The main reason for this is because, Fx3.7 consisted primarily of “Out of Process Plugins” which as most of you know has been implemented in Fx3.6.4. This has pushed developers to bypass the 3.7 release and focus on pushing out Firefox 4.0, hopefully by November.

A couple of things that jump out to me are that there will be no more modal dialogs and software updates will switch to background tasks. This is to help improve the user experience as they are two of the main pause points in a using Firefox.

The background process updates I can understand, Chrome has shown that this is by far the best way to push out updates and bug fixes to users and ensure that everybody is running the same version across the board. The removal of modal dialog however Im not too sure about.

There are also the expected updates, the new chrome (browser layout, not Google browser) redesign, which has removed many of the less used parts of the interface as found during a Test Pilot back in March and from developer feedback.

Firefox 4.0 UI concept - May 2010

Something Im really excited about are the developer tools. In particular the console. Beltzner described it as a Quake style console, pulled from the top of the browser, as an advanced view source. With the ability to edit css/dom elements, and make other tweaks on the fly. They will continue to support Firebug and will also add a couple of other api’s to allow us to access rendering times and memory usage from within our apps with should help a lot with development and optimisation.

If you using Firefox or a modern web browser that supports fully open HTML video, you can watch Mike Beltzner presentation.
It is almost an hour long but I do recommend watching or at least listening, to what Mozilla believe is the future of Firefox and the direction they are going.

For more on this story, head over to Mike Beltzner blog post, view the slides and watch the presentation.

With this in mind, this last week or so I have been dipping my toes into the wonderful world of native Android development.I have gone for the setup advised in the SDK documentation, Eclipse with the ADT plugin. Quickly passing over the Hello World app, as a developer its a task  I must complete before doing anything else, I started on my first application. I decided that for my first attempt I would stick to something I know and rebuild a web based tool I help develop for a well known Manchester server hosting company.

Its been a long time since I last did anything in Java so was a little rusty, but after a few lunchtimes and couple of late nights I have managed to cobble together something that resembles and could just about pass for an Android Application.

So what is it you ask, this wonderful app you have been building up (wont shut up about if you follow me on twitter)? Well I can now tell you, its a speedtest. Not for how fast your mobile connects to the internet, I’ll leave that to the guys at speedtest.net, but to test the speed your website can deliver files to your visitors, now I cant provide you with a link to download and install it as its not really finished and as its not an officially sanctioned app, but I can show a couple of screen-shots from the current alpha version.

This is probably as far as this application goes, unless the boss asks me to continue with it, as although its quite basic and there isn’t all that much to it, it has served its purpose and helped me to figure out how an application should work, its activity life-cycle and how to correctly put one together.

The next step is to think of that award winning, must have,  how did we live without it  idea that will make me millionaire… any suggestions?

I couldn’t remember when I first noticed they were missing but when ever I checked a working folder on my laptop the tortoise svn icon overlays were missing. When I edited a file the red cross would appear as expected, but the green tick to say a file was up to date or the question mark for non-versioned files were missing, meaning I didn’t know if a file was up to date with the repo head or an ignored/non-versioned file.

This morning I came across a post on stack overflow that suggested modifying the registry to over-right the usual Microsoft default setting cock-up. In Windows, for memory reasons Im guessing, they have limited the number of allowed Shell Icon overlays  to 11. Now at first this seems like a logical way to stop memory abuse in Explorer. But for some stupid reason (most likely so their overlays come first), they are actioned in alphabetical order, so any overlays in position 12+ are ignored. With M being in the middle of the alphabet this results in the majority of these slots being allocated by Microsoft Products. In this case Tortoise SVN (obviously starting with a T) was being pushed out of the allowed slots.

I found this out by doing a search in the registry for ‘ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers’  (NOTE: only open regedit if your comfortable using it, we don’t need to change anything just taking a peek so you should be ok). This reviled that most of the Shell Icon slots were being taken up by something called Microsoft Groove. Not having a clue what this is I turned to a popular search engine to find out.

Microsoft Groove is the name for their multi-user document collaboration tool, which makes sense that it would need some icon overlays as it is essentially the same thing as Tortoise SVN. I don’t do any online document collaboration so re-searched for how to remove it. The Microsoft knowledge base article advised to remove the feature from Office via the add/remove programs control panel but when I looked I couldn’t find anything that mentioned Groove but after a further search or two I found that it has now been renamed to Microsoft SharePoint Workspace, which was listed in my version of Office. I disabled the feature and restarted my laptop and I now have my overlay icons back.

