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Mar 06

Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.2 and 1.5.0.10 Released

This article was written on February 23, 2007 by CyberNet.

Firefox After several delays, Mozilla was finally able to roll out Firefox 2.0.0.2 and 1.5.0.10 today. The release of Firefox 2.0.0.2 is a pretty big one with 158 bugs being squashed: 21 fixed crashing issues, 4 fixed privacy bugs, and 2 fixed memory leaks. Not only that but Vista users will recognize a huge difference in the way that Firefox handles itself. Here are some of the Vista-related bugs that were fixed:

Automatic Updates now works with users who have limited account privilege and User Account Control (UAC) enabled.
Uses the Vista Default Application API which means Firefox should now be able to set itself as the default browser without having to be run as an administrator.
Before Firefox would remain elevated (a.k.a. running as an administrator) after an update was performed, but that has been fixed.

The remaining bugs relate to under-the-hood work that won’t be visible to you. You will, however, be running a more secure and stable browser by upgrading. The official release notes page has not been posted for either version, but they should be available later on today (1.5.0.10 and 2.0.0.2).

Download Firefox 1.5.0.10:

Download Firefox 2.0.0.2:

Firefox 1.5.0.x will continue to receive security and stability updates until April 24, 2007 so I highly recommend that you upgrade if you haven’t done so already.

I also put together a portable version of Firefox 2.0.0.2 and that can be downloaded from here. That is great for anyone who wants to take Firefox wherever the road takes you. Of course, if you already have Firefox Portable installed you should just be able to go to the Help menu and use the “Check for updates” option to upgrade Firefox. Note: As Max mentioned below in the comments the upgrade option won’t work until Mozilla activates the Update, which will probably be tonight or tomorrow.

Now I’m just waiting for the new Firefox Addons site to be launched. It was supposed to happen last week, but they ran into some unexpected issues (here, here, and here). They now say that they’ll be doing some additional testing over the next week and a half to help create a list of things that need to be fixed before they ship the new addons site. After that is completed then they’ll make a release schedule. Oh, and don’t worry, it is probably more frustrating for them than it is for us:

It’s embarrassing and frustrating to miss deadlines (as I know from very extensive experience!), and painful to not be able to put your hard work out into the world where it can help people. The entire Remora team has been working almost literally around the clock for the last few weeks, and very hard for half a year before that, and we would like nothing in the world more than to deliver it to the world.

Good Luck Mozilla at getting that rolled out!

Thanks for the tip Alfredo!

Mar 03

Microsoft Says No! Xbox 360 Price is not Dropping

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on June 11, 2007 by CyberNet.

Last week, Bloomberg (a news agency) published comments from David Hufford, director of Xbox product management, which lead people to believe that an Xbox 360 price-drop was imminent. Hufford was quoted as saying “We are all aware that the sweet spot of the market is really $199 bucks.” With that statement, everybody assumed that Microsoft was planning to take the Xbox 360 to that sweet spot.

Hufford later responded to the conclusions that were drawn and explained that Microsoft has no intention of bringing the Xbox 360 price down to $200, and that his statement wasn’t made to imply that. He says the afore mentioned comment was taken out of context and he was not signaling a price drop. Even with a firm denial of a price-drop, sites like AOL’s BloggingStocks are reporting that the Xbox 360 price has already been cut! In an article published earlier today, they say “So there you have it — the Microsoft Xbox 360 is now at $200 and the Nintendo Wii is at $250”. Interesting how news gets skewed.

It makes perfect sense for Microsoft to look into lowering the price though. Right now they’re the middle-man. The Playstation 3 is priced above them and the Wii is priced below them. A price-drop could help give them an even bigger boost over Playstation 3 sales, and maybe even bring them closer to the kinds of sales that Nintendo has been experiencing with the Wii.

While it would be no surprise to see a price drop before the holiday season in December, perhaps Microsoft is going to try and boost sales first by appealing to a new demographic? Microsoft’s next goal with the Xbox is to appeal to families, in particular mom’s who walk into the store looking for a deal. If we take a look at Nintendo’s marketing strategy which has included families, children, and even elderly, it’s worked well for them. By expanding their demographic, Microsoft is hoping to develop a “solid business with 90 million people.”

Part of appealing to a new demographic includes releasing games that will appeal to children and families. While this strategy alone could certainly give them a boost, I think a combination of a price-drop along with a new set of family related games would give them even better results.

For now, the price stands as-is with no change. There has been and always will be a lot of speculation in the gaming industry. Just because Microsoft is denying this rumor doesn’t mean that it’s not going to happen though. If they confirmed the rumor, it would just mean that people would hold off buying until the drop occurred, and what company wants stalled sales?

