Firefox gets 500Million Downloads!

According to the Spread Firefox site, there had been 500,168,448 downloads as of 6:15 a.m. PST. About 12 hours earlier, there had been more than 499,900,000.

So go ahead download Firefox. Its the best!

SkyFire, Mobile Browser with Flash.

The Skyfire browser is set to finally bring PC-like browsing to your Windows Mobile device with crazy speeds and support for all manner of embedded content. Follow the read link to get signed up for the beta. Facebook, Myspace, YouTube and everything on the web in your palm!

The technical trick of Skyfire is that it’s a proxy browser. The Skyfire app itself isn’t a full browser. Instead, big Skyfire servers elsewhere process Web pages, including all the media and browser formats — like Flash, Java, and Ajax — that a normal desktop browser would handle but that most phones can’t. Then it streams data to phones, which the mobile half of Skyfire displays. To the end user, it looks like a browser, but the mobile app is just one part of the product.

This means that Skyfire can do things on mobile phones that mobile browsers, including Safari and Opera, cannot, at least not without bogging down the phone. The danger is that the Skyfire servers themselves will bog down, due to over-use, and ruin the experience for mobile users. This is the experience I had with Micrsoft’s Deepfish, a proxy browser project we covered last year and that appears to have gone dormant. Bhandari told me the service is “built to scale,” and that “once at escape velocity,” the company can plug in additional servers to handle a growing user base. He would not reveal the technical underpinnings of Skyfire beyond that.

IE8 mock ups…

From Paul’s Super site for windows

Nice mockup.

Many people think IE8 will have the ribbon UI from Office 2007

Apple TV take 2

HD rentals are $4.99. 100 titles today

12:47:16 – Synchs with iTunes

12:46:51 – podcasts – audio and video – and photos from flickr and .Mac

12:46:20 – Completely computer free. do it all from Apple TV

Here’s what you can do with Apple TV: rent movies directly on widescreen TV with Apple TV. Rent them in DVD quality, rent them in HD with 5.1″ HUGE applause! Screaming.

9:44am – “I’d like to say all of us have tried. We have, MSFT, Amazon, TiVo, VuDu, Netflix, Blockbuster — we’ve all tried to figure out how to get movies over the net onto the TV. We’ve ALL missed. No one’s succeeded yet. We tried with Apple TV — it was designed to be an accessory for iTunes and your computer. But that’s not what people wanted.”

“We learned what people wanted was about movies. Movies. Movies. We weren’t delivering that — we’re back with Apple TV Take 2 — It still syncs to your computer, but no computer is required

9:43am – “It launches today! Free software update for iTunes, iPods, iPhones to support rentals. Rolling it out in the US today, we’re dying to get this out internationally. But what about this? What about the flat screen TV? I’d like to watch the movies there too.”

9:42am – “Here’s how it works — I’m on iTunes, looking at a movie I want to rent, I hit rent movie, and it adds to my rented movies category in my iTunes library….” Sorry for the technical difficulties everyone! We’re at 10x the traffic of our last keynote, but things are coming back online.

9:41am – “Watch instantly! In less than 30s…” it streams. “The rules — you have 30 days to start watching it, and once you start you have 24 hours to watch and finish it. As many times as you want. You can transfer films to another device in the middle — transfer to your iPod and watch the rest on the iPod on your flight.”

Customize Firefox with Personas!

Yeah, make your firefox look the way “YOU” want it to look. This video shows how to do it!
Download Personas from here:

http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/12/perso…

Excuse the ums… errrss and stuff cause it was my first video

Video after the break

Safari for windows.

Woo! I tested Safari for Windows (since I don’t have a Mac ).  And what do you expect from a Beta? Slowness, Crashiness, a crashes(did I say that already?). I made a video review of it and its here after the break. The effects are good though

From the website:

Blazing performance.

The fastest web browser on any platform, Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2.

Tech on wordpress…

I was just putting technology in front of .wordpress.com and I found disturbing things.

Links after the break…

The Test: AdBlock Plus

Save your time and traffic

(Official Slogan)

Text from Site:

Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock Plus now and get rid of them. Right-click on a banner and choose “Adblock” from the context menu — the banner won’t be downloaded again. Maybe even replace parts of the banner address with star symbols to block similar banners as well. Or choose a filter subscription, then even this simple task will usually be unnecessary: the filter subscription will block most advertisements fully automatically.

I must say its true. Every word of it. Ever since I installed it my meetings with Ads have dropped almost 95%.

So I thought why not put it on a test, some websites with advertising that annoys me.

Windows Live Mail

Ads encountered: 0

Things I did:

• Successfully entered the Today screen
• Checked my mail(inbox)
• Sent a reply
• Sent a new mail

Windows Live Spaces

Ads encountered:0

Things I did:

• Entered the home Screen
• Checked my own space
• Wrote a blog post
• Did some layout editing

Yahoo Mail

Ads encountered: 1

Things I did:

• Successfully entered the Today screen
• Checked my mail(inbox)
• Sent a reply
• Sent a new mail
• Chatted a bit

“Yeah so what if it was a “Tip” Ad? Come on I have been using Yahoo mail long enough to know “the short cut to a new mail message!”"

Engadget

Gadget site but I do find the Ads quite irritating!

Ads encountered: 0

Things I did:

• Checked the news
• Checked several different articles (3 to be exact)

Deviantart

Ads encountered: 0
Things I did:

• Checked the Subscriptions
• Checked Messages
• Replied to friends comments
• Saw 3 Deviations

Ah… The sounds of an Ad-Free Web!

Even if you do find an Ad just right click on it and select Adblock “image/frame/link” and there you have it never will there be anymore Ads!

Tip use the following subscriptions:

EasyList (USA)

Fanboy’s List

EasyElement

All you have to do is navigate to this page, and click subscribe!

Windows Live Web Messenger

This is one Windows live service that I am looking forward to!

Some Features:

1. Have lots of different conversations at the same time.
2. You can also connect with your Yahoo! IM contacts.
3. Your Messenger contacts are already here.
4. Easily change your display name or personal message.

Very nifty if you don’t have access to messenger. And plus it includes tabbed chat which is not on WLM 8.5 or on the Beta of WLM9 so could that mean the next beta of WLM could have…. It does not look nice for a web  messenger to have more features than the desktop version;-)

Netscape Navigator R.I.P

I may be a little late for this post but I thought it must be done:

The end has come.

On the 28th of this month Netscape blog posted the end for Netscape 

Some quotes from the blog:

“While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions.“

“We’ll continue to release security patches for the current version of the browser, Netscape Navigator until February 1, 2008. After February 1, there will be no more active product support for Navigator 9, or any previous Netscape Navigator browser. This includes Netscape v1-v4.x, Netscape v6, Netscape v7 Suite, Netscape Browser v8, and Netscape Navigator/Messenger 9.“

“The Netscape Team fully stands behind the fine work being done by the Mozilla Foundation. We recommend that you download Mozilla Firefox and give it a try. We know you’ll enjoy it!“

(looks like they like FireFox)

“While we will no longer support the Netscape web browser as of February 1, 2008, Netscape.com  will still continue to serve as a general use Internet portal.“

Ok enough of that, they even post a link to Firefox add ons that resemble the features of Netscape.

The latest update for Netscape Navigator is 9.0.0.5 and can be downloaded here.