Until now, you had to verify you owned every sub-domain on a domain before you could use webmaster tools for it, while for most sites this is fine, you verify the www. version, sometimes there are a couple more that need to be done.
for example on my site, I use the non-www domain, also there is a dev. and a api. that also need their own verification meta tag/html file. If I want to use webmaster tools on another sub-domain I have to verify again… this becomes a tiresome process.

Enter the new DNS verification. You now add a TXT record to your dns and it automatically covers any sub-domains you add.
That’s it… done! There is of course the usual dns propagation you have to worry about so it may not be a quick as adding a meta tag, but it defiantly saves time in the long run.

You can find out more by visiting the Google Web master tools or popping over to the Webmaster Central blog.

For a while there has been an option in the config to display image place-holders while a page loads but not for broken images as on IE (yes I’m praising an IE feature!).

Image placeholders on load is set to ON by default, your can change this if you want by going to about:config and searching for ‘image’. The option your looking for is:

browser.display.show_image_placeholders

Just double click to change the value.

As I said before, this doesn’t affect broken images after the page has loaded, and after several searches it looks like the option just isn’t available to Fx users as a general setting. There is however a solution…

Firefox allows users to specify custom CSS to be applied to websites on a global basis, e.g if you want your default link colour on unvisited links to be black instead of the default blue.

You do this by making changes to your global content css file. You can find it at the following location (OS Specific – I’m on windows 7) ‘%appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\\chrome’ (if your on a domain you will need to edit it in your roaming folder), look for a file called ‘UserContent-example.css’ and rename it to ‘UserContent.css’, this will then be loaded by Firefox when it fires up.

Add the following CSS to the file and restart Firefox..
/* Enable image placeholders */
@-moz-document url-prefix(http), url-prefix(file) {
img:-moz-broken{
-moz-force-broken-image-icon:1;
width:24px;
height:24px;
}
}

Thats it… when you next come accross a broken/missing image, you will get a box the size you have defined in its place with the alt inside it.

The biggest change comes on the SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages) where the navigation has moved from the top of the results to a left hand column

New Google SERP Design

Iif you cant wait for it to be rolled out worldwide, you can get a sneak peak by following these steps

1) log out of your Google account if currently logged in

2) goto http://google.com/ncr

3)  type the following javascript into your address bar to add a cookie to your browser

javascript:void(document.cookie="PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com"); alert('cookie added');

4) reload the page and you should see the new design…

Googles Nov 09 Redesign

UPDATE:

if you would like to remove the cookie from your browser, them enter the following into your address bar

javascript:void(document.cookie='PREF=20b6e4c2f44943bb;path=/;domain=.google.com;expires=Sat, 01-Jan-2000 00:00:00 GMT'); alert('cookie removed');

Full of “how are javascript engine is better than your javascript engine” talk, there isn’t much about the features it will include, or a reason why they dont just release a version 8.* will all these updates rather than just going for version 9, but it does highlight their focus on improving CSS support (including rounded corners), its defiantly worth a quick read and also a bookmark for those of you not already subscribed to the RSS feed.

You can find the post on the IE Developer Blog

You can read more on the history of Mozilla Firefox on this wikipedia article.

Users of Twitter can show their support by adding a Twibbon to your Twitter profile picture

And everyone else can forward this link to friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances and anyone else you meet on the street – http://getfirefox.com/ and help to make the web a better place

What is the Google Webmaster Central Channel?
Its a channel on Youtube that is used mainly by Matt Cutts (project leader of Googles web spam team) to pass on little snippets of info and answer questions made by Joe Public and his wife on the Google Forum. It is also used by other teams,  to give useful information and advise on how to make the most out of Google and the web as a whole.

Why should I watch them?
Why not? Google are market leaders in their field and they are giving advise (for free) on how to improve your website, I’ve learnt many tips and tricks from watching the videos and a lot of them have helped out a lot.

Where can I watch the videos?
Here is the answer, on YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp

The first is called ‘Fetch as Googlebot’ as allows you to view the information that Googlebot retrieves when it visits ont of the pages on your site. This is what people, webmasters and SEO ‘experts’, are most likley to be interested in. At fist glance it appears to be just the source code of a page, and while yes it is, it does also contain the server headers that were detected, so you can use the two to determin if googlebot sees your page as you want it to.

The second feature is a Malware status page, this feature has been around for a while outside the webmaster tools, if you knew where to find it, and its a useful tool is your site does contain some dodgy code, its good to see this is now part of the webmaster tools and easier to find.
There is a good post on the Google Security Blog that can tell you more about Malware detection so rather than write about it myself, I’ll refer you to it.