Source: DailyTech

Mar 01

Apple Releases Patch for QuickTime Exploit

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on May 02, 2007 by CyberNet.

Yesterday, Ryan pointed out a QuickTime bug that affected Java-Enabled browsers. The bug affected those using Firefox and Safari on Macs, and those using IE7 on Vista. Very few people were immune to this issue, and all it took was visiting a malicious website and the user’s computer could have been compromised.

Thankfully Apple got on the issue pretty quickly, and today they released QuickTime 7.1.6 which patches the bugs that were previously mentioned. Had it not been for the CanSec West Security Conference, this bug wouldn’t have been found, and Apple thanks Dino Dai Zovi, Tipping Point, and the Zero Day Initiative for reporting what could have caused some problems for users.

Also included with this release is support for Final Cut Studio 2, and display fixes for timecode and closed caption.

If you use QuickTime, I’d definitely take the time to download the update so that you don’t have to worry about the security of your computer being compromised.

Download QuickTime 7.1.6 here

Thanks anonymous tipster!

Mar 01

CyberNotes: Is Safari the Best Browser?

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on June 13, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Safari for Windows The new Safari on Windows is boasted as one of the fastest browsers available for the Windows operating system. Well, that might be a little biased considering that it is according to Safari’s homepage, but I’ve tinkered with it over the past day and it is among the fastest browsers that I’ve used. It also has some shortcomings though…

First and foremost there have been a number of security concerns with Safari on Windows, which is something I definitely expected. Apple released Safari saying that their “engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one.” We all know that talk is cheap, and the vulnerabilities are something that I expected since Apple doesn’t make Windows software very frequently. Not only that, but this is also a pre-release application, so they have time to correct things before anyone can really start criticizing.

All browsers have their security woes, so in this review I’m going to set that aside and look strictly at the features. I’m going to give a bulleted list of the things that Safari includes, and then I’ll provide a short screencast where I’ll point out some of the cool features as well as the things that it lacks.

–The Features–

Here are the more notable features in Safari (for Windows) that you should be aware of, as specified on the Safari homepage.

Performance – As the Safari homepage points out, this browser is very good at loading Websites quickly. I was able to notice a significant reduction in page load times as I was browsing the Web, but that’s not the only kind of performance that is important. The Safari site fails to say what the memory usage is like for the browser, and I’ll be the first to say it’s horrible. At any given time, it is twice what Firefox, Opera, or even Internet Explorer is using up even when visiting the same sites.
Interface – Ahh, this is something I don’t really know that I can touch on. Apple made sure that they gave people the feeling that they are using a Mac computer by preventing the Windows operating system from controlling any aspect of the appearance. I think it is safe to conclude that people will be able to easily see when you’re using Safari on a Windows computer. It sticks out like a sore thumb.

Bookmarks – This is something that I cover more in the screencast, but overall this is one of the biggest downfalls in Safari. I’m a right-click/drag-and-drop freak and the Bookmarks Bar hardly allows for any of that. You can’t arrange your bookmarks by dragging them around in that bar, instead you have to use the Bookmark Collections which is a hassle. Oh, and did I mention that there is no Bookmarks sidebar for you to use?
Searching – The searching in Safari is almost its best feature. They have done a great job of making the results stand out, and that is something I very much appreciate.
Tabbed Browsing – Come on, all of the cool browsers have tabbed browsing these days. The only thing cool about Safari’s is that you can drag a tab off of the tab bar and it will open in a new window.
SnapBack – This is pretty nice as well since many of us perform a lot of searches. After doing a search and clicking on a result there will be a little orange icon in the upper-right search box in Safari. That will always be there as a means to take you back to the initial search that you performed.
AutoFill Forms – Meh, it’s a form filler and nothing more.
RSS Reader – The built-in RSS reader is a nice cross between the Live Bookmarks that Firefox has and a full RSS feed reader. It even has a cool slider that instantly lets you adjust the length of the articles being displayed. It’s important to note, however, that they do not let you configure an external feed reader for subscribing to the feeds though.
Resizable Text Fields – This seems to be the hot new thing since Netscape 9 Beta also has this feature. All it does is let you resize text boxes on a site, such as the one we have below for commenting.
Private Browsing – With Private Browsing enabled, Safari won’t store your Google searches, your cookies, the history of sites you’ve visited, your download history, or information from online forms you’ve filled out. With the increasing concern over privacy, this is a feature some users will appreciate.
Security – I think I said enough about this up top.

