for google). As in windows - IE counterpart of this plugin, the toolbar allows you to automatically fill forms (again, already done by firefox). But the coolest part is that it lets you autolink maps, books, and also vehicles from the toolbar itself ;)
A nice thing to appreciate is that it allows use of yahoo! maps, and other rival sites in all the three autolink searches. One can set the default autolinking service to either google maps, yahoo! maps or map quest. Same with books and vehicles - the contenders also get a chance :)
The trademark Google options like 'Blog This!' for blogger, News, Next - Previous buttons all are there :) Word translator is there, but not much of use for us, as no Indian languages are present on that.
But before using, beware! ;) Google says this in its privacy statement of the toolbar:
"if users are running the Google Toolbar with advanced features enabled, Google may collect information about webpages that they are viewing".

The buzz was on from last few days, when SFX announced prize giveaways for those who celebrated 50million landmark little differently ;) So they did. They gave away a limited edition coin to all those who pulled the attention in the drive to commemorate the 50 million (5 crore) downloads. The "Blazing a trial to 50million" page also says that the SFX team will give out a prize for the 50 millionth referral for download.

The counter though, has passed 50 million and is still counting. When I checked, it was 50,065,200. Way to go!

Go get firefox, if you haven't, yet!