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It's time to change to another browser…

First of all, if you are reading me from education.mozilla.org planet, sorry for my bad english. I’m trying to improve it!

Second, thanks to David Humphrey for adding me to the planet. I will try to keep you informed about thing we are doing in Spain, more concise, in education world (as I’m currently a college student).

One of my first problems on University was to see only Windows computers on it (I’m studying computer engineering, and this is a bit depressing). You shouldn’t have only Windows-machines availables to the students if you are going to teach future computer engineers. So we (my colleagues and me) discovered that we have Linux machines in laboratories, where we can write our own code in a standard way easily and using open source software.

But the most depressing thing about having only Windows-based machines is that you have only one browser per default: Internet Explorer. Not only the bad Internet Explorer. We have Internet Explorer 6!!

Nobody doubts about Internet Explorer. It sucks, and v6 is old (not updated for 5 years) and it’s slowing the web (and developers’ brain). So I’ve thought about trying to install Firefox on all computers. Well, yeah, I can’t, users don’t have enough perms to install new things.

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I’m not yet an expert about operating systems and LANs, but I think each student has her/his user, not an “student” standard account and I don’t know how are stored documents of each student, because we usually wait about a minute from the login window to the full desktop (it seems that all is retrieved from an intranet server).

So, what do you think I should do in order to try to make Firefox as the default browser on my University?

For me, the best option is to talk with IT guys and try to explain them what is Firefox (in case they don’t know it!). And then convince it about the Fox and his friends :P

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Have you driven a similar change? If so, please, contact me on this blog post’s comments.

PS: And if you have time, please, write down my grammatical errors to improve my English. Thanks!

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Fennec 1.0a2 is out!

Fennec 1.0a1

A lot of performance improvements from 1.0a1 in this new release.

I have installed it and my first impressions are very positives: more responsive, the zoom is more quick than 1.0a1…

And there are some addons!!

So check it out! :P

Firefox 3.1 b2 has been released

The new beta in the Firefox 3.1 development cycle has been published.

New features are:

  • Private browsing
  • Firefox 3.0 tab-switch behaviour
  • Tracemonkey is on by default
  • more and more bits of awesome features.

Check it our while it’s hot! Obviously, it’s available in es-ES and es-AR!

Fennec 1.0a1 and… Tracemonkey!

We have Fennec 1.0a1

Nice build, a lot of bugfixes, only works on Nokia N800 and N810, and Windows Mobile builds are on the way, but there are builds of Fennec for Windows, Mac and Linux. Check it out here.

But since M8, we have a very nice feature: Tracemonkey.

Type about:config in the awesome(fennec) bar. Filter by: jit and activate (to true) the two preferences.

Maybe Tracemonkey for Firefox is: “Hey! Gmail looks like it is a little bit more smooth”, but for Fennec (where processors are slow), “Hey, it tooks only one second!! not 5!!”

So, Fennec Team: THANKS!!

Creating a Weave's server

Well, long time ago I tried Weave (0.1 version) and I left behind in a second, but I don’t remembered why.

Today I was reading something about Ubiquity (I will blog about this awesome extension in a few days, when I have played with it), and suddenly: Weave. Why not give it another chance?

The answer could be: it’s full. Nobody can sign-up now. The server is crowded, so it’s slow, buggy… And yes, it is full and crowded. But you can create your own Weave’s server. And I did on my Dreamhost server (this how-to is focused in Dreamhost, but could be adapted).

Read the rest of this entry »

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Happy birthday Bugzilla

Bugzilla is nowadays widely used in the bug tracking world. But only 10 years ago, it was a small project on the Netscape community.

It first release was 10 years ago and run under Oracle (“it cost too much”) and Kiva (“$35,000 at the time”). And on 26th August 1998, Bugzilla could run freely (under Apache and MySQL).

Long live Bugzilla!

Reference #1 and #2

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Using Mercurial for l10n progress

First of all, I use Mercurial because of the change of many Mozilla products to this VCS. But I think that for localizers is enought to have CVS. Why? Because usually we are one or two different people with CVS access and more usually localizers only touch a part of his l10n. For example, in the es-ES team we are two members with access to Mozilla’s repository: Ricardo and me.

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New Fennec release: M6

If yesterday I wrote a blog post about how to localize Fennec M4, today I read on the Mark Finkle blog that there is a new milestone in the Fennec development, the M6 (0.6). This is a pre pre pre pre alpha release, so use carefully.

I think I will try this myself in less than 2 weeks…

New version of Flock: 1.2

Today Flock Inc, has released the new version of Flock, its social browser that allow to communicate with friends and a lot of web 2.0 services.

I have test Flock, and it rocks, but there is some problems I noticed:

  • It’s based on Gecko 1.8, so new features of Firefox 3 (awesome bar, new themes, more standards of Gecko) are not available.
  • Little browser window, I mean, a lot of bars, lateral-bar and more things that reduces the window of the webpage browser.

I will wait for Flock 2.0, based on 1.9 Gecko. That will rock.

Firebug on Firefox 3

As we are getting closer to the final release of Firefox 3, all our appreciated addons are being updated to work on Firefox 3.

Now, the turn of Firebug.

Firebug 1.2 beta released. Big improvements on memory and stability.

Recommended.

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