So that’s how I feel about the features Safari has in it that is supposed to make it the browser for you to use. Some of them are cool, but a lot of them have already been seen in existing browsers which makes them far from spectacular.

–The Screencast–

Latest take a more hands-on look at how I feel about the features in Safari:

–The Overview–

As you can see, Safari has several cool features that I would like to see available in other browsers. There is nothing in it that makes it better than Firefox, Opera, or even Internet Explorer in my opinion, so there will probably be few people actually using it. The only way that it will benefit me is allowing me to easily test my site to make sure it renders properly in the Safari browser.

Download the Safari 3 Preview

Feb 27

Google Chrome: Merging the Best of All Browsers?

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on September 02, 2008 by CyberNet.

google chrome.jpg

Google kicked off Labor Day yesterday with a huge announcement. They gave everyone a heads up that sometime today the Google Chrome web browser would be launched for the first time. Needless to say there’s been a lot of buzz surrounding the pending release, but will it be able to live up to the hype?

The browser will include Google Gears and will be based on Webkit, which is the same rendering engine that powers the Safari web browser. That’s basically saying that if a website doesn’t work right in Safari there’s a good chance that it won’t work in Google Chrome either.

One of the most acclaimed features for Google Chrome is that it treats each individual tab as its own process on your computer. That way you’ll be able to see which tabs are eating up your memory, and when one of them crashes it won’t bring the entire browser down with it. That is definitely a welcomed feature.

Google’s browser has also taken a few cues from Opera. The more obvious example of this would be the “new tab” page that displays nine of your most visited sites (see screenshot above). It’s pretty clear that they took the idea of Opera’s Speed Dial, and then put their own little twist on it by displaying the user’s most visited sites instead of user-defined entries. They’ve also decided to place the tabs above the address bar, which is something very few browsers do besides Opera.

The question that’s burning in everyone’s mind is whether Google Chrome will be the browser that takes the world by storm. Personally, I don’t think so. I believe existing Firefox users will give it a shot, but probably won’t like not being able to customize it through the use of extensions. After all, Opera’s always criticized for not being extensible despite the fact that it ships with a robust amount of customization options. Google will probably have to target Internet Explorer users, and they’ll likely do that using a massive Adsense advertising campaign.

Google Chrome will be released for only Windows at first, but Google says Mac and Linux versions are on the way. Just hold on a little longer… today’s the day we get to see how Google envisions a browser.

Google Chrome Announcment
Screenshot Source
Thanks to everyone who sent in the tip!

Feb 25

Windows Live Folders Amost Here!

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on May 12, 2007 by CyberNet.

Windows Live Folders

After Microsoft’s last slip-up we knew that Windows Live Folders would probably be coming soon, and the service was available for a short period of time earlier today. Luckily Chris over at LiveSide managed to sneak in fast enough to snap some screenshots of what the service is going to offer.

The Windows Live Folders service obviously focuses on making it easy to share your documents with others, or keep them private so that you’re the only one who has access to them. Chris also provided a nice summary of the different types of folder sharing:

Personal

Use personal folders to back up important files that are only for you.
Get to your files from any computer with Internet access by signing in with your Windows Live ID.

Shared

Shared folders make it easy to collaborate with coworkers or classmates.
You decide how much control each person has over each shared folder. Some can just read what’s there: others can add and delete files.
Everyone who is sharing uses their own Windows Live ID.

Public

With public folders, anyone on the Internet can view your files, but they can’t change them.
Want to show your public files to others? Just send them a link! Each folder and file has its own web address.

I haven’t been able to tinker with the service myself because it was pulled down so fast, but looking at the screenshots that Chris provides I would say that the service is fairly intuitive. Take a look at how you do some things on Windows Live Folders:

Note: Click any of the screenshots to make them bigger.

Creating a folder is just a click away:

Mange who has access to each of the folders:

Do a lot more with the folders:

As of right now the service is only showing 250MB of storage, but when it is officially launched to the public it is supposed to offer 500MB. I was expecting to see the storage hit at least 1GB, but more like 2GB to 5GB. So the quota is a little disappointing, and they even limit filesizes to about 50MB each. I think most geeks will be holding out for a service with larger amounts of storage since Box.net offers 1GB and AOL’s Xdrive offers 5GB for free.

Does this look like something you would use? Both Internet Explorer and Firefox are supported in case that will influence your decision.

This will be the homepage of Windows Live Folders

See more screenshots over at LiveSide

Feb 24

CyberNotes: Ways to Shutdown Your Computer

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on April 29, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

This article might seem familiar to some of you because we’ve covered shutdown utilities quite a bit in the past, but rest easy knowing that this is going to be different than anything you may or may not have read. We’re going to cover some of the best shutdown programs and tips out there since, as Ashley has pointed out, this coming Saturday is Shutdown Day.

