Stealing a little thunder from Microsoft’s IE7 release is Mozilla’s update: Firefox 2.0. This version had been in beta for a while, but now available as a full version release.

The user interface has improved (improved tabs, spell check, session restore, search suggestions, live bookmarks, and so on), security has been up-ed further, and and the number of extensions has grown to over 1,000. This update really does see a great browser become even better.

I particularly like the anti-spyware measures described on the Firefox site “Firefox will not allow a Web site to download, install, or run programs on your computer without your explicit agreement. Period. You will be notified whenever downloading or installing software, and Firefox will always tell you what’s happening so that you can stay in control of your computer.”

Of course unlike IE7, Firefox 2.0 is avaliable for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

CNet has published an extensive review which says it all far better than I could have. I was interested to see the critical comparisons to the new IE7; only a week old but apparently miles behind the Firefox offering. User reviews are also interesting.

Of course there’s only one way to be sure, and that’s to Get Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7 and compare for yourself!

Wandering around ZoomBlast this morning, a new video aggregation site I guess you might say. Came across this funny little homemade ad for Firefox web browser.

In a repeat of prior news … Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has a security hole and a third party has released a patch to fix it prior to Microsoft doing so. What takes a company with the resources at their disposal longer than a third party? The current active scripting hole allows a site that you visit to install spyware. Now there is a pleasant thought.

Do yourself a favor, get Firefox and support Mozilla.

I did something dumb the other day. I was so excited at the prospect of using WindizUpdate within Firefox as an alternative to Windows Update within Internet Explorer, that I showed my complete ignorance of K-Meleon as a browser. The comments feature of HTMLfixIT is temporarily disabled, but if it were functional I’m guessing that I would be getting a hiding from a heap of loyal K-Meleon users.

To make amends, I have pulled my head in and checked out K-Meleon. For those folks who don’t know, K-Meleon is a web browser based on Gecko, the layout engine written by the Mozilla Foundation and also used in Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Application Suite, and SeaMonkey. According to Wikipedia, the aim of K-Meleon is to provide a light-weight browser running under Microsoft Windows using the operating system’s native interface for the application’s toolbars and menus – similar to Galeon or Epiphany on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems, and Camino on Mac OS X.

Wikipedia further reports that because of the lower resource requirement, K-Meleon is more responsive than most other Gecko based web browsers. It is beneficial for systems where the hardware is aged and system resources are limited. It is also stated that it starts up much faster than one of its competitors, Firefox.

I have now tried K-Meleon out for myself, and found it to be an easy browser to use. Like Firefox it uses “layered” (tabbed) browsing, and like Opera is uses mouse gestures for navigation. The default skin is boring, but what default skin isn’t? There are a range of macros available, providing functionality not unlike Firefox Extensions.

The claims of fast load times seem to be valid, and this is something that really appeals to me. Allow me to explain why. The most popular PC in my house is a Dell notebook with a modest 1.5GHz processor and 512MB RAM, and between my 3 children the PC can be logged on / switched between any number of users at a time. With limited resources it often slows to a painful crawl when switching between users, sometimes proving too poor for Firefox, killing it off and stopping it from responding. If K-Meleon can make life easier in this regard, I’ll be converted to a fan!

Go on, give K-Meleon a try for yourself!

I use Internet Explorer for two purposes only: testing new web pages I’ve written, and running Windows Update to patch all of the security vulnerabilities detected in Microsoft products each month. Beyond that I use Firefox for everything. Frankly if I could ditch Internet Explorer altogether I would.

Today I stumbled upon something I didn’t know about, a browser plug-in called WindizUpdate. According to the site this plug-in allows users of Mozilla Firefox 0.9.3+, Netscape 4.0+, Mozilla Firebird 0.7+, Opera 5+, and K-Meleon 0.9+ (whatever that is) to enjoy the benefits of Windows Update without needing to use Internet Explorer.

Forgive me if the rest of the world already knew about WindizUpdate, but I’m really excited about the prospect of trying it out. The only downside is that my PCs are currently up-to-date, so I’ll have to wait another month or so to try it…….

This is a great read, even if it is not true. Can Google, the company who plans to do no harm, actually buy something called dark fiber? It makes sense that they would like to own such a system. It will create Web 3.0, essentially networked machines on their network. That will allow users to purchase low cost slave machines and use them on a system monitored, updated and kept functional by professionals. For many that sounds good … how else has AOL survived this long?

Firefox released a new version 1.5.0.1 overnight apparently and the update sniffer in Firefox asks you to update. The site is absolutetly silent on the update, no announcement, nothing tells you the latest version … just nothing.

More significantly, if you choose to upgrade immediately, your extensions may not work. They now have a hook in extensions that limit them by version of Firefox and when you exceed the current version, your extensions become invalidated. Some developers countered by adding a future release as the limit so that they will not stop working based on the hook. Of course they may not work if in fact they are incompatible. I think a better system needs to be developed otherwise an update means giving up interim functionality.

You get this message on completion of the upgrade: “This page confirms that you’re running the latest version of Firefox, with the latest updates for stability and security. It won’t be displayed again.” So which is it, stability or security. Given that they appear to have rushed this out the door, one must suspect a security issue was discovered. I appreciate regular updates. And maybe it was just to create buzz now that Internet Explorer 7, Beta 2 preview was publicly released this week?

I expect more from Mozilla, tell me you have an update out and give a brief overview of enhancements … in this case likely just bug fixes.

Note: ahh, this makes more sense … this is really a beta release according to this very helpful article. Now one would think it might tell us that …