Firefox

Not to be outdone by the hype surrounding IE7, it seems that the Mozilla group will be releasing the first alpha of Firefox 2 this Friday.  Looking at the release plan, it seems that it’ll be ready for final release this June.  I’ll likely be trying out the betas when they come out in a few weeks.  Firefox will remain my browser until there is a major change in the features available in competing browsers.

Where did Firefox come from?  [via]

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’ve been trying out 30 Boxes.  I said in that post that I couldn’t get the site to work in Firefox at home but that it worked ok here at work.  Last night I tried the site again and found that I still couldn’t get it to work in Firefox.  I’m not sure what is going wrong at home; I don’t have any crazy extensions installed but I do know that it doesn’t work.  I haven’t seen any similar problems on their support forums so I’m not sure what I should do.  I guess I could just suck it up and use IE but that’s hardly a good longterm solution for me.  If I find some time maybe I’ll post on the forum to see if there’s anything that I’m doing that is causing it not to work.

Yesterday I was able to sign up to be a beta tester for 30 boxes which is a new online calendaring site. I first read about it on Matt’s site and since then the buzz leading up to the public beta this past weekend has been deafening. Just look here and you’ll know what I mean. I tried it last night at home and found that it didn’t work quite as well with my installation of Firefox and I actually had to use IE to be able to enter new calendar items. Fortunately though when I got to work this morning I was able to use Firefox with the site without any difficulties. You can see my profile page here. I’m going to try and put the HTML/Javascript badge on the sidebar here to see how it looks. They have a lot of neat features planned like custom feeds based on tags/dates/whatever as well as an API for developers to leverage. They added iCal/ICS support over the weekend so that people can download their 30 boxes calendar into their desktop calendar applications (Outlook, Mozilla Calendar, whatever). Interoperability is key.

It’ll be interesting to see if this site becomes what Flickr has become for photos. There is a lot of competition for online calendars already.

I just finished installing IE7 Beta 2 (see this earlier post about IE7) which was released today. Edit: I should say that it’s not officially Beta 2 but rather a “Beta 2 Preview”.  Apparently that makes a difference.  It’s very similar to Firefox in many respects but differs in others. The menu items no longer exist along the top but rather are graphical pulldowns on the right side of the browser. It has an integrated phishing filter, supports IDN and has numerous fixes and improvements to IE6 and below. There’s also an integrated RSS feed reader that seems pretty nice (at least the styling of the feed looks nice) but I’m going to stick with my current feed reader for now. I’ll keep IE7 running to test it out with work-related sites but Firefox still remains my browser of choice.