By shutting down your computer you can save a lot of energy, which is merely money in the bank for you! If you’re one of those who leave your computer on 24-hours a day then think about the money you could save by shutting down your computer overnight. It’s estimated that 25% of people leave their computers on at the end of the day (whether it be at work or home), and so a simple shutdown would be very much welcomed. Heck, we’ve already seen how much money Vista saves because of its various power schemes.

Alright, let’s jump into the different ways to shutdown your Windows computer…

–Shutdown After BitTorrent Downloads Finish–

I’m sure many of you have left your computer running overnight to download something from the BitTorrent network. That’s definitely understandable considering how long it can take somethings, such as Linux DVD’s, to finish downloading especially when you don’t have a fast Internet connection.

One of the most popular BitTorrent clients, uTorrent, has a feature buried within the Options menu that you may not have seen before called Auto Shutdown. Check it out… you can have uTorrent shutdown your computer when the downloads complete:

utorrent shutdown.png

–Schedule and Shutdown From Anywhere–

I have a server that I like to shutdown at night before I head off to bed, but one of the problems is that it’s not connected to a monitor or anything. So what I end up doing is remotely shutdown the computer from a web interface using Shutter, and thanks to a little port forwarding on my router it’s actually accessible from outside of my network. Don’t worry, you can specify a username and password so that some joe schmo from your local cafe isn’t rebooting your computer every 10 minutes. 😉

(Click to Enlarge)

To setup web access beyond the computer you’re on you’ll need to pull up the options, and there is a tab called Web Interface that you’ll need to jump to. You’ll want to change the Listen IP from the 127.0.0.1 to the IP address of the computer, and it’s probably easiest if you leave the port set to 80.

Tip: There’s also a Screenshot option that you can select on the web interface which is really nice. It will show you a screenshot of your desktop at that moment, which is handy when you don’t have a monitor hooked up!

–Shutdown After Firefox Downloads Finish–

firefox shutdown-1.png Maybe it’s not a BitTorrent file that you’re downloading? No problem. If you’re using Firefox you can have it shutdown your computer after all downloads in the browser finish. All you’ll need is the Auto ShutDown extension.

Once installed the extension will place a “Shutdown” checkbox in the download window, which essentially gives the browser permission to shutdown the computer once the downloads complete.

If you really get into using this you may want to checkout the options it has to offer. You can change around how it works quite a bit, but the default settings will be fine for most people.

–Bulk Shutdown Computers–

Have too many computers that you need to shutdown? PowerOff Beta has an option available where you can specify multiple computers that you would like to shutdown according to IP address, name, or by browsing for them. Naturally you’ll need to know any usernames and passwords for the computers you want to shutdown… otherwise we would all be having too much fun randomly shutting down people’s computers. 😉

(Click to Enlarge)

–Shutdown Shortcut–

Looking for a blazingly fast way to shutdown your computer? What’s faster than creating a shortcut that you merely have to double-click? There are a lot of different options available when shutting down your computer via a shortcut, and so I’m just going to point you in the direction of our fairly comprehensive article on creating the shutdown shortcuts.

–Overview–

So I think you’re all set for Shutdown Day on Saturday, May 3rd! Shutdown your computer, get some fresh air, and then come Sunday you can stop hyperventilating from the severe withdrawals you went through.

Feb 19

CyberNotes: Add Toolbars to Your Desktop

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on March 20, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

One of the things that I’ve come to realize with using a computer is that you can never have too many ways to launch an application. The Quick Launch bar is probably one of the most famous ways of doing so, and I’ve seen people who have a Quick Launch bar that takes up more than 50% of the Taskbar. Crazy, I know.

Did you know that you can add toolbars, such as Quick Launch, to your desktop? You can, and it’s actually rather nice because you can have it dock to one side of the screen or even float around on your desktop. And why stop at just using it for Quick Launch? We’ll show you how you can add any folder to a floating or docked toolbar on your desktop!

–Add a Toolbar–

Create a new folder on your desktop (or using an existing one) and drag it to one of the sides of your screen. Windows will automatically turn it into a toolbar which we will further customize in a minute:

windows desktop toolbar 1

–Moving the Toolbar–

If you don’t like the fact that the toolbar eats up so much room you have two options available. The first is to right-click on the toolbar and set it to automatically hide. This will force the toolbar to only appear when your mouse hits the edge of the screen where it is located.

