Fortunately Firefox

At this point, tons of people have heard of Getting Things Done - a book (and a technique) for organizing things in your life so you can accomplish more each day.

Now someone has written a Firefox extension that makes the labels you use in Firefox a little more organized themselves. It tunes them to work in the GTD scheme of things.

Getting Things Done Gmail Firefox Extension at gHacks tech news:

Labels are structured into Statuses, Contexts, Projects and References. Status simply describes the current status of the task, is it finished or should it be the next action that you perform ? Context is the context that you have to be in to complete the task. A task that would require a computer for instance could have either the Desk, Home or Office context associated with.

I have a copy of the GTD book on order that is supposed to arrive any day now. If it gets here by this weekend, maybe I will try this extension out after I read the book.

Practically all my friends and relatives, even extended family relatives, are using Firefox now. People just like it; programmers, engineers, my mother, everybody.

Personally, I have found it invaluable during the past couple of years. I know for a fact the Firefox extensions have really helped my productivity - and output quality - quite a bit.

According to this recent articel, Mozilla Delays Firefox 2.0 - Softpedia - Mozilla is shooting for an October 24, 2006 release date for Firefox 2.0.

That is the first specific date I have heard for the new version. I think the most definite one I heard before was Fall 2006. Sounds like they will make it.

It sounds like it is tentative, so I am not going to write it on my wall calendar with a red pen.

Sounds like the actual ship date will at least be in the same ballpark and the October 24 date might turn out to be the real one.

Looks like the release dates for major upcoming software is falling into line like this:

1. Mozilla Firefox 2.0 - October 2006
2. Microsoft Vista - January 2007
3. Apple Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) - April 2007

I think Firefox is planning a Firefox 2.1 to come out sometime in 2007, sort of completing the cycle that begins in the latter part of this year.

I doubt we will see updated operating systems from Apple and Microsoft again for several more years, however. Unless Microsoft surprises everyone by coming out with a MS Linux distro sometime after Vista ships.

Firefox seems to be evolving faster than the major operating systems and all the other major browsers combined.

In the 1990s, one company distinguished itself by using what it claimed was a grass roots campaign of people supporting it and its products.

When the truth came out, their efforts were quickly renamed astro-turfing by the real public, people that actually exist - not ones that are made up.

Firefox is a web browser that has a lot of support. The enthusiasm is for how many of the official file formats it supports, the fidelity with which it renders these things, and how up-to-date it is with things like JavaScript.

Plus, people do not mind that when they just have to switch operating systems because they have too many problems with their computer - they can use Firefox on their new one. Firefox knows how to run on lots of types of computers and operating systems. It is smarter than a lot of browsers in that regard too.

Anyway, this year a couple marketing interns at Mozilla had a dream. They wanted to create a huge crop circle to draw attention to the new release, which at this point is just months, or maybe only weeks, away. You can download the movie, which is in standard QuickTime format (works with (Macintosh and MS-Windows), by clicking on one of the pictures in the blog entry linked to below.

The Road to Firefox 2 Blog Archive Behind the Scenes: The Firefox crop circle!:

...not only completed successful internships as documentary filmmakers for Mozilla, but also left a 45,000 sq. foot crop circle in our wake. Through our video blogging, we brought people a little bit closer to the heart of Mozilla...

It is kind of cool that they came up for the idea of something like this.

It is way better than some huge corporation that comes up with a plan to write graffiti all over some city's sidewalks, streets, and buildings.

Also, people tend to think of the Fall as the time of harvests and mysterious things. Humans have been harvesting their crops for thousands of years during the Fall.

This fall, they will be harvesting Firefox 2!

Many people use Macintosh computers at home or work these days.

Some of them like Firefox but miss the halcyon days when the Mozilla group had not just a browser and news/email/feed reader - but a whole suite of programs integrated into one application known simply as Mozilla.

Fortunately for them, the Mozilla project known as SeaMonkey carries on that tradition - and that codebase.

In addition to the things you get with the Firefox+Thunderbird combination, you also get: HTML WYSIWYG editing, IRC, and a more advanced/powerful email editor.

Best of all, it runs natively on the Mac.

The SeaMonkey Project:

The SeaMonkey project is a community effort to deliver production-quality
releases of code derived from the application formerly known as
"Mozilla Application Suite".
Whereas the main focus of the Mozilla Foundation is on Mozilla Firefox and
Mozilla Thunderbird, our group of dedicated volunteers works to ensure
that you can have "everything but the kitchen sink" %u2014 and have it stable
enough for corporate use.

Firefox, the famous open source web browser, continues to gain popularity - and users.

The percentage of users using it inched upward this summer.

mozilla links - Firefox market share keeps growing:

mbers reflect an overall growth for Firefox compared to May numbers: in Europe, market share increased

I was at a party last night and I was surprised at the number of my relatives that use it now. I think I was the first in my family to use it.

I heard about it from a friend of mine, who is even more aggressive than me in keeping up with the latest computing technology. (People that know me are noticing their jaws have dropped all of a sudden now.)

LOL, lots of people are.

Fortunately for all of us, Firefox continues to grow in popularity and that helps insure its continued viability.

After all, when users stop using a product, its team tends to stop updating it. When a team stops updating it, it rapidly becomes less interesting than other programs in the same functional area. That causes more people to abandon it, and thus a vicious cycle is formed.

Firefox is in a rather pleasant cycle.

The plan was to ship the 2^end beta of Firefox 2.0 yesterday (Tuesday). Instead, it will ship one week later, on August 15.

Gregg Keizer, Techweb:

Firefox 2.0, which appeared as Beta 1 last month, was to shift into Beta 2 Aug. 8, but will now be posted Tuesday, Aug. 15

In any case, it looks like Firefox 2.0 is entering its home stretch.

Firefox is not one of the companies that seems to favor epically-long beta periods.

Their beta cycles tend to measure a few months, not several years.

These days, unless you are Apple - who tends to promise a delivery date - and then beat it - slipping a schedule of a major software product by only a week is pretty wonderful.

I came across this pretty interesting-sounding website this morning. It is called Talk Digger.

Talk Digger lets you see what is going on with a certain web page in terms of interest in it. At least interest in it so far as people are writing its URL down and saving it on the web. Presumably, in the interest of saying something about it or remembering it.

The explanation below is taken from the Talk Digger home page. It explains it better than I can. (Note if you are in China, the author says you cannot reach his page, his site, or his service.)

Talk Digger:

It is simple. You have in hand the URL of a piece of news of the BBC, a blog post, a product page,
or any other web page, and you want to know who is talking about it, you want to know what people
have to say about it. You copy that URL, paste it in the Talk Digger search box
and press Dig it!

Talk Digger will then return results from various search engines. All the results returned contain
a link to the URL. This is what we call a conversation: a multitude of people, all over the Internet,
linking to a specific URL.