The alternate method, and the one that I prefer, is to drag the toolbar off the side of the screen so that it is no longer docked. I actually didn’t realize that this was possible until just a few days ago when one of my friends told me about it. To do it you need to click on the edge/border of the toolbar with your mouse (not on the portion where you resize it), and then drag it into the middle of the desktop. This diagram shows exactly where you need to click:

windows desktop toolbar 3

Even though the toolbar looks like a window it doesn’t actually show up in the Taskbar, and so you don’t have to worry about there being additional clutter.

–Customize the Toolbar–

Now that you have the toolbar positioned where you want it lets make it useful. If you right-click anywhere in the toolbar you can go to the Toolbars menu to select any pre-made toolbars, such as the Quick Launch one. That’s right, you can have all of your Quick Launch icons show up on your desktop instead of or in addition to the Taskbar!You can also use the New Toolbar option to browse for a folder on your computer to be added.

In the end here’s what my toolbar looked like after removing the “New Folder” that we temporarily added, I put the Quick Launch on there, and I browsed for the “My Computer” folder on my machine:

windows desktop toolbar 4

I normally remove the Show Title and Show Text features (located in the right-click menu) since both of those will consume quite a bit of room on your toolbar. You can also change the size of the icons (I’m using large ones in the screenshot above).

By adding the “My Computer” folder I have quick access to all of the drives on my computer, including USB drives that I might add and remove quite frequently. If there is too much to show in any of the toolbars there will be a small arrow along the bottom to display a flyout menu for the rest of the contents.

Pretty cool, huh?

Feb 13

Microsoft Announces They Have No Plans for Major Vista Service Pack

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on April 06, 2007 by CyberNet.

Windowsvistasp1 Are you planning to purchase Vista after Service Pack 1 is released? Your plans might have just changed. Microsoft says that they don’t have any plans to issue a major service pack for Windows Vista like they did with Windows XP. This came from a senior Microsoft official who said that Vista was “high quality right out of the gate,” and in other words, is not needed.

When asked whether they would continue to have service packs, the corporate VP for Windows Marketing says that they will, however they won’t be as urgent, or as important as XP service packs were.

If you recall, Service Pack 1 for XP was around 30–134MB, and the second one was much larger at around 75–266 MB. SP1 patched security holes, but also added additional functionality like USB 2.0 support, and a “Set Program Access and Defaults Utility”. Within that service pack, Microsoft removed Java Virtual Machine which was a requirement after a lawsuit with Sun Microsystems.

One of the big differences with Vista is how users get updates. When Microsoft can add updates slowly over time using Windows Updates, there’s really no reason for one big update like a service pack. Which also means, to those who said that they were going to wait until the first service pack was released to make the upgrade, you’ll have to think of another reason to continue using your XP machine.

Source: CyberNet Forum (Thanks Richard) [via iTnews.com]

Feb 12

Selectively Backup Your Opera Profile

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on April 25, 2008 by CyberNet.

Microsoft Windows Vista-1.png

One thing that I’m always careful about backing up is my browser’s profile. There is a lot of information stored in there, and it would be a real shame if I lost it all. If you’re running Opera then you’re in for a real treat with this backup utility. OperaFly is a nifty little free program that runs on Windows. You can get a version that does or doesn’t require installation, and the beauty is that it takes what could be a daunting task and turns it into something that is very user friendly.

When you startup the program it will automatically find the files and folders that it needs to access. Then you can select what parts of your profile you would like to back as seen in the screenshot above, and this is where the true customization comes into play. If you were wanting to start with a clean profile this would be a quite handy tool to have. You can selectively backup the areas of your profile that would be difficult to replace (bookmarks, mail, etc…), wipe out the Opera profile (which OperaFly can also do), and then restore only the portions of the profile that you just backed up. It pretty much does it all from a single interface.

Yeah yeah, I know… the problem is remembering to backup your profile. OperaFly has got you covered there as well. It includes a tool called OperaFly Watch that will sit in your System Tray. From there you can create a backup on-demand, or you can have it automatically create a backup each time you close the browser. Just tell it the location on your PC where you want the backups stored, and it will make sure it gets done. This is automation at its finest!

Get OperaFly
Thanks for the tip Mark!

Hasta La Gadget!

Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.2 and 1.5.0.10 Released

Microsoft Says No! Xbox 360 Price is not Dropping

Apple Releases Patch for QuickTime Exploit

CyberNotes: Is Safari the Best Browser?

Google Chrome: Merging the Best of All Browsers?

Windows Live Folders Amost Here!

CyberNotes: Ways to Shutdown